New Films 2009

[DJ Solid Snail]

Was anybody else amused/irritated by that ridiculous Tarantino quote regarding the spelling of his new film, along the lines of, "Hey man, when you do an artistic flourish like that, it just pisses on the whole thing to explain it"? I'd thought his ego had deflated slightly in recent times, presumably because even he knows how awful his post-Jackie Brown work has been, but no, apparently not. Having read the first few pages of the script, I get the distinct impression that the reason for the title is that he simply cannot spell. I mean, "basterds" could be vaguely stylish, but "inglourious"? "In-glower-ious"? It just looks like you've misspelled it. I also read a pretty embarassing quote from him saying something like, "Yeah, if these kick-ass soldiers had been in the war, it would have been over a lot quicker." Ugh - how can anybody possibly still like him?

[Famous Mortimer]

I just can't fathom Werner Herzog making a cheap-looking digital camera remake / sequel to a well-regarded film which only came out in 1992, and equally I can't imagine whoever funded it having the money for that cast. I'm clutching at straws now, but by gum this is going to be a trainwreck.

[boxofslice]

That comment Herzog makes about Ferrara makes me think this is all a bit odd. Would he be completely unaware of another directors work including one whose work he's about to remake?

[Sam]

Would he be completely unaware of another directors work including one whose work he's about to remake?

Oh yes, absolutely.

Werner lives on another planet anyway, I'm surprised people are shocked by this film. Faint bemusement should be the standard. I think he just liked the idea of taking Nic Cage, a mainstream Hollywood guy, and making him do weird things. He also insists the film is funny, mostly due to it being so bleak it becomes funny. Despite all his earnestness about ecstatic truth he also has quite a unique and refreshing sense of humour and a playful side to him. Incident at Loch mess Ness, shows his willingness to poke fun at himself and also take part in a film which is just a bit of fluff as opposed to some of his more po-faced fare.

With "Encounters" I think we are seeing a conciously and deliberately "Herzog-lite" mode. That film is great fun but actually fairly slight upon closer inspection and he seems to be content now to make films which are less edgy and ideas busy and more fun. He has also been very busy himself, jetting around the planet to shoot incongruous footage for all manner of peculiar projects. His next film, a "horror" made with David Lynch looks quite interesting.

[uesugi_proagon]

Was anybody else amused/irritated by that ridiculous Tarantino quote regarding the spelling of his new film, along the lines of, "Hey man, when you do an artistic flourish like that, it just pisses on the whole thing to explain it"? I'd thought his ego had deflated slightly in recent times, presumably because even he knows how awful his post-Jackie Brown work has been, but no, apparently not. Having read the first few pages of the script, I get the distinct impression that the reason for the title is that he simply cannot spell. I mean, "basterds" could be vaguely stylish, but "inglourious"? "In-glower-ious"? It just looks like you've misspelled it. I also read a pretty embarassing quote from him saying something like, "Yeah, if these kick-ass soldiers had been in the war, it would have been over a lot quicker." Ugh - how can anybody possibly still like him?

I'm not sure all that many people do still like him. It's all sort of an illusion. He's important to film magazines and film websites because he's all about film and a geek like them and they all think they discovered him and blah, blah, blah, so they'll print anything he says and try and keep interest in his output alive, but his recent films have been dire and have under-performed at the box office. Audiences in general don't particularly give a shit about what he's offering up these days (From the magazines/websites point of view I think Edgar Wright is being built up to be their next superstar).

(As for the actual film, does anyone find it all a bit distasteful when a real-life bad thing that happened is used as a backdrop for something that is primarily supposed to entertain? (Potentially unpopular opinion in 3, 2...) Even as a kid I felt uneasy about the fact that the bad guys in two of the Indiana Jones movies were Nazis and obviously more recently we've had things like 'Titanic' and 'Pearl Harbour'. Anyway, this is hardly a new/original stance but I'm reminded of my take in this regard by what I've heard/read about IB.)

Speaking of recent shit quotes by movie people, I was amused by this statement from Jeffrey Katzenberg:

Question: What else is good about 3D?
Katzenberg: Ninety percent of piracy is somebody sitting in a theatre with a camcorder. Good luck.

Yeah, nice one tough guy. What a wholly fucking ridiculous thing to utter. In your wildest dreams would you ever so smugly lay down the gauntlet like that to a group of people who have successfully beaten you with hilarious ease at every single fucking turn? Surely the pirates will just raise their game and figure it out, as they have done, time and time again, since forever. It might just be me but I can't help but imagine that after he said 'Good luck' he touched his top teeth with the tip of his tongue and looked off to the side through squinting eyes. I'm not particularly a fan of piracy but if statements like that become common-place you can be sure that I'll be laughing my head off when the pirates inevitably figure out a way to pirate 3D movies. I might be getting carried away slightly but it does strike me as an absurdly short-sighted thing to say.

[VegaLA]

There's still blood in that Myers corpse.......

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSPqbbjc0BE

and Rob Zombie's going to milk it some more.

[VegaLA]

Zombie lake part 2 ? More olympic zombies.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/74985/movie-trailers-dead-snow

We should have gone to the beach.

[boxofslice]

Surprised no-ones mentioned this yet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXJEDUainX4&feature=player_embedded

[ThickAndCreamy]

Probably because the trailer is awful and the film comes out in 2010, you twerp!

I'm looking forward to it obviously, as I do to every Pixar animation, yet as the trailer is just full of nothingness I don't really care for the moment. I'm much more interested in Up.

[An tSaoi]

Trailer for Guy Rich Tea's attempt at doing Sherlock Holmes

For the first few seconds I thought that would be a fun and somewhat lighthearted take on the character, but after a while I realised it's just an unaffectionate pisstake. For some reason it reminded me of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which is a very bad thing indeed. Oddly enough I like LS&2SB and Snatch, but everything since has been cack. Don't like RDJr or Jude Law either, so that's buggered.

an ageing original Ghostbusters team?

I can't speak for the Dan Aykroyd of 2009, but when the lame Blues Brothers 2000 (1998) was on telly last week I was amazed that he hadn't aged a day since the original in 1980. Of course the hat and shades helped obscure any real giveaways but he still looked pretty much the same considering the time gap. Has he gone massively downhill in the last ten years?

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

Holy cow that has to be a mashup. I hope it is anyway. What with the silly hick music the trailer opened like the trailer for a comedy. You wouldn't even think it was a serious crime film.

Does it have any relation to the crazy Harvey Keitel film? Is it a remake or a pseudo-sequel or something? And would I be right in thinking that the Southern setting is purely because Nicholas Cage is unable to do accents other than his own? New York was a far better location.

EDIT: According to wiki it's a remake, although the director says otherwise. Understandably the original director had this to say:

As far as remakes go, ... I wish these people die in Hell. I hope they're all in the same streetcar, and it blows up." When asked later for his response to Ferrara's statements, Herzog stated that he does not know who Ferrara is, saying "I've never seen a film by him. I have no idea who he is."

Harsh words, but just ones too.

EDIT 2: Fuck! The quote's already been mentioned.

As for Tarantino's film, there's no reason to call it Inglourious Basterds. Now if Basterds was some sort of colloqualism (like people who pronounce "bollocks" as "ballix") then it would be valid, but it's not. And "Inglourious"? I didn't even notice that the first 20 times I read it so if he was trying to make a point he didn't make it clear enough. His dyslexia is no excuse.

I think that's the problem with his films. There's no point. You gain no character insights, and nothing is learned. I like Reservoir Dogs as a stylish flick to watch with undiscerning friends, Pulp Fiction too, I haven't seen Jackie Brown yet (I know I should), but everything since has been shite.

Kill Bill was too serious at times to be a send-up, but too silly and supposed to be funny to be a serious film. When you've got a mixture of serious scenes about murder and rape mixed up with silly squiriting blood like it's come from the Green Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, then you know the director doesn't know what he's doing.

Same with Grind House. Why waste so much money on making it look cheapy when he should have just used a few million dollars to go out and make an actual grindhouse film? It annoys me when teenagers (or even worse adults) make him out to be a real trailblazer (when he hasn't had an original idea) and one of the best directors ever.

What particularly irks me is that I don't think WW2 can be mocked in the usual Tarantino way. Charlie Chaplin managed to pull it off but then again he had restraint, sophistication and understanding of what he was doing. QT has never been able to prove to me that he can tackle a serious subject matter in anything but a tongue-in-cheek fashion. Now if it was Vietnam I could understand because that was a crazy pop-culture type of war, which would suit him. If ever a war could be described as "zany" it would be 'Nam. I'm not sure why exactly seeing as it was as horrific as any other, but if you look at some of the more lighthearted scenes in the second half of Full Metal Jacket you can see that it lends itself to irony and humour far better than WW2.

So why did he choose such a "serious" war? And why would he limit his pop culture references? All his movie "homages" will have to be pre-1940s. And if he wants to do speghetti western references (like he did a lot in Kill Bill and a few times in his earlier films) why doesn't he go the whole hog and make a friggin' spaghetti western set in the Old West? That's clearly where his interests lie. And Jesus - he spent ten years writing it. A script that takes that long is either an unworkable idea or should be an indisputed masterpiece. No prizes for guessing which way this one's going to go.

_{PS - does anyone know where I'm coming from with Vietnam being a Tarantino style war whereas WW2 isn't? I really can't explain why it comes across like that, it just does.}

[ThickAndCreamy]

I really think you're watching Tarintino's films the wrong way. Why do you expect 'character insights' and to 'learn' from a Tarantino film, it's like going to watch The Holy Grail and expecting deep philosophical morals and character development. Do you never watch dumb comedies as you never learn from them, yet really that isn't at all a justifiable way of condemning them.

Most Taratino's films aren't at all serious, any illusion of them being serious are simply a facade of melodramatic build up and tension to me, especially evident in Kill Bill Volume One. They aren't at all supposed to be parodies or 'send up's', as the films are often too entertaining to be that, they're more of a homage to genres of styles of filming. Kill Bill for instance clearly incorporates such a huge amount of camera styles, genres and different scenery to call it one genre is doing it a disservice. This is why he is often seen as gimmicky, which is understandable.

His films are foremost supposed to be simply entertaining as well, not a huge complex puzzle of deep and insightful characters. His films are often just celebrating the extremes, whilst being entertaining. He is the perfect creator of stupid, entertaining films which have no true meaning or value other than to be incredibly entertaining. I mean for god sake, I found it so hard not to adore Kill Bill Volume One just due to the last 30 minute epic fight scene. You have limbs being lobbed off nonchalantly, hundreds and hundreds being murdered by one assassin and wonderfully choreographed martial arts scenes. In Planet Terror a one legged character straps a machine gun to her leg and murders zombies whilst doing acrobatics. It's just sheer entertainment of blood and gore, it's a form of escapist cinema really with no need to look for a hidden meaning, as there isn't one, it's simply fun.

That's the problem with Tarantino, they have no point, but really, that is the point. If they had any form of meaning they wouldn't be anywhere near as entertaining. His films are stupid, littered with gimmicks and memorable dialogue and include such a vast array of cinematic techniques and styles and genres that I find it hard to not adore them. It's some of the best entertainment I've seen in modern films, and whilst it is an emotional vacuum, that's the way it's designed to be, that's why his films are incredibly good dumb films. With any form of intelligence, the plot, characters and scenes would fall apart and you wouldn't get murders galore, over the top sequences and a huge amount of melodramatic acting. Each one of his films seems so utterly unrealistic that comparing it to other serious films seems pointless.

Also, with him choosing WW2 to film Inglorious Basterds, does it matter. His film won't be at all serious as it's about a bunch of fictional Jewish soldiers murdering Nazis in the most brutal way possible. It has no real relation to actual history and does not attempt to be portrayed as historically correct. Why on earth are you treating it as if it is serious, it's not, at all. Every way is a violent culmination of death, pain and moral disgust and seeing other wars as not being "serious" is a hell of a lot more offensive than making a film completed unrelated to the war, with no connotations to real life events.

This is Chris Morris' forum for god sake, you should be able to poke fun out of an situation as long as it's funny. Although, Taratinos films are so warped from reality the use of World War II does not actually make the slightest difference.

I must admit though, Inglorious Basterds doesn't look very good. It can't be much worse than Death Proof though, now that was fucking dreadful.

[Famous Mortimer]

My problem with Tarantino post-Jackie Brown is that he makes straight-out genre films, but spends tens of millions of dollars on them and still ends up with something which isn't as good as the super-cheap and cheerful originals. Kill Bill wasn't as good as its main inspiration, the "Lady Snowblood" films; Jackie Brown wasn't as good as most of the films Pam Grier appeared in in the early-to-mid-70s; Planet Terror isn't as madly entertaining as hundreds of proper drive-in B features...if he added something to the things he does, then fair enough. but I don't think he does. I admire him for getting paid millions to make expensive ripoffs of cheap old films, but on the whole I'd rather watch the originals.

[An tSaoi]

it's like going to watch The Holy Grail and expecting deep philosophical morals and character development.

But I don't have frigging hipsters going on and on at me about Holy Grail being the epitome of filmmaking, up there with Kubrick and Kurosawa and Bergman and all the rest. QT fans (and I suspect the man himself) make his films out to be more than just entertaining schlock. If a dumb comedy was being claimed as (or was itself claiming to be) some high class comedy I'd be equally annoyed.

they're more of a homage to genres of styles of filming.

But there's homage (certain scenes from Star Wars replicating The Triumph Of The Wills for example) and "I'm just going to take all these different elements from obscure genre films and bundle them all up into one big package even though half the styles don't go at all well with each other and it's grossly stylistically incoherent". Now he managed to get that right with RD and PF (which I quite enjoy), but ballsed it up big-time with KB where we went from stone-faced revenge film to cheesy samurai flick to Japanese cartoon to outright comedy and back again several times.

Kill Bill for instance clearly incorporates such a huge amount of camera styles, genres and different scenery

Far too many. It feels like little bits from other films strung together as opposed to one actual film in it's own right. If a person who wasn't well-versed in cinema saw RD or PF he'd think they were pretty original pieces of work because Tarantino disguised the homages quite well. But anyone who watches Kill Bill can see just what a muddle of different influences it is to the point where each scene plays like a spoof of a different film instead of a film that occasionally makes reference to other films.

He is the perfect creator of stupid, entertaining films which have no true meaning or value other than to be incredibly entertaining.

Which is why he shouldn't be held up as a truly great filmmaker. By definition Tarantino films cannot be great because they are copies of previous films, with decreasing personal invention every time. That's why he went from proper, entertaining films that sometimes showed their influences to "let's pretty much do this genre and that genre and the other genre and stitch it all together, except I'll spend ten times as much money making it as the original genre directors did. And my fans will hold me up to be some genius filmmaker for showcasing what are essentially the fruits of other people's labour".

You have limbs being lobbed off nonchalantly, hundreds and hundreds being murdered by one assassin and wonderfully choreographed martial arts scenes.

Now if it had been a completely silly send-up from the start then I'd have enjoyed that too, but KB can't seem to decide whether it wants to be an out and out spoof, a thousand different homages which don't sit well together, a stylistic mess, simply cobbled together from stolen ideas, or a somewhat proper film that's tongue in cheek. I know what he was going for but he didn't reach it.

In Planet Terror a one legged character straps a machine gun to her leg and murders zombies whilst doing acrobatics.

Not a Tarantino film.

That's the problem with Tarantino, they have no point, but really, that is the point. If they had any form of meaning they wouldn't be anywhere near as entertaining. His films are stupid, littered with gimmicks and memorable dialogue and include such a vast array of cinematic techniques and styles and genres that I find it hard to not adore them.

That's all well and good for the first six or seven films he's made. But you think he'd pull something new out of the box wouldn't you? And I don't think RD and PF are particularly silly. They could be properly serious when they wanted to, albeit in a "knowing that it's all a bit silly really" way. Whereas KB and DP were wall to wall stupidity without any attempt to make them come across as being close to proper films, like RD and PF managed.

With any form of intelligence, the plot, characters and scenes would fall apart and you wouldn't get murders galore, over the top sequences and a huge amount of melodramatic acting.

Bit that's all he can ever do. A really good director could tackle various genres with various amounts of seriousness/frivolity. The simple fact is that while I accept QT isn't trying to make serious proper films that are well constructed and have any sort of reverberance, he couldn't make even if he tried very hard indeed. Highly limited director.

And I think a WW2 film requires some amount of seriousness. Unless it's a well-measured satire of the inherent stupidity of war, not some genre geeks (Eli Roth being a particularly bad apple) having a laugh and being silly all over a massive human tragedy. Although as I said I wouldn't have minded a Vietman film for some reason.

This is Chris Morris' forum for god sake, you should be able to poke fun out of an situation as long as it's funny. Although, Taratinos films are so warped from reality the use of World War II does not actually make the slightest difference.

TDT's war video ad is hilarious, because you trust CM knows his reason for doing it, and that those will be good reasons beyond the simple requirement of making people laugh. He has a serious point to make with his comedy. Some comedy is after all serious business. Well, after the business of being funny that is. But QT does not make comedies. He makes film that are in that rare limbo between not being joke-orientated enough to be a comedy and not being joke-free enough and with the correct tone to be a serious film. He's just playing at making a pretend film.

Even his beloved Spaghetti Westerns, while hyperreal and often absurd were completely straight faced and often deadly serious. I for one love the Dollars Trilogy, and I see them as serious films. I just don't think he could sit down and watch a film and appreciate it for anything other than the most 2-dimensional qualities of it looked cool and it had some neat looking fighting and music and shit. When he stops trying to make "badass" or "cool" films or "films that are deliberately populated with flat characters and stupid plots or scenarios" (AKA making bad films on purpose) and goes back to making (that's if he ever made them at all, I think he did, briefly) "good" films then I'll start prasing him like I once did.

I must admit though, Inglorious Basterds doesn't look very good. It can't be much worse than Death Proof though, now that was fucking dreadful.

Right, we'll agree on that.

[SavageHedgehog]

For some reason it reminded me of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which is a very bad thing indeed. 

It reminded me of Van Helsing, which is a far worse thing.

[An tSaoi]

Oh dear Lord. That would be a disaster.

[Blaaah]

I like Reservoir Dogs as a stylish flick to watch with undiscerning friends, Pulp Fiction too, I haven't seen Jackie Brown yet (I know I should), but everything since has been shite.

He's always been shite. He was just shite with novelty value before.

What particularly irks me is that I don't think WW2 can be mocked in the usual Tarantino way. Charlie Chaplin managed to pull it off but then again he had restraint, sophistication and understanding of what he was doing. QT has never been able to prove to me that he can tackle a serious subject matter in anything but a tongue-in-cheek fashion. Now if it was Vietnam I could understand because that was a crazy pop-culture type of war, which would suit him.

Charles Chaplin didn't 'mock' 'WW2' in The Great Dictator. As for the idea that some wars are zanier than others...

[An tSaoi]

I agree he didn't mock WW2, I just worded it badly. He mocked Hitler though.

[uesugi_proagon]

Bobcat Goldthwaite's 'World's Greatest Dad' looks good. Robin Williams is in it but it looks good.

Clips:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgzVA9u_s_c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B76DMj9328
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXHJkNUNfFU

Film's got good reviews so far, did well at Sundance, etc.

[SavageHedgehog]

Yeah, I look the look of that. I've been meaning to see Shakes the Clown for years too.

[CaledonianGonzo]

More one for 2010, but anyway.. ..

If the rumours are true, Kenneth Branagah has just cast Brian Blessed as Odin in his forthcoming Thor movie.

http://chud.com/articles/articles/19705/1/BLESSED-BE-ODIN/Page1.html

Given Branagh's previous Blessed-casting form, this could well be a bit of casting made in Valhalla....Prince Vultan might just have been a warm up..

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Awesome.

"THORDON'S ALIVE!!!"

[unky herb]

Terminator Salvation

The first film I've actually gone out to see at the kino since Terminator 3 (!). Aside from the slightly wrong Danny Elfman theme, it was very enjoyable. Forgot how good zooming out tracking shots look on the big screen rather than a couple of dots on the telly. The story ticked along nicely, I didn't get sore arse syndrome and Christian Bale is excellent as predicted, especially when people weren't going "da da da da" and looking at the lights.

It certainly rescued the franchise for me after the bullshit of T3.

Orange Wednesday for the win!

I am only regretting not going to see Crank 2 as I imagine that would kick ass in the cinema.

[samadriel]

It certainly bested T3, but that's not saying much; still, it was your better class of standard-issue po-faced scifi action bollocks; better this than, oh, I dunno...  Transformers?

I think maybe the difference lies in how calculatedly 'charming' they try to be; T4's not ingenious, but at least it's not trying to be your friend.  And I did think 'a Terminator that thinks it's a man' was a decent, vaguely new place to take the mythology (don't feel like spoilering that, it was in the trailer).

[wheatgod]

Terminator Salvation for me, too.

If taken separately from the previous films, its a pretty decent action film. Plenty of thrills and spills, and things going boom.

Unfortunately, though, it cannot escape comparison to the previous films. All three of these followed the same path, and stayed true to "the Terminator universe". Even T3 shared the same essential tone as T1 and the quite breathtakingly excellent T2.
Was the 2018 we saw really an extension of what we saw at the end of T3? If you added 15 years, is that really what it would look like?
I would envision a post-apocalyptic hell-hole, with the resistance relying on guerilla tactics to take tiny victories against the Machine behemoth. Not a fully fledged army, fully stocked with bomber jets and big old bases.

So, the "world" disappointed me. The plot was surprisingly adequate, I was expecting totally brainless balls. Not even too many plot holes - it was kept relatively simple. The dialogue stunk of poo, though ("I'm not a good guy" "You are, you just don't know it yet"). Decent performance from Yelcin (who continues to impress), and liked the death row guy too. Bale was in Batman croak mode, and didn't feature as much as I'd expected. The score was stolen from Dark Knight, obviously.

All in all, worth a watch if you fancy a decent actioner.

Throwbacks to previous films that I liked (do add more):

Spoiler alert

ARNIE!
Subtle one: truck/bike chase - bike smashes through motorway bridge - reversal of chase from T2
Connor: "I'll be back!"

[close]

[samadriel]

Throwbacks to previous films that I liked (do add more):

Spoiler alert

ARNIE!
Subtle one: truck/bike chase - bike smashes through motorway bridge - reversal of chase from T2
Connor: "I'll be back!"

[close]

Spoiler alert

Arnie, aaah!  Heh, a mate of mine was saying, "Wow, they must have paid a ton to get him back!"  I had to break it to him...
(I liked the "I'll be back" too.)
Hey, good spotting on the chase scene.  Oh, and I'm certain that the music John played on the stereo to attract the bike Terminator was the same Gunners song that was playing when he and his friend were tinkering with his first bike in T2.

[close]

Oh man, Michael Ironside was head of the resistance!  I thought there was something about his voice -- it's Sam Fisher's...

[Custard]

The Sun review of Terminator Salvation made me laugh out loud on the bus today

Spoiler alert

"Arnie shows up in a non-speaking role, which appears to be computer trickery"

[close]

Haha no shit!

[thugler]

Terminator 4 was so, so bad. I actually prefered the third one, at least it had a decent ending. Endless action with little or no explanation, a billion types of transformer style terminator, terrible overacting, and a completely awful ending. Mcg has no original ideas or talent.

[Feralkid]

Terminator 4 was the dullest most interminable think I've seen in ages.   The action is meaningless and quickly becomes mundane - with no characters to actually root for or empathise with it's all empty spectacle.   Bale's performance was dull and one note, with nary a hint of humanity or introspection to it.   Worthington was similarly boring and the notion that's he a huge star in the making wasn't substantiated by anything I saw there.   He couldn't even maintain an American accent and kept slipping back into antipodean mode.   The only positive thing I can say about the acting is that Anton Yelchin did a reasonable job of channelling Michael Biehn, with lots of frantic running and speaking urgently through clenched teeth.   

I think there are myriad problems in terms of the film's look and design.  I for one wanted to see a movie which built upon the look of the Future War scenes in T1 & T2, piles of bleached skulls in a sea of ruins, laser weapons, and long tracking Kubrick style tracking shots the resistance bunkers.  Instead we get a warmed over Black Hawk Down aesthetic with a side dish of Albert Pyun.   

More to the point, by turning the resistance in 131st Airborne we lose the sense that they're scrappy underdogs fighting a desperate battle.   They just seemed far too well resourced here - and whilst I can buy time-travel, killer cyborgs and what not the notion that aviation fuel will be easy to come by after the apocalypse was too great a stretch.  The fact that the iconography McG deploys (Huey helicopters, jungle fatigues et al) recalls 'Nam is a huge mistake.   Not the sort of associations one wants to evoke.   If anything the resistance should be more like the Tunnel digging North Vietnamese, using cunning, guile and sheer bloody determination to defeat a more technologically advanced foe.     McG has compared his action scenes to Apocalypse Now which he seems to have studied.  A quick gander at Battle of Algiers might have proved more instructive.   

As for the script.  Jesus wept.   It's been widely reported that Bale was offered the Marcus role but was more interested in playing Connor.  But, because the original script had Connor as a minor mostly off-screen presence, the script had to rewritten.  The finished film features uncredited contributions from a slew of high paid scripters including Jonathan Nolan, J Michael Strazynksi, and Anthony Zuicker.   Yet it's full of clunky entry-level mistakes and all manner of horrible contrivances.  It also features dreadful clichés at every turn - the most jaw-dropping being the introduction of Moon Bloodgood's character.  At first we're lead to believe she's a man but when she takes off her flight helmet we see she's a beautiful lady with lovely shiny hair.   Yeah, who needs James Cameron when master auteur McG is on the case...

The Marcus plot-line would play so much better if we hadn't been shown the pre-apocalyptic prologue.   The use of Reese makes exactly zero sense

Spoiler alert

why not kill Reese the moment he was captured.  And seriously, how did Skynet discover he's Connor's father

[close]

.   Connor's broadcasts are surely a bad idea - wouldn't Skynet be able to trace the signal?   And that ending is just ludicrous

Spoiler alert

so we're to believe that Marcus the cyborg's heart can be transplanted into Connor with relative ease in a post-nuke Military hospital.  I'm also presuming they must be a perfect tissue match.  Or does the resistance have a shit load of anti-rejection medication right next to their endless supply of F16s?

[close]

[copylight]

I second this shiteness in lieu of a terrible trailer./Ronseal/

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I thought new Terminator was alright for a bit of mindless smash bang wallop. The action was more thrilling than most recent blockbusters I can remember and it did a good job of making the terminators frightening again.

The whole save the cheerleader

Spoiler alert

Reece

[close]

, save the world thing didn't make a whole heap of sense. If they'd failed, would John have faded away like in Back to the Future? Of course you can apply that criticism to the rest of the series, so it's probably best not to think about it too hard.

After this and Star Trek, is Anton Yelchin going to be like Michael Sheen but with fictional characters?

I think there are myriad problems in terms of the film's look and design.  I for one wanted to see a movie which built upon the look of the Future War scenes in T1 & T2, piles of bleached skulls in a sea of ruins, laser weapons, and long tracking Kubrick style tracking shots the resistance bunkers.  Instead we get a warmed over Black Hawk Down aesthetic with a side dish of Albert Pyun.

True it was a bit disappointingly derivative in that respect (some Mad Max influence in there too) but, what with Reece being a teenager in this, there's still time for the world to become the way we've seen before. The resistance is all tooled up now, but that could easily change.