The way writers make fantasy engaging — and sci-fi is a form of fantasy — is by anchoring the hard-to-grasp concepts with familiar ideas.
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Curiously, once Kyle Reese is safe, he is transformed from a confident, well-meaning soldier into an idiot with a surprising lack of common sense.
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The problem with resetting the timeline is that the audience’s emotional stake in the outcome necessarily diminishes when no events are permanent.
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I don’t know if the inconsistencies were enough to convince the powers that be in Hollywood to try to make an entirely different sequel but viewers tuned out.
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A critical plot decision — to give Skynet a key piece of information — makes Skynet’s Terminator strategy seem incoherent.
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Terminator Genisys is one of those movies where that create a growing sense of unease that viewers can’t quite put a finger on.
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Genisys completely ignores everything set up in Terminator Salvation and Terminator 3 and assassinates John’s character, reducing the emotional stakes.
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A real problem in cinema is that bad story writing is often treated as successful because it is wafted along by the hype from a previous film in the series.
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Science fiction is closer to comedy than tragedy so a device like this — technically, a retcon — is handy and the writers were smart to use it.
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Although the Resistance blows up Skynet’s headquarters, the success of their mission turns on saving badly wounded John.
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This film makes clear that the machines are the enemy because they are cold, and there is something special about being human.
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The dilemma is well handled because John Connor is genuinely confused and trying to understand the situation.
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By the end of the movie the viewer briefly sees John become something of a mentor, if not an outright father figure, for his father Kyle.
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It’s fine to play with the idea of fate in a time travel tale, but the writer must work within the set-up given by the prior stories.
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The problem with time travel stories is that dropped plot points and forgotten predictions add up and new additions to the story forget the older ones.
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Despite puzzling sequences, there is a thread of logic that keeps the franchise from becoming too complicated as the story continues.
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Portraying John as a sort of nomad was overall a good plot device because the T-X can’t find him. So, she begins killing apparently random people.
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The plutonium used for nuclear weapons is plutonium-239 and the plutonium that powers current space exploration hopes is plutonium-238.
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It’s a science fiction classic for a reason. Save for the bar scene and the ending, the writing is pretty tight when the writers aren’t preaching.
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Last Saturday, young John Connor met the original Terminator and realized it was here to protect him. He then rescued his mother Sarah from a mental institution. I have mixed emotions about the scene that follows. After she is saved from her predicament, Sarah, rather than being grateful, shows anger at John for putting himself at risk. She even tells him that she didn’t need his help. Why is Sarah angry? This scene both does and doesn’t make sense. On the one hand, Sarah wouldn’t want him putting himself at risk for her because he is the future hope for humanity. But on the other hand, she seems more angry about the fact that he saved her than about the Read More ›