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OneThousandMonkeys posted:SMG makes contrarian contemporary Marxist readings of films, it's really that simple and if this thread could be about anything else in addition to what he thinks that would be cool too. Yeah my bad for engaging him. Even though I know he is either mentally disturbed or the Ur-Troll, it is really hard not to call him out when he says some of the more patently retarded stuff that he does. So.. uh... how about that Terminator 3?
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Dec 9, 2014 03:25
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Caros posted:Opposition to militarisim, or even to the military industrial complex, is not by definition opposition to capitalism. Anarcho-Capitalists for example love them some capitalism while simultaneously hating the military. Anarcho-capitalists are in theory revolutionaries against capitalism as a practice in the cause of capitalism as a faith (or ideology if we are feeling evenhanded). In practice they are pretty complacent and easily bought off by the military-industrial complex via cool toys. E: To clarify. the real capitalism is inextricable from the military-industrial complex, which would only grow more powerful in Libertopia. That's basically the story of how capitalism has played out in post-Soviet Russia, although I guess ideally it would fracture into competing DROs. Or as the rest of us call them, "warlords." Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Dec 9, 2014 |
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Dec 9, 2014 03:26
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Terminator is fictional. Of course, everyone knows this - but it's nonetheless difficult to accept.
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Dec 9, 2014 03:28
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Do a libertarian reading of the films. All of them. Fake edit: I mean SMG and/or Caros and/or someone who is bored and has seen them way more times than I have.
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Dec 9, 2014 03:35
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Hodgepodge posted:Anarcho-capitalists are in theory revolutionaries against capitalism as a practice in the cause of capitalism as a faith (or ideology if we are feeling evenhanded). In practice they are pretty complacent and easily bought off by the military-industrial complex via cool toys. Well, yes and no. Libertarians believe that there wouldn't be and MIC if there wasn't a state, there would be as you say, a ton of DRO's such as DRO Vahalla with their drugged up child soldiers. Ancaps were just the first example of someone who likes capitalism but hates the MIC that came to mind. quote:Do a libertarian reading of the films. All of them. I don't even have an idea of where I'd start with that. I might actually do a review of Terminator Salvation though, because I hate that movie so much.
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Dec 9, 2014 03:36
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Caros posted:Well, yes and no. Libertarians believe that there wouldn't be and MIC if there wasn't a state, there would be as you say, a ton of DRO's such as DRO Vahalla with their drugged up child soldiers. Ancaps were just the first example of someone who likes capitalism but hates the MIC that came to mind. Let me put my point this way: the ancaps hate the MIC so much they want to put it in charge of everything. quote:I don't even have an idea of where I'd start with that. I might actually do a review of Terminator Salvation though, because I hate that movie so much. So long as you let the hate flow through you, I'm fine with whatever.
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Dec 9, 2014 03:41
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Caros posted:Yeah my bad for engaging him. Even though I know he is either mentally disturbed or the Ur-Troll, it is really hard not to call him out when he says some of the more patently retarded stuff that he does. It wouldn't be so bad, but some people are under the sad delusion that his posts are a valuable and welcome alternative to sane threads, and thus encourage him.
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Dec 9, 2014 04:00
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"loving men like you built the hydrogen bomb. Men like you thought it up. You think you're so creative. You don't know what it's like to really create something; to create a life; to feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death and destruction..." Nope no political message here.
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Dec 9, 2014 04:05
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Lurdiak posted:It wouldn't be so bad, but some people are under the sad delusion that his posts are a valuable and welcome alternative to sane threads, and thus encourage him. He quotes Francis E. Dec, what do you contribute?
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Dec 9, 2014 04:10
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Oh, he's one of the best posters on the forums. People just get pissed off because he comes off as pretentious, but you don't need to understand anything I didn't pick up in Grade 12 Lit and English to follow him. The best way to explain him though, is this: he often says that everything he says about this or that film is true, and this is absolutely correct. Well, to the best of his ability, anyhow. Of course, always telling the truth isn't the same thing as being right. Basically, imagine how Coyote would post on CineD. Well Coyote would have an avatar of himself, but it's not a perfect analogy. The more direct way is to ask yourself what the standards of truth are for literary and cinematic criticism. Not the abstruse theorems, the basic ideas you get even in 100 level classes in any interpretive subject. Oh and then add Marxism to everything, but what isn't fun about that?
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Dec 9, 2014 04:11
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I don't understand getting mad at SMG. He presents some interesting food for thought and interpretation. The problem isn't him, it's getting riled up. I find a lot of it funny. Movies can be art. Are you gonna get pissed if someone looking at a painting goes "Van Gough must be depressed. There's blue in so much of his work during this stretch of work." and come back "You're loving retarded. It's blue cause the loving sky and ocean and shirt and the man is blue and nothing to do with anything else. Van Gough was hardcore, man, emotionless manly man." It's film and a piece of work that can be examined for food for thought. I dunno if its just the sci fi or comic book nerd threads that get up in arms and having to defend their beloved franchises.
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Dec 9, 2014 04:25
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What interests me is that fans will attempt to defend the franchise by saying, in this case, that the robots represent robots and it doesn't mean anything. It seems like fans don't actually like fiction. And this is fiction.
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Dec 9, 2014 04:34
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Once you accept in your heart that terminators do not actually exist, you can appreciate the films more - including the very good sequel Terminator Salvation. This is beyond any level of autism.
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Dec 9, 2014 04:34
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I like the Terminator franchise. Like, a lot. You guys know me as the uber-nerd when it comes to Aliens/Predator stuff, but I'm almost equally as much of a nerd when it comes to Terminator stuff. I've got next to no standards, and can find genuine enjoyment in just about anything Terminator related. I really need to re-watch T3 and Salvation, it's been years since I watched them. I liked them both for the things they did right, even if they both felt really flawed (T3 less so than Salvation) and couldn't hold a candle to the first two. I'm halfway optimistic about this new one. loving with the timeline and "rebooting" stuff similar to the Star Trek reboot is a halfway novel idea given the whole time travel concept, and it's an interesting reversal where Kyle Reese is the clueless audience surrogate this time around, whereas it was Sarah Connor in the original. Full disclosure: I was the moderator on the official Terminator3.com forums way back in the day. If any of you frequented that forum and remember the moderator, that was me. It was actually a pretty entertaining gig, all things considered, and at the end of it the studio sent me two stupidly-gigantic hanging posters made of fabric that were meant to be suspended from the very tall ceiling of appropriate movie theatre lobbies. I still have them in a box, and I can't actually hang them up because they're literally taller than my house. There's a lot of wacky and interesting Terminator poo poo out there, mostly comic books and occasionally novels. Did you know there's two novelizations of 'The Terminator'? There's the better-known one by Randall Frakes, who is a personal friend of James Cameron (and who later novelized T2), but there's a lesser-known one by Shaun Hutson, who was originally contracted to write the novelization. Hutson wrote his, then Cameron decided he'd rather have his friend write it, and tried to get all copies of the Hutson version recalled as Frakes published his version. It didn't really work out - the Hutson version is less common, but I got myself a copy fairly easily. It's been several years since I read either, but I remember them reading pretty differently - I recall the Hutson one being much gorier and darker in tone. As I recall, the T2 novelization opens with John sending Kyle back in time, and points out that the time machine is very literally time displacement equipment - when they send Kyle back, that "sphere" he arrives in literally "swaps time" with wherever his destination was, and John knows the time machine worked because fragments of a newspaper from 1984 get transported back to where Kyle had just been standing in 2029. There's a lot of interesting comics that don't feature John, Sarah, or Arnold in any capacity. Dark Horse did a whole string of story arcs starting with a parallel mission sent back to 1984 to assassinate/protect Sarah Connor, which gets derailed from its main objective early on and goes in some interesting directions. There was a series by Malibu Comics in the mid-90s based on James Cameron's original planned opening scenes for T2, chronicling the Resistance breaching Skynet, sending Kyle back in time, and then sending the reprogrammed T-800 back in time. The gist of it was that Skynet sent both the "Terminator 1" T-800 and the T-1000 back in time back to back, and then the Resistance breached the facility and captured the time machine. Kyle volunteers and John sends him back without telling him about the reprogrammed T-800, because he needs Kyle to believe he's the last hope for protecting humanity's savior so that he's at the top of his game when protecting Sarah. The Terminator franchise is a legal clusterfuck because James Cameron sold the rights to it before 'The Terminator' was even made - it's how he financed the movie's production. Certain details of the franchise have been retained by certain owners, while others have been sold or passed around. The term "T-800", "endoskeleton", and the actual classic design of the endoskeleton from the first movie is actually owned by a specific group (Canal+, if I remember right), so any time anyone wants to use them, they have to license it from them - that's why the Terminators in T3 were "T-850s" (and they're technically cosmetically different from old-school T-800s, albeit slightly). It's also why the ones in the TV series were "T-888s" (and were also cosmetically different). Likewise, the term "T-1000" is owned by someone different. Salvation did license the T-800 likeness and name, and a handful of comics and videogames have done so as well. Incidentally there's only one T-800 in Salvation, all of the grey, sort of mottled ones on the production line near the end of the movie were in the script and production notes as T-700s. Speaking of Salvation, a comic series continuing from that movie has been coming out for the past year or so. I haven't read it yet, but volume 1 just shipped from Amazon and I'll be getting my copy tomorrow. One discarded Future War robot from T2 that I hope at least cameos in the new movie is the Centurion:  That's concept art drawn by James Cameron. It was supposed to show up in the opening future war battle, but got dropped for budget reasons. Since then it's cameoed in a few of the comics, a few of the video games, and even in the viral marketing for the Sarah Connor TV series.
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Dec 9, 2014 04:40
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Vaall posted:This is beyond any level of autism. Actually, I consulted a Buzzfeed questionnaire and it turns out my posts are caused by Postpartum Depression. Also the Harry Potter character I am is Hermione.
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Dec 9, 2014 04:43
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I hope the climax of Terminator Genysis involves the Protoss vs the Terminators. Then again, maybe we could get a found footage horror film set in the Terminator universe future war. Like monstrous, nightmarish technology hunting humans down filmed in that way.
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Dec 9, 2014 04:46
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Gatts posted:I dunno if its just the sci fi or comic book nerd threads that get up in arms and having to defend their beloved franchises. Ding ding.
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Dec 9, 2014 04:56
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Gatts posted:I hope the climax of Terminator Genysis involves the Protoss vs the Terminators. There's like, a Terminator 1 only EU that has awesome content to draw upon for this. Like the much messier and primitive models of the T-800 and inhumanoid robots that exist just to like scap and skin humans for tissue samples and stuff, these metal plated, snake like robots that would slither around and then sit still in some rubble collecting data, and of course the actual concentration camps where the humans do menial tasks and are then incinerated that Reese talks about in T1, etc. I remember one of the Terminator PC games, Future Shock, game is legit amazing. It has a few missions where you have to get information/find out stuff about the camps, eventually you storm a camp and go in to the cell to rescue you friends but they're just charred skeletons when you get there. The explorable rooms were like that too throughout LA itself. Impressively somber game given that it came out after the more action oriented T2 movie, RoboCop vs. Terminator was already at thing, etc. A pain to get working now but maybe worth checking out a let's play of it.
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Dec 9, 2014 04:59
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SMG does a nice job of attacking the argument when someone disagrees with him, vs. attacking the person disagreeing with him. Most people seem to take his assertions a little too personally.
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Dec 9, 2014 05:21
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Xenomrph posted:Speaking of Salvation, a comic series continuing from that movie has been coming out for the past year or so. I haven't read it yet, but volume 1 just shipped from Amazon and I'll be getting my copy tomorrow. The one I liked was the little rolling trilobite/cockroach "cruise missile" that would drive through the rubble and seek out human positions to explode. It showed up in the T2 shooter game, at least.
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Dec 9, 2014 05:27
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Young Freud posted:The one I liked was the little rolling trilobite/cockroach "cruise missile" that would drive through the rubble and seek out human positions to explode. It showed up in the T2 shooter game, at least. These are cool, they first appeared in a novelization of T1 I believe.
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Dec 9, 2014 05:34
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Young Freud posted:the T2 shooter game, at least. Oh man that game was sweet, I forgot all about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ0Nfan4MHk
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Dec 9, 2014 05:37
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef_dv29apUo&t=252s Offtopic, just any time anything cool is in a game SNK/Taito/Data East/Sega did a couple of years earlier.  But man that T2 game is so good, I spent so much money on it.
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Dec 9, 2014 05:44
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Ross posted:SMG does a nice job of attacking the argument when someone disagrees with him, vs. attacking the person disagreeing with him. This is a really dumb post.
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Dec 9, 2014 05:48
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Gatts posted:I don't understand getting mad at SMG. He presents some interesting food for thought and interpretation. See what I mean? Gatts posted:I dunno if its just the sci fi or comic book nerd threads that get up in arms and having to defend their beloved franchises. Ah yes, that old strawman. Derailing entire threads with gobbledygook is unwelcome whether we're discussing something we like, dislike, or feel no attachment to. Head on over to the absolutely ruined Star Wars thread to see SMG and others defending the prequels and implying people who dislike them don't actually like Star Wars. Who is defending what here? Lurdiak fucked around with this message at 06:03 on Dec 9, 2014 |
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Dec 9, 2014 06:00
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I don't know. It's like when people complain that TSCC had 'too much religious symbolism' but don't mention the swathes of it in T1 and T2. Terminator films are incredibly political and you can always just - I don't know - not respond to SMG's posts?
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Dec 9, 2014 06:06
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Lurdiak posted:
"My circle jerk is ruined! Absolutely ruined!  "
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Dec 9, 2014 06:08
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Lurdiak posted:See what I mean? Dude just put him on ignore like I did like a year ago who gives a gently caress.  I know it's not a total solution since people quote his posts verbatim but who cares?
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Dec 9, 2014 06:25
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Vaall posted:This is a really dumb post. I'm not sure if you were being serious but I apologize if my words have inadvertently upset you.
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Dec 9, 2014 06:26
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Oh no, people are thinking in my movie forum? Unacceptable. There should be a movie about SMG. Terminator SiMGyn?
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Dec 9, 2014 07:28
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Gatts posted:I hope the climax of Terminator Genysis involves the Protoss vs the Terminators. Young Freud posted:The one I liked was the little rolling trilobite/cockroach "cruise missile" that would drive through the rubble and seek out human positions to explode. It showed up in the T2 shooter game, at least.  (again, concept art by James Cameron).
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Dec 9, 2014 08:47
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I don't understand why anyone ever gets mad at SMG. He is by far the most entertaining poster at SA.Xenomrph posted:The Terminator franchise is a legal clusterfuck because James Cameron sold the rights to it before 'The Terminator' was even made - it's how he financed the movie's production. Certain details of the franchise have been retained by certain owners, while others have been sold or passed around. The term "T-800", "endoskeleton", and the actual classic design of the endoskeleton from the first movie is actually owned by a specific group (Canal+, if I remember right), so any time anyone wants to use them, they have to license it from them - that's why the Terminators in T3 were "T-850s" (and they're technically cosmetically different from old-school T-800s, albeit slightly). It's also why the ones in the TV series were "T-888s" (and were also cosmetically different). Likewise, the term "T-1000" is owned by someone different. Lots of Hollywood legal rights situations are weird, but the Terminator franchise is truly something else. I remember that, about a year after Salvation opened, some company announced plans to make an animated Terminator movie, claiming that they had obtained the animated movie rights many years ago, I believe before T2 had even been made. Apparently this was disputed and even led to threats of legal action by either Halcyon or Pacificor; I can't remember which of them owned the rights at that point. I don't know if anything more ever came of that. Also, at one point during Halcyon's bankruptcy, some media outlets reported that there was a possibility that the Terminator rights could have ended up being split up among everyone that Halcyon owed money to, which as I've already talked about was a lot of people, and would have effectively killed the franchise. And finally, the rights are going to revert to the ownership of James Cameron in 2019 anyway, and he's repeatedly stated that he has no further interest in the franchise, so who knows what he'll do with them at that point. As such, don't expect this madness to end even if the new movie is a success.
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Dec 9, 2014 09:21
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He should find out how to release the Terminator intellectual property to the public domain just to see how Harlan Ellison would react.
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Dec 9, 2014 09:24
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INH5 posted:I don't understand why anyone ever gets mad at SMG. He is by far the most entertaining poster at SA.
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Dec 9, 2014 09:35
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So anyways, as I was saying, the 'time travel' in Terminator is really this idea that the future is inherent in the present. As in The Matrix, you shift perspectives from one to the other. It's '1999' and '2199' simultaneously. Kyle Reese looks at construction equipment and sees drone tanks mowing us all down. Every telephone and walkman represents the the reduction of men to thoughtless cyborgs. Sarah can look at some druggie bodybuilder and see a ghoulish monster, as in They Live.... These three films (Terminator, Matrix, They Live) use time travel, simulation, and brainwashing to all represent the same thing: the ability of some people to shift perspectives and see the mechanisms 'underneath' everyday reality. And the consequences thereof. So we can read Terminator 1 as Sarah's realization that she's living in a simulated world that is unwittingly serving the machines. All around her, there's pro-Skynet propaganda. The only real difference between this time-travel stuff and the literally fake worlds of the other films is that nobody in Terminator is doing it 'intentionally'. There's no conspiracy to dupe the masses because the enemy is, rightly, identified as a system. This is why Skynet doesn't send a robot back to Precambrian times, to stifle the Cambrian Explosion and begin construction of its new facilities. The present, as a reference point, is absolutely vital because it's the point where Sarah can make a new fate for herself. Because the time machine operates according to this story logic, it can only send machines to the present day. The point of Terminator Salvation is that, by 2009, the gap between present and future has totally collapsed. There is, essentially, no future - which is why the plot concerns John Connor reaching the limits of his foreknowledge and not knowing how to proceed.
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Dec 9, 2014 10:44
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Neo Rasa posted:Dude just put him on ignore like I did like a year ago who gives a gently caress. Yeah, yeah, I just wish people would admit he's a terrible poster.
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Dec 9, 2014 11:05
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I am the ultimate killing machine.
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Dec 9, 2014 11:06
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Lurdiak posted:Yeah, yeah, I just wish people would admit he's a terrible poster. I will grant your wish.
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Dec 9, 2014 11:32
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Lurdiak posted:See what I mean? The Star Wars thread hasn't been ruined. Who cares if SMG says you don't really like Star Wars? Just tell him he's wrong and move on. He's not even insulting you, really. He's just making an argument about what Star Wars "is", which you happen to disagree with. He's not ruining this thread, either. He's not even saying anything that weird. Like, really? You guys don't think the Terminator movies have anything to say about capitalism? SMG is right that it's dumb to argue about time travel mechanics in the Terminator movies, because that's not the point. I was doing it anyway, because I'm kind of dumb and I think that stuff's amusing, but still. The nonsensical time travel mechanics were contrived in order to be able to tell a specific story. It's perfectly acceptable to ask why that story was told. One one level, it's because killer robots are cool and scary. But there's a reason human beings think killer robots are cool and scary. There's a reason a future dominated by sentient machines is horrifying to us. There's even a reason people like to argue about time travel mechanics. We're human beings. There's a reason we do things, even when we think there isn't. Maybe James Cameron thought he was just making a scary movie about a killer robot. It doesn't matter if that's what he thought, because it's more complicated than that, whether he'd (hypothetically) like to admit it or not.
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Dec 9, 2014 14:12
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What SMG is actually saying is totally appropriate for this thread, that's not the problem. The problem is a few people were having a light-hearted discussion about time-travel, and having a good time with it. SMG popped in to basically say "your conversation is stupid, here's what you really need to be talking about." It came off as pretentious and judgmental. These days I find myself agreeing with the content of SMG's posts more often than not, but he doesn't always have the best timing.
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Dec 9, 2014 15:08
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