COMIC-CON 2008

looks very good hoping its rated PG-13

#2, i hope to god its not a pg-13 rating.

Utter waste of time. Strange Characters that have no real meaning (I know how much daily maintenance it takes to keep a chopper flying) beyond their own acknowledged multiethnic motif. Fights in daylight that have no interest because they are out in the great wide nothin' where Skynet could easily pick people off and which plagiarize Road Warriorism besides. Too late to be believable as a war of the machines (15 years!?!?) Connor is still messing about like it's all about him without any organization or ARMY behind him. 'Harvester' themes that look like they come straight out of 'I Robot'. Environments that are flat and utterly uninteresting because they have lost Cameron's junkyard sense of a charred-remains urban existence. Gee Thanks James. You dork around for 10 years to NOT show us Judgment Day, then abandon the concept altogether and let somebody else screw around for nearly 15 more only to produce yet more rev-in-park useless crap. Now, it's more than 20 years later and you look like Lucas having handed off to a music video director what you pretended you didn't want to show and now have no choice. 'Males are such evil perverts for wanting war. And only the machines can teach them better by beating the audience black and blue!' Yeah Right. Hope all you innocents wake up from the Stunt Reel in time to _vote with your wallet_ and refuse to watch this on the first weekend. KPl.

So Alex let's hope you don't build this one up only to give a disappointing review after it comes out. Word of advice, try not to hype it up to us too much.

When the hell are you going to learn that you can't guess the quality of the finished product by explosion-filled teaser clips? It's McG, for pity's sake, he's going to fuck it all up in the end.

i think it sounds pretty cool. i loved the tv series and if that was any indication of what the movie is going to be like then it will rock! and a pg-13 rating would kill this movie, go for the R!!! i'm totally syked about seeing this film!

I sure hope it's R. But then again, I don't care for the rating as long as it's good.

I wish i had the epic scope and vision of KPL(#6), to take that all in from a minute long trailer. That Sixty seconds was the whole movie. Now i can just safely wait in my house to not be left behind. I just want it to be rated R for Remarkable. This story needs a uplift like Batman, and hopefully RoboCop. But seriously. Wait for a longer trailer.

Buttons, Those who have something to show, do. Those who mix and match based on hiding the story as much as the action lash up 2-second clips that deliberately encourage the ADD acceptance of the Gen-Stupid as the flash-card equivalent by which they learn. Look at the trailers for Kingdom Of Heaven (what you want to model a large scale endo ground war on) and realize how much more honest they were, from the very start with the shots they could and would show. This pastiche-o-vision is simply the jumble of images you'd see in a music video 'if the singer weren't crying about it'. Given I've seen the singers and they don't have any skill to cry /with/ let alone about, there is not going to be a lot to see when they do bring out the next trailer which I understand is due with Quantum Of Solace. They will be finished with principle photography on 'Terminator Salvage Rights' by then but I doubt seriously if you will see anything better. Because they don't have enough to spread around and still pretend they have a film. KPl.

First; I am hearing some of the same prejudice that Spike Lee gets every time he makes a movie. Second; The Statistics about these types of sites confirm that the average commentator is a white middle class male. McG made one bad movie so far. Every one is entitled to make one bad movie. Every great director has made at least one bad movie. McG is not even a great director and some of the commentators are already writing him off. Ever since the Terminator movies started; I always told my friends that the best scenes in my opinion were the scenes of Conner and his men fighting or discussing the battle plans. This also goes for The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Being a Marine; I have always wanted to see the grunts fighting the terminators. It's a war movie! My men and I want to see a war movie that finally shows the brave men and women who fight and die for the most fundamental of American/human ideals. Freedom for American and freedom for the human race.

I'm totally looking forward the new Terminator... Christian Bale tends to do a great job no matter what role he takes

lol: This is a war movie. John Conner and his army fighting the terminators and their flying machines. Doesn't anyone remember the flashbacks in the Terminator movies and the Sarah Conner Chronicles. What is it with some of you who can't accept a movie about an adult Conner and other humans kicking Terminator Ass! Do you think that people always want to see movies where the machines are the predators and humans are the prey. My men and me rather be the predators killing Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters that the opposite. Fuck the machines! We're with you John; Kick some Terminator Ass. By the way; we don't have the luxury of fighting the insurgents only during the night. We light them up day and night.

KPl. I forgot that Conner's men are probably civilians. So far they haven't shown any special military training in either the snippets during the terminator movies or The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Thanks for the heads up.

IAASr, Both Reese and Ferro are wearing tagged uniforms in 'Terminator'. As does Connor in T2. They are all relatively clean faced and take good care of their equipment which, to me, indicates a working military field discipline. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v484/NickO123/KyleReese.jpg OTOH, he is probably staying in a 'Resistance' (think Militia and the American Revolution) bunker with his team during daylight hours, simply because Tech.Com has commandeered the site for whatever operational necessity reason (you don't generally let the unwashed masses into a military bunker, for opsec, disease control and yes, infiltration/sabotage reasons). The reality of all this is that, the further you get away from J-Day, the LESS you will have to scavenge of any kind of material goods, manufacturing capability or whatever. Things will not improve, they will slump further down towards stone age. The same holds true of humans. Get the healthy ones before they spend a couple weeks wandering around in high radiation zones, eating contaminated food and suffering from simple compound environmental exposure to cold and toxic soot and you will have the best of human immune systems and education levels from the prewar days in a 40-50 year life span. Wait 15 years and suddenly you are dealing with third world level intelligence and malnutrition effects on both physical and mental capabilities in a soldier who will last 25-30 years, tops. Skynet gets past this by assumptions of underground automated factory bunkers and/or external-to-CONUS installations in general. You certainly don't bootstrap a post nuclear recovery effort from atop ground zero, especially when the victims are hostile. You fly it in. Added to which is the notion that you need a 'Northern Alliance' type terrain occupation force as the cannonfodder who attract Skynet's attention and prevent it from just going whereever it pleases or leaving it's own installations undefended against mass attack. But you also _really need_ the Special Forces to train those primitive irregulars. Because that's what they do really well. And their ability to employ multiple weapon types and improvise explosives as well as limited knowledge of more sophisticated weapons systems will all add up to a significant cadre` level edge to those who have the brains to hire them on _before they are flash vaporized_. Sarah the smart (college bound) girl is not a warrior because she doesn't have the body or the time for it and because it just doesn't matter vs. a Terminator. So, she HIRES IT DONE so that she can delegate to expertise and stay fixed on the task of building up the 1990s _technology company_ ('Tech.Com') to create the rural bunkers and post-apocalyptic technology systems that are survivable without backing resources. This is what Billy Bob McG should have concentrated on rather than 'explain' (by virtue of distance) why he adapted from T3's storyline yet, again, 15 years into a war, Connor is still just building up a Resistance which should be instead have been in full swing against Skynet for years. Wars are won in the beginning and lost in the end. Achieving this could have been done so simply by visual exposition, an advanced ('Damnation Alley') guntruck pulls into a hidden rural bunker and 'as the camouflaged doors close' you see the gleam of an inscribed brass plate: "T.C.1223". And Connor brushes his hand on it as a kind of 'thanks Mom!' moment that hints what could have been proven in T5 or T6. When a NEW Sarah Connor showed why she was a _legendary organizer_ and you saw the beginnings of what Connor later fought with. Pros talk logistics, amateurs talk tactics and in this case, Sarah must build a war machine atop a pool of post-civilization quicksand in which everything is sinking to nothing. A warfighter that can produce things like those demolition charges that Reese tosses beneath that HK tank. That can adopt Terminator optimized plasma weapons to humanoid rifle stocks. That can fabricate electronic sights which the Terminators don't /need/ because they have magnified FLIR eyeballs and stabilized hydraulic arms. Watch this- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3irrStwto1Y And then ask yourself. What happens when the above happens and 103 nuclear reactors in the U.S. meltdown? When the 15,000 chemical sites have no long term supervision? What happens when entire continents are firestormed as urban fire fronts spread and conjoin, reaching into natural forests and farm land across the nation? What happens is that you move underground or you die on the surface. And once underground, you have to stay there for at least 1-5 years while the torrential rains wash things somewhat clean and you, like Skynet, wait for humanity to kill itself off and the disease vectors to vanish. Which means you have to bring in closed loop air and things like hydroponics to keep people from getting scurvy and ricketts. You may need tanning beds. You will need class rooms and medical centers and bunkrooms. This is not something for some dumb commando psycho babe to be pretending she knows how to plan for. It needs a lot of brains and a lot of 'from the future, I give you...fusion!' _cheating_. It effectively needs everything that T3 failed to show us for the machines side as being already a part of the human warfighter effort. Because the home front and the main front are one and the same. And there will be no diddling about 'salvaging' whatever, once Skynet comes out from under it's own rock. KPl.

IAASr, I didn't mean to suggest that we were feeding these people to the grinder on purpose but to put the battlefield in motion, you have to have a force in play. Whatever word you use: militia, unconventionals, levies they need numbers to act as a fixing force that pushes the enemy into engagement. If you've ever seen 'Dogs Of War', the little pep talk that Walken gives his local hires will make it clear what I'm trying to say here but the essence is that if the NA attack a Taliban controlled village and the Taliban fight back, the NA will get slaughtered by indirect fire and possibly AFV /unless/ they have both the numbers to diffuse return fire and the fire support to make exposing fixed assets really risky. Fire support the GBs can give. Numbers are impossible, even if they are not ROE restricted from participating directly. Of course the Taliban could play that game to. Mobbing up and staying under cover to remain unengaged until it was belt buckle time as the NA were too close and so defeat the PGM threat. Which is when you have a FAC talking down strikes on mudhuts which the aviator's own ROE says he cannot drop on because there isn't any obvious threat to him (Canadians go home). The combination of the mobup and undercover effects being: 1. You now have a target big enough to be worthy of an airstrike and concentrated enough that you can blow up mud hut #2 from the north end of the village square instead leveling the whole block and trade likely civilian casualties for the certainty on the part of the Taliban that -no- mudhut is safe. 2. Good targeting or bad, once you have killed enough of the Taliban, they run in panic which makes them legitimate roadkill. But to get there from here you still had to have a big enough NA force to make the Taliban feel like they have to defend against the threat. Because sitting on COGs (such as they are) is how one militia force controls anothers' population and the Tadjik and Pashtun don't much like one other, haven't since before Mohammed's boys went blazing thru 1,200 or so years back. To be one or the other in either man's home turf means going in numbers _just like a real army_ sufficient to force protect. This is what differentiates SWA tribalism from true nationalist guerilla actions, they can't just run hide in the bushes until you go on by without risking ending up d***less and dead in the morning. But at the same time that kind of partisan crap only works so long as the locals are themselves too numerous to be victimized by drive by tactics. Skynet will have no such inhibitions because 'there are no collaterals or unintendeds' and nobody is likely to have the firepower or the coordination to push it's patrols back as they sweep and clear sterilizes whole areas. If humans are too dispersed to mob up, they will get run over by a superior mechanized force that just blows right through them and/or _sits there_, with one tank and a platoon, making it impossible for 10 or 100 naked apes to go out and hunt rats or whatever else passes for entertainment. Yet if they do mob up, they will simply be bigger key signature (thermal bloom) target masses that Skynet can respond in kind with lumpsum heavy assets and combined arms drill to offset numbers issues. The question then becoming how many HK tanks and aerials can Skynet assign before it weakens other AORs. Connor can help stress the deployment picture of those kinds of choices by stiffening key sectors that give him intel, troops and 'basing rights'. Leaving Skynet with an Anbar or Baghdad question. But this kind of flex task discretionary/desultory warfare only works _If_ he has (retired) A-Team level cadre` troops able to sustain high tempo ops over long periods with little or not support or BMC2 on autonomous operational initiative. The Resistance will cave or hold tight if they don't have these kinds of people ramroding their spines. And SOF can also employ heavy weapons (Mortars, HMG and perhaps ATGW, Stingers won't last without batteries and coolant). At which point you'd /better/ teach the mob some basic tactics so their is some degree of fires deconfliction. Later on it will plasma weapons and heavy (thermobaric) demolition charges, perhaps even nuclear weapons that 'only Tech.Com' can make as the technology becomes available by raiding Skynet stores like every good guerilla force does. The irony being that whatever Connor does can't last for long as a fixed frontal war because if he sits still in any one place, Skynet will dogpile him. So wherever he lends a hand, he has to be able to displace away from the action as rapidly as he came so that he when The Machine get's pissed and decides to sterilize an area, he can at least trade blood for further attacks on Skynet resource convoys or whatever to keep it dividing it's available systems between logistics convoy protection and area security. If you want mobility and firepower, you _have to_ go mech. Probably with guntrucks that are also part tanker and so can run for perhaps as much as 1,000 miles on a single fuel load. I say this because Connor has three commitments: A. Hitting road march threats to mess up Skynets' force build. B. Protecting local forces so they stay loyal to him. C. Doing Deep Strike to actually interdict the manufacturing as much as delivery of war materiel. So he has to stay on the run because even if he wins every battle, he is going to be like Captain Jack and the Modoc. The second he stops at a lava field, Skynet will trade everything it has just to keep him pinned down and sieged up until he starves. As for 'where the U.S. Armed Forces Went'... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWrmosittYk Time Index 1:36. I can see at least 14 ICBMs rising up out of the Minot or Malmstrom fields. That's 42 W87 warheads at roughly 270KT each. 378 Megatons of yield and more than enough to burn the heart out of either the U.S. or Russia's primary urban centers while only 1/10th the total number of ICBMs available from either installation's SMW. Time Index 1:50 shows that a large number of these shots are in fact depressed trajectory impacts heading for U.S. targets. Given the Russians were taken completely offguard by a Norwegian Sounding Rocket for which they had had half a year's written notification; Skynet could not rely on them to be sufficiently vicious in their response and the Europeans and Chinese may not be much better. Thus, I have no doubt that further weapons are on their way to the various theater Commands and without Looking Glass to give the flush order, few if any foreign soil force deployments will survive the AI's intimate knowledge of our strategic force dispositions either. Given that the still large stocks of tactical nukes and nuclear powered CVBGs would, in the case of a full release nuclear exchange, likely be used to set up a 'New And Improved' United States in someone else' territory rather than scrape CONUS up with a blotter, the reality is that Skynet cannot allow any theater storage facilities or their delivery platforms/basing modes to mate up and so it probably dropped hammer on all deployed naval forces as well with overhead Optical and COMINT tracking to make sure. This means every USN Fleet base, every one of the major Commands and all their subordinate units were likely crispy crittered to the extent that only those small enough and/or far away in the field would likely be MIRV-free and they would have at most 7-10 days of food and water to hike out of the BFE with. At which point even a Snake Eater's ability to contribute to the future of the States itself is gonna be limited to the extent he can find naval or air transport back to a continent likely burning end to end. Something like this- http://www.myfoxcolorado.com/myfox/pages/News/Detail?contentId=7131963&version=32&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=TSTY&pageId=3.1.1 That's Green Mountain, just west of where we live. Happened yesterday and took less than thirty minutes and a stiff breeze to put a 2X2 square mile area at risk with about 30 million dollar homes no further than a back fence away from being an insurance statistic. In summer, the entire western half of the country is vulnerable like this. Imagine that kind of blackened earth result on a Continental Scale with hurricane force winds instigated by the very firestorms themselves causing the blaze to spread at upwards of 20-30mph across the landscape. Where do you run without meeting a firefront coming the other way from some other blast? The only people who are going to avoid randomly becoming charcoal bricketts will be those so deep in a barren terrain matrix (i.e. desert or high mtns) that there is literally no way for the fire to burn into their position. Half the population will be gone in the first 24hrs. Half the remainder in the next six weeks as immediate radiation poisoning shuts down major body systems (bone marrow) due to failed oxygenation of the blood system. Others will die of simple exposure and starvation while prestocked foods all go bad. Some will be hunted by those more desperate than themselves. And half of those will be lost at the end of the first year as longer term radiologics do in other organs and our first post-nuclear winter sets in. Altogether, at 16 months, we should expect no more than 35 million to be left standing in the U.S. after a deliberate, max-release, counter value strike. This number corresponding to roughly half the level of population base that the Native Americans were living at when Columbus showed up asking directions. At likely similar geographic dispersion levels, you will be able to walk for weeks if not months at a time without seeing anyone. Which is why Connor will need to have his sh** in one sock and get the people he can save rapidly underground, breathing canned air, drinking 'recycled' water and eating sealed MREs because -those folk- are gonna be the ones who don't suck up the contaminants that kill. And they are also the ones who will survive the firefronts coming together as much as weeks after the initial attacks and any cleanup secondary strikes. Waiting until 2018 is a fools game. We'd be lucky if there were 10-20 million people left in the entire United States and you would _never find them_ they'd be so deep down their own holes. KPl.