The Terminator Franchise

I miss the days when toy companies tacitly admitted parents were letting their young children watch basically anything

My greatest charity shop find

First episode was okay.

Ooooh I just checked out the reviews, I’ll start this tonight. Sounds very promising.

No, just the guy, sadly

The Terminator - 40th Anniversary Re-release

The lights go down and up pops James Cameron on screen, saying he's glad to have his first film (still ignoring Piranha II then Jim) back in the cinema after 40 years, it was remastered by his team (alarm bells) and he even went to go into the detail on what film he used to allow them to shoot in darkish conditions and how it was a product of its time but the 4K version is as close as you could get to how it was on the negative.

Anyway the film and the biggest change to the titles, MGM (an Amazon Company) pops up before the sadly missed Orion Pictures.

The film, well it's the same film obviously but lets get to the main reason anyone is reading this nonsense, how does it look? Seeing it on the big screen is almost certainly going to be different from anyone watching the UHD but I thought it looked very good, there's a lot of detail that almost certainly wasn't visible before and it doesn't seem to suffer from the AI turning people into melted dolls in the background that some of the other Jimbo remasters have. Possibly helped by everything is pretty much shot fairly close, nothing is really off into the distance too much even during the car chases. I feared the smokey atmosphere of TechNoir may have got de-noised but it was not.

There is one weird moment though, when Reese is having his flashback to attacking the tracked HK with a female soldier there's a clip where they're running in the foreground and it's in the background that looks like they kinda forgot to do anything to it, it stuck out as being at VHS like quality. Everything else in the future looked fine, although the the flying HK shot still looks terrible in how poorly the movement is done and they use that shot twice!

So I left the cinema very happy with what I saw, there's no new effects or changes it is purely a cleaned up version and the sound is probably better too. Brad Fiedel's main theme does sound great in the cinema.

Sorry if I’ve missed it - where are you watching this? (My living room ha ha ha!)

I watched the first two episodes. It's not too bad. I'm not sure it's done anything different so far over the films. I'll continue on.

I finished Terminator Zero the other night. It kind of dipped again after the mid-way point and my enthusiasm waned. By the end I was pretty much ready for it to end. Overall it's decent enough but a bit too "anime" for my liking. There's stuff in there I liked, stuff in there I hated. It's not the worst thing to emerge from the franchise but it's not the best. A sterling recommendation, I know.

I really must try it, since Future Shock & Skynet are up there with Jedi Knight and Doom/Quake as my all time favourite FPS games.

The warnings of jank aren't too much of an issue, as I'm pretty tolerant of that kind of thing if the game grabs me. It's more just an issue of free time, and system requirements, and me waiting til the price dropped because I'm used to spending $3 a game these days.

I’ve got about 5 episodes into Zero and it’s ok. The kids are unnecessary, but I’ll probably finish it.

Can everyone please stop saying KOKORO every 30 seconds though.

You could say the same for any 80s franchise to be fair. Diminishing returns for all of them.

Terminator feels the one that is trying to ice-skate uphill the most.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is easily the best Terminator thing since T2, cancelling it on that cliff hanger was fucking criminal.