Current Events > I think one of the main reasons as to why Terminator no longer resonates

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with audiences is how mundane the 'future' where everybody is connected to each other actually ended up being.

20-30 years ago, Terminator had a legitimately scary forewarning edge to it. I remember thinking the world building was crazy when I was a kid, the idea that we could just sleepwalk into this technological nightmare. This is all pre extremely widespread online-ness but it still hit home and I think to many, the hook of it all was that it seemed like something that wasn't too far outside the realms of possibility. Or that at the very least it was grounded in reality on some level.

Fast forward to 2019 and we all essentially embraced the Skynet type figures but there was no robot apocalypse, instead it's just a non stop avalanche of awful but fairly mundane in the grand scheme of things stuff.

I think this totally removes the stinger from the series. It's no longer 'a terrifying view into a not too distant future' but just another post apocalyptic science fiction universe, almost undistinguishable from the rest. I think Genisys actually tried to give a more modern feel to some of the origin elements but the film wasn't particularly good either sooo...

Oh and as an aside, the T models basically peaked with the 1000 and its very hard to top that without going too silly or just copying bits from it. I think the Dark Fate antagonist has a pretty clever gimmick that naturally follows from the 1000 but otherwise...

Oh and the sending a robot back in time concept was terrifying too before they did it like 100 times more. Oh and all of these films have at least two fights/chases on a road or in a like lab type setting.

I think it's funny in Dark Fate that they just gloss over Sarah icing at least two Terminators by herself before she finds Dani.

Also, like zombies, I think they ruined the Terminators by making them "fast". In 1 and 2 the bad Terminator was just an unrelenting and unstoppable monster that was always just in your periphery, edging closer. Now they're more like a leopard that leaps out of the bushes and you just hope you can kick it off your ankles long enough to get away.

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Ranting Nord posted...

Also, like zombies, I think they ruined the Terminators by making them "fast". In 1 and 2 the bad Terminator was just an unrelenting and unstoppable monster that was always just in your periphery, edging closer. Now they're more like a leopard that leaps out of the bushes and you just hope you can kick it off your ankles long enough to get away.

Idk, the t1000 was very well done imo. Again, I think the issue is that they've basically exhausted the best options for a terminator at this point. And they did it after 2 films!

long post inc:

yea i just watched the RLM review of Dark Fate and they touched on the concepts of why terminator just does not work in 2019.

the first two movies are basically sci-fi slasher films, and the entire premise is rooted in the lifestyle and tech of the late 80s/early 90s. so you have this high tech super robot Terminator, but he's looking through the phonebook to find out where John Connor lives.

now our 2019 technology is honestly pretty close to much of the tech of the Terminator in the first two movies, so the only way to make the concept of a Terminator "work" is to give them a million super powers, and then you lose a lot of those slasher elements from the first two movies.

another big idea they touched on is how illogical the concept of sending a robot back in time sounds outside of the scope of the first two movies. in T1 and T2 it's this desperate future and sending back a terminator is a last ditch effort by the machines, in dark fate they're sending back a million robots for no reason other than because that's what has been established in the franchise (rather than, say, creating a biological weapon or something like that).

i really wish hollywood would stop trying to make the terminator franchise a thing. the first two movies established a premise, fully explored it, and closed it out perfectly; unless they dramatically shake up the formula, anything else that a studio does with the franchise is just going to be an unsatisfying mess.
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TL;DR but it's because the last few movies have been shit
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Romulox28 posted...

long post inc:

yea i just watched the RLM review of Dark Fate and they touched on the concepts of why terminator just does not work in 2019.

the first two movies are basically sci-fi slasher films, and the entire premise is rooted in the lifestyle and tech of the late 80s/early 90s. so you have this high tech super robot Terminator, but he's looking through the phonebook to find out where John Connor lives.

Hmm, I'm not a huge rlm guy but might check this out.

ALIEN_WORK2HOP posted...

TL;DR but it's because the last few movies have been shit

Great analysis my guy

ya i agree the shift to straight up action movies fucked it up. also just fatigue of the connor arc...
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I think its more that robots are part of the cultural zeitgeist

we arent scared of them the way we were
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spudger posted...

I think its more that robots are part of the cultural zeitgeist

we arent scared of them the way we were

This kinda ties in with what I'm saying, though. 20-30 years ago, robots are scary whereas now it's like hmm I just bought a robot to vacuum my house

Malfunction posted...

spudger posted...

I think its more that robots are part of the cultural zeitgeist

we arent scared of them the way we were

This kinda ties in with what I'm saying, though. 20-30 years ago, robots are scary whereas now it's like hmm I just bought a robot to vacuum my house

I wonder why there hasn't been a Maximum Overdrive reboot yet...

The premise would be a lot more scary if the robots were sent back to terminate our jobs.
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I actually half watched Genisys last night and I thought it was funny when the Genisys rep guy was announcing how they had 1 billion users and yet the crowd there was like 15 people big lol.

We've also lost most of our active fear of nuclear war. We're more afraid of zombie uprising that someone really looking at launching.

Though I think the big issue is the quality of the material went down as our film saviness went up. T1 was the almost perfect if not fully perfect time travel movie. At least it's hard to poke holes in, and was released to a public largely still new to science fiction and time travel stories. T2 wasn't as perfect, but was strong enough to not detract.

With the new ones, the time travel makes no sense under the best of circumstances, and we can all see it.
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only thing left is for them to reboot the post-apocalyptic war but not make it bad like salvation and with an actual endgame in sight.

i don't even remember how salvation ended but they were nowhere close to ending the war.
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I think part of the issue is that T3, Salvation and Genysis undermined dark fate:

The "dark liquid" terminator from Genysis is very similar to the Rev 9, the concept of Pops aging is like the concept of Carl aging, and the concept of the "human terminator" from genysis is very similar to the concept of the human terminator woman in Dark Fate)

If all of these ideas had been used for the first time in Dark Fate everybody would be impressed