If Rolands Terminator says “I’ll be back” I’m walking out for a refund.

Reason I hate this new film (without seeing it yet) is because of the rumors I’m hearing about the ending and the ripping off of the skin of Connor and sewing it on a endo from the 2003.
I didn’t invision that and I can’t begin to tell you how feather plucking insane that is.

Pg-13 sucks!!!!!!!

anyways, i’m really dying to know if anyone else out there has seen all the comcast on demand featurettes for TDK, and what they thought.

i just saw one of the ‘Gotham Knight’ anime chapters called ‘feild test’. i don’t like ‘anime batman’, but it was good to hear conroy as the voice again. there is so much shit on there, it’s fun as hell - they even show a 3 min featurette on how they made they ‘clown masks’ for jokers gang.

i’m dying to know if anyone else has seen all this stuff too.

Anyway, to anybody including Dan who thinks this film can survive without violence, it can’t. Think about the concept here. People are facing their extinction at the hands of cybernetic organisms The sense of doom can’t just be evoked with just a simple panning of really malnourished resistance fighters living underground. That’s pretty much every goddamn war film you’ve ever seen dozens of times before. Sure, the HK’s and the laser weapons are a huge difference, but you need to show people dying in really inhuman ways to show just how fucked the human race is even with John Connor. He’s got to be losing people left and right in awful, terrible ways. It’s not realistic to think war with machines wouldn’t be a goddamn bloodbath. People would be cut in half by laser sentries, having their limbs torn off by an early model rubber Terminator, put in cages to harvest their tissue to emulate it and create later models, have smaller drones fly into a barrack and cut down people left and right. It has to be complete madness when you really think about it.

I have no faith in McG, considering he thinks this film can work as a PG-13 flick.

You don’t think the violence in T2 was graphic?

1) The scene where the T1000 mimicks John’s foster mother to John over the phone, panning to the foster dad getting impaled through the head by the T1000’s swordlike blade. The blade gets pulled out and he falls to the ground.

2) The fat security guard in the insane asylum who turns around to see the T1000 be his double. He raises his finger up and it goes right through his eye and out the back of his head.

These are great, creepy scenes, where the audience sees first hand how easily somebody can die at the hands of a Terminator. They are effective, eerie, and just plain badass. All of those scenes go out the window with a PG-13 film. This film may just “nuke the fridge” if they become too restrictive.

Np. The first Terminator is too nihilistic in my opinion; even if you cut out the profanity, the violence is too graphic and there’s also a bit of nudity that wouldn’t pass for PG-13 today. But mainly, it’s an R-rated film, and that’s how James Cameron envisioned it. I don’t follow the argument that if “you cut this out and this out and toned this down” it would automatically become a PG13 rated film and still be AS GOOD. That is thinking in terms of what gets by the MPAA. But it doesn’t take into consider the director’s vision. If you want a shot of liquor, you want a shot of liquor. If you want to watch Die Hard, you watch Die Hard, not Die Hard: Odouls. Cameron wanted to and made two R-rated films. That didn’t mean that he wanted to include naked babes and f-bombs for the sake of it. A lot of R-rated films today play up the R, which I find annoying. Have you noticed?

And, no, The Dark Knight is not the end all be all for this argument, b/c Chris Nolan gets carte blanche on those films - it’s a very rare deal. PG-13 is fine, but when it’s used for material that deserves to be R-rated, like the Terminator films, it’s compromise plain and simple. You can’t make fans of the films - the reason why those films have grossed hundreds of millions - swallow the decision, especially sight unseen. And you can’t rewrite history. Part of the reason why the Terminator films were successful, and anyone who was in middle school or high school when they were released knows this - is because they were hardcore action films - something that barely exists today. This wasn’t death that was off screen, the Terminator did it in front of you and it kept coming. It gave the films unparalleled excitement and buzz. The third film was very nearly PG13 but the studio turned the other cheek. That film is moot. It would have sucked either way. Yeah, it could have been PG13….and? It would have sucked.

This is where the MPAA has really effed up the market in my opinion. Studios think, “well, we can tone this down and get the rating and it’ll play bigger,” - common business sense - but as a movie fan, I don’t think like that. For instance, John Carpenter’s Escape From New York and They Live and The Thing are all better and classics imo because they are R-rated. They aren’t compromised. They aren’t for the prototypical teenager per se. Sure, you can edit them to be PG-13, but they won’t be the real deal. Singling out profanity, boobs and violence overlooks the bigger picture. And when did we start meh’ing those ingredients for action films anyhow?

There’s a mentality to the first Terminator movie that is meant for adults. For some reason, PG13 has become a celebration of the populist experience that is going to the theater. I don’t buy it. Even if you removed the stuff to please the MPAA — like cable often does — The Terminator still has a darkness and edge to it because the director was able to go for broke. T2 has numerous scenes with heads being impaled et al. The violence improves the film on a visceral level, and I think Cameron would agree. The urgency and sense of doom in T1 and T2 is rated R. You can do it the other way, but it’s one scoop of raisins instead of two. It’s just a sign of the times, but even when I see T4, I can tell you right now, it would have been better with an R. Why do I care if 15-year-old kids don’t have to sneak in? I don’t. Why get amped defending a PG13 rating? I don’t. That is for the next Tipper Gore. People don’t say “Yikes” when they are fighting robots of death, I mean, what did you say when you fought them?

I cannot wait for that theme to start playing in a darkened theater once again.
T-3 was god awful, but that theme still gets me pumped.