EDIT: Holy shit that was a long post, read at your own risk. I do not accept responsibility for any face melting.
For some reason whenever I go to the cinema I like to eat the worst junk food, not snacks like popcorn but chilly dogs, burgers or tacos. That kind of stuff. It would be awesome if they served beer in theaters but they don't do that in Canada. I guess I could sneak it in but I'm not motivated enough.
As for the movie I enjoyed it overall. It's pretty much what I expected. Sure it could have been better but I'm smart enough to not set my hopes too high. The whole thing had a strong Transformers Vibe to it.
The worst thing about the movie is the character Marcus. I didn't have an issue with the actor, he did better than Bale but the character and plot elements attached to him are so fucking dumb. He's a major plot point and he feels tacked on. Choup is absolutely right about the cheesiest ending ever and of course it involves dear Marcus. For me every scene with that character was painful to watch. I would have scrapped his character completely, kept the actor though. They should have focused more on the signal, the concentration camps, John and Kyle Reese. The movie needed more atmosphere, more suffering and more suspense. The action is still very good, I enjoyed the setting of the movie too.
The time travel business is inconsistent but not in the way that many people think. As far as we know real time travel to the past is impossible but lets look at how its handdled in fiction. When people talk about time travel even just in fiction there's two main theories that people choose from. It's one or the other.
One way to portray time travel is to have a single instance of time that would look like a line. If you go back in time you affect the whole timeline for everyone. This creates the famous parent paradox. Can you go back in time to kill your parents before you're concieved if doing so would mean you couldn't have gone back in time in the first place?
The first movies adopt this format. So in essense you can greatly affect the present and future by travelling in the past.
The other theory is that time travel means you create or travel to another timeline (or dimension) so in essense you can't affect the timeline you exit from. Which would render the premise of the series worthless if this was handled badly.
I like to see things as a combination of the two.
Time is not a linear line in real life. Time has a lot to do with gravity, that's why they called it the space-time continuum. Basically time progresses faster when there is more gravity. Traveling in the future occures all the time with traditional definition of past, present and future. Even on Earth there are minor gravitational fluctuations which affect the flow of time. Astronauts who have spent time in space are a bit younger than they would otherwise have been. I know it fucks with your head. It helps to perceive every object/person as being in their own isolated instance of time. Even parts of myself are experiencing time at slightly different rates. Lucky for use these variants are close enough so we don`t even notice the difference?
How do you even define the present? Is it infinitely small? The way I see it. Either the present does not exist and we mearly have the past and future or there is no past, and there is no future, we mearly have the present in relation to our point of origin. Its practical for beings of our size and speed to think of the past as the cause and the future as the effect but in reality cause can come from either end, and it does.
So how would I have handled the time travel in the Terminator series? I would have probably done a similar job in handling it, I wouldn't have made it seem like it was so linear though, even if it would seem that way from the position of the time travellers. Off the top of my head the one big inconsistency in T4 I can see was at the end of Salvation when John gets the face scar that was shown in the first movie. What are the odds that that would happen again? It was a shout out that wasn't worth it in my opinion. The biggest inconsistency in the whole series is that skynet and the Terminators seem to have knowledge of alternate timelines. From their perspective the alternate timelines did not happen, unless there has been communication between time travellers and I don't see how skynet would get that information.
People always say that they should have prevented Judgement day because they blown up Cyberdyne. Well that's assuming there can only be one cause. I think the third movie did a good job of covering its tracks actually by offering another cause (even if it was stupid). To illustrate my point. Lets say I'm eating an icecream cone on a bus and drop some on another man's (lets call him Arnold) dress pants and he's fuming about it. Arnold asks me where I bought the icecream and I tell him. So Arnold skips his big important meeting and instead heads home to his time travelling device and goes back in time to set fire to the ice cream shop the day before I could have bought it, thus preventing me from dropping the icecream on his lap. So the next day I see that my favorite icecream shop was burned to the ground and I think to myself hmm I can sure go for a tripple fudge. So I head out to the next shop and bring my towering cone of icecream on the same bus. The bus is packed except for a gentleman sitting alone in a nice suite, so i sit next to him and tell myself I better be carefull....
In that example neither myself or that Arnold have had any experience with the imminent mess. Maybe I would spill the icecream
again or maybe I wouldn't but you can see that a string of cause-effect doesn't have to be the only possible path.
What's interesting about this example is that in this new present there would be two Arnolds. One on the bus and the one from the future bumming around. If old Arnold decided not to make contact with young Arnold and it happened again the young Arnold would likely decide to go back in time and burn down another icecream shop (he's not that bright). LOL Maybe old Arnold would attend the meeting, or maybe he doesn't have time to change his pants.
<message edited by Agent Ghost on Jun 10, 2009 11:32>