Terminating the Franchise: Terminator Genisys

Everything I’ve seen regarding this new remakequel/preboot/whatever the hell it’s supposed to be is utterly atrocious. First it was the casting. Arnold is back… old, but still some remote potential and yes I can see a Terminator getting old...maybe, but when they said he’s playing ‘father figure’ to Sarah Connor in yet another terrible timeline alteration, I think I was ready to say enough right there. Emilia Clarke isn’t necessarily a bad choice, but doing a prequel about Sarah Connor makes no sense. We don’t need to see 16 year old Sarah before she gets a job as a waitress, but, oh, you say you’re sending more Terminators back in time before that?  We’ve seen that already, in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I’ve seen enough Terminator Father Figures and Connors growing up. Enough of that shit already. The guy they cast to play Kyle Reese is the worst thing about this movie for me with all of its foolishness. They have two actors still young, and still capable of playing Reese who already played him… nope, we’re not going to see Christian Bale play John Connor either. I’d have rather seen Thomas Dekker reprise his role than the actor they picked because I just don’t see it at all, it’s absurd. I don’t even want to know why Doctor Who is in this movie.

Then we see the promotional photos, and it looks like this is some sort of parody movie. Arnold just looks ridiculous, and I don’t even want to know why they’re carrying Super-Soakers and shooting at the ground and screaming. The title is dumb, then they changed it to simply spell it differently? Nothing about this Terminator movie is good, it’s worse, it’s fucking insulting.

Remember that Terminator Salvation trailer when it came out? Wow, it didn’t live up to that entirely, but it wasn’t the worst movie ever made. This Genisys looks like the worst movie ever made. There are several stories they could have and should have told other than this garbage. The most obvious story which I believe everybody has been waiting to see since the first movie is what happens in 2029? What about the big future war? A giant epic futuristic robot war with all the imagery and all the big flying machines and the desperate attempt to save the past and the future? Nope. We get this shit.

I’ve been told that “everybody” hated Terminator Salvation. I didn’t. I didn’t think it was terrible, and while it wasn’t ‘great’ and could have been a lot better, it didn’t sink it for me. I liked the casting, I didn’t care for the Marcus storyline, but the rest was pretty decent in my opinion and I thought the effects and action were all pretty good. There was supposed to be three of those with Christian Bale, or at least three in a series that McG wanted to do. He could have improved… we’ll never know now, and now we’re getting something that looks so much like shit, it makes Terminator 3 seem like the quality of ALIENS. 

There’s so many better things they could have done with this, they could have made a sequel to Terminator Salvation and showed us the big future war. They could have given us the answer to the Sarah Connor Chronicles and tied the series, Salvation and the other films all together. They should have gotten the actors who played the people previously (any of them, there’s a lot to choose from for Christ sakes, every film is a whole new set of actors).  I would have even accepted a story about the creation of the T-1000, (this could easily have been the tie-in to the TV Series).  What was needed was for somebody to look at all these stories and attempt to tie them all in somehow, because everybody knows it’s off the rails now as far as continuity goes, and a few things could have been done to make things right. Nope. They decided to fucking change everything all over again. In the TV Series, they basically gave us “Terminator 3 has been superseded… Sarah Connor flew right through the timeline and it never happened.” Thanks for that, I’m good with that, but here we are again another fucking story about a teenager and a robot? Fuck this nonsense. 

The ending of Terminator Sarah Connor Chronicles left a few questions as well as a few good ideas, but also changed the whole Timeline again. There’s a good place to start if you’re going to do yet another fucking sequel/prequel. The fact is, as soon as you start to think about any of this none of it makes any fucking sense, and I’d be happy to treat it like the Old Planet of the Apes Franchise, which is about the same level of continuity and sense, but this shit is just getting so ridiculous it’s not even worth thinking about.  For me though, the constant cast changes just piss me off. I seriously doubt they even considered casting ANYONE that previously played Connor, Reese, or Sarah. This is clearly just an Arnold-is-back cashgrab gimmick. It’s that simple. The people who hated The Sarah Connor Chronicles can suck it now. The writers of that show gave the Terminator Franchise a lot of thought and tried to write some good stories, and the people who hated Terminator Salvation can also suck it now, because looking back at it, it really wasn’t as bad as Terminator 3, and though it focused too much on a character nobody cares about, it wasn’t Phantom Menace. Now we’re getting Phantom Menace, only no Ewan MacGregor to give us an acceptable Obiwan. No Christian Bale, just an old Arnold and likely a lot of stupid jokes about his age. This is going to suck miserably, think Terminator 3 only on a scale you previously didn’t think possible.

Personally I would think people would be pissed that Christian Bale isn’t back, and this has nothing to do with Terminator Salvation, because at least we saw a John Connor who kicked ass for once and didn’t sit there and pout. To be honest, I would have rather seen a movie starring Linda Hamilton as an old Sarah Connor (now that Terminator 3 has been excised—thanks Sarah Connor Chronicles) in the future with Christian Bale, and the other cast of SALVATION.  If you really want Arnold, do the Tron Legacy CGI. (They did it in SALVATION didn’t they, and they’re doing it again in this piece of crap). There’s no reason to have an old Terminator except for jokes. They could have had Linda Hamilton getting old, watching the world die, and having some sort of relationship with her 30 year old son before she dies. This could have started it all out, with the death of old Sarah. Or perhaps she doesn’t die, if Terminator 3 was non-existent, no cancer, no death.  

I would have even gone for a movie-sequel to the Sarah Connor Chronicles which would have been the storyline of how the T-1000/liquid terminators deviated from Skynet, evolved beyond Skynet and played a third party to the post-apocalyptic conflict, and nobody knew who John Connor was when Thomas Dekker jumped into the future to find his fembot. Sarah clearly could also make a jump after all the events we’ve seen up to that point, thus making her alive in the future to fight the war. Enough of this shit about sending Terminators back in time. Skynet must be stupid, all it needed to do was go back in time and either kill off the early descendants of the Connors before guns were even invented, or just kill off the human race by exterminating all prehistoric hominids or primates with Ebola or something. This is just getting ridiculous. Give us ‘the future,’ this is why we all had high hopes for Terminator Salvation. It was the future, no time-travel for once. Now we’re back to that stupid shit again. 

Once this movie comes out, I’m pretty sure I can’t watch this shit any more. Terminator was one of my favorite franchises. I even loved the TV Series, but this is beyond the pale. This shit they’re releasing looks so bad, it’s like a SyFy movie of the week piece of garbage written by hacks worse than Damon Lindelof. The End did Begin as Terminator Salvation said. The End Began of the franchise, and now the End Ends here. No other reboots could possibly be taken seriously after this shit. This is Batman Forever, this is Batman and Robin here. This is the worst possible avenue these idiots could have taken with this series. Time-travel doesn’t fix everything (sorry Lindelof), and they never should have gone down that road again. Ultimately, they might as well have made a Terminator film where Arnold gives birth to Sarah Connor, and then sends her back in time to kill himself.

        Perhaps they should have stopped after T2, perhaps they never should have gone forward with anything, and at this point, unless they're going to give us a really good story not inspired by Damon Lindelof, I think they really need to quit. People are still holding out for James Cameron, and a lot of people still want to see Arnold do the Terminator schtick again, but Arnold wasn't the center of it all.  If we're not getting Bale as Connor, or a continuation of anything we've seen before, nothing but 'reboot' after 'reboot' what is the damn point? Franchise: Terminated.

Big-Time Television Episode 1

Big Time Television: Hour One from Phil Sternwise on Vimeo.

The Cybertronica Obscura Blank Reg Big-Time Blank Bus Project

This is totally Big-Time.  We're going to take this show on the road. We're going to acquire this bus (well, not the original one of course--it probably no longer exists... if it does actually still exist, well, let me know!) we're going to paint it pink, and it will essentially serve as a 'replica' though it won't be easy to replicate the whole damn thing.

Anyways, we're going to get a "Big-Time" pink bus. We're going to go further than that, we're going to outfit it with old VCRs and technology, and we're going to drive it around the country and we're going to document the "Max Headroom" Culture we all find ourselves in. We're going to make videos on VHS camcorders, we're going to hand out videotapes, and we're going to have Alphabet Soup parties and events. We're going to meet off-grid people, you know, "Blanks" and we're going to hand out cans of Alphabetti, and we're going to interview Blanks, Retro-punks, Off-Gridders, retro-gear-heads, Max Headroom cast members (if we can find them), and who wouldn't do a interview when this bus pulls up?

We're going to hand off the videos we make to people who will put them on Youtube for the cyborgs, and we'll also do actual mailings to those who will be on the "Blanks" mailing list. You will send us a "Blank" (tape that is) and we'll ship you off our latest "tape." We'll offer alternative media to those cyborgs still glued to the internet and their laptops, such as a file on a DVD-R or something, but you will only be able to receive these "tapes" via the mail. Now here's the interesting part, we're going to have to try and do a lot of this without the luxury of all the instantaneosity of the ever-convenient and omniscient and omnipotent internet!  So once we get the bus painted and ready to go, we're taking it real. To the real world. If somebody wants to put one of our tapes on the internet, so be it, but we're not going to fuck around with all that internet shit once we're off!

We're also going to show people that "Blanks" are people too, and those without PAYPAL accounts, credit cards and Facebook pages are human, and are not evil mutants bent on the destruction of the 'free world.' We're going to be a force of good in this world, and it will all operate out of the "Big-Time" Bus which will go on tour... to events, to the Fringes, to your own house!

If you want to help, or be a part of this magnificent and crazy idea, contact us.  This is gonna be "Big Time!"  More to come....

The Clones (1973)

The Clones (1973) is directed by Paul Hunt (Director of Psychedelics (1966) and another guy, Lamar Card who would go on to make Shadow Warriors (1995).

Now, with that said, the people who made this film are insane. This movie is totally insane. What do I mean by "insane?" Well, I mean that this film is so off the hinges that I'm thinking that Paul Hunt was so hopped up on LSD that Lamar Card was called in to try to make sense of what the hell he was doing and finished the movie. (This is pure speculation on my part of course.)

This, however, doesn't mean you should avoid this movie, as a matter of fact this may be one of the best "worst" movies, one of the best "so-bad-it's-good" films I've ever watched.  As a matter of fact this movie is probably best watched under the influence of illicit substances, but I believe a bunch of alcohol will also do the trick. (Watch it with a friend too).

The premise of clones, cloning and conspiracies pretty much takes a back seat to the utter insanity going on in this film, so don't expect to see a movie which is attempting to have a serious take on these science fiction ideas.

The film begins with the weirdest title sequence I've seen, and I believe the editor was on LSD as well for the entire making of this film. The main character is a guy in a lab coat and a bow tie, and he appears to be pressing buttons, flipping switches in some sort of boiler room dressed up to "look" like some kind of "fusion reactor" (?) control room, and some sort of noises occur, some smoke, an alarm (?) and this guy appears to be trying to escape what seems like could be some sort of accident, but who the hell knows. He runs through these tunnels for awhile and then climbs up out of this underground base into the woods and trips and lands on his head...

Now, I can't go into spoilers for the rest because it is far too valuable for you to see it for yourself and experience for yourself (with friends of course) for the rest of this movie had me laughing and screaming "what in the fuck is happening!!!!"  This movie proceeds to go into territory that is either pure 70s psychedelia, or complete batshit insanity and don't bother trying to understand from any rational moviegoing point of view what should or shouldn't happen next. Forget trying to follow the plot and just watch what the fuck happens. It's truly amazing. There are so many things I want to tell you, but I just can't spoil it, you literally have to experience it for yourself.

This film had me falling off my chair, and not simply rolling my eyes (that would be reserved for a film to attempt to take seriously) but making my eyes bug out and say "why why why is this happening on screen!!! Oh my god, is that what I think it is!"). These people who made this must have been so drugged out that this could very well be the most bizarre and insane movie I've ever seen in my life.  There's plenty of action, violence, funny violence, inexplicable dialog, helicopters, planes, car chases and other crazy shit in spite of it's terribly low budget to continue to entertain you for it's running time, and it's all mad. Mad. Mad. Mad.

If you want to have a good time watching a really bad movie, this is truly worth every minute of your time. You may try to figure out what's going on, by all means, please do, but trying to figure out wherever these people were coming from completely takes over. How crazy are these people? This is worse than Easy Rider. This is completely insane.