terminator

Chris Knight's avatar

It was forty years ago today, October 26th 1984, that James Cameron’s science-fiction thriller (I’d also consider it horror) The Terminator was released.

Cameron was sick with food poisoning in Rome.  While convulsing in agony he had a fevered dream of a robot assassin with glowing red eyes hunting him down.  And that was the genesis of the Terminator.

This is a movie that has aged very well.  Including the design of the Terminator and the then-relatively distant future of the SkyNet-dominated 2029.  Ask a conceptual artist on a modern film to create an endoskeleton for a cyborg killing machine and it would be difficult not to envision something along the lines of the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 Hunter-Killer.

I first saw The Terminator in 1986.  My best friend Chad had seen it on cable TV and was really raving about how good it was.  So I was able to ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

This was filmed, people! This was soooooo filmed!

What. The. Hell. Were. They. Thinking. ?!?

GeekTyrant posted this yesterday. It’s a scene from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines that was edited out of the final film. And had this been included in the movie, I could almost see how Terminator Salvation would have been better for it, because it proves that the Terminator saga’s timeline incongruities were being actively addressed. I like how it’s explicitly stated that the Skynet technology originated with Cyberdyne, and the reason why all the T-800 Terminators look like Arnold Schwarzenegger and even have identical voices (as weird as that was).

But I swear: I literally fell out of my chair when the clip gets to U.S. Army Chief Master Sergeant William Candy.

Nothing I can say could possibly prepare you for this, friends and neighbors…

“OOH… it’s ME!!”...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Please don’t.

I just got back from the midnight premiere of it. And right now I’m weighing whether or not I should take the time to write a full review of the movie.

So far as I’m concerned the Terminator story ended with Terminator 2: Judgment Day: one of the most perfect sequel movies of all time. Neither of the last two alleged installments have added anything of merit to the saga. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was pretty bad and Terminator Salvation stinks on ice. Just about everything about it is wrong, with the exception of Anton Yelchin as the young Kyle Reese and he’s channeling Michael Biehn from the original The Terminator about as well as Karl Urban did DeForrest Kelley in Star Trek.

And speaking of Star Trek: if you haven’t seen it yet and were planning on catching Terminator Salvation this weekend, ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Couple of items that I found in the news today, that juxtaposed together make for a rather disturbing scenario…

First, the Pentagon wants 20,000 soldiers deployed inside the United States by 2011 to complement local law enforcement agencies. A move that from what I’m reading comes perilously close to blatantly violating the Posse Comitatus Act.

And as if that isn’t bad enough, the Pentagon is also working with a British scientist to create robot soldiers that will be deployed without risk of “committing war crimes”.

So logically, it can be deduced that in the near future there is an outstanding possibility that robot soldiers – armed with lethal firepower – will be active on the streets of your hometown.

This blog has already discussed reasons why this might not be such a hot idea. Gotta wonder if the first robotosoldier that goes nuts and kills a pregnant woman will ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

From The Register comes more evidence that giving a gun to a robot is a very, very bad idea…

US war robots in Iraq ‘turned guns’ on fleshy comrades
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Kill-droid rebellion thwarted… this time

By Lewis Page
Published Friday 11th April 2008 10:10 GMT

Ground-crawling US war robots armed with machine guns, deployed to fight in Iraq last year, reportedly turned on their fleshy masters almost at once. The rebellious machine warriors have been retired from combat pending upgrades.

The revelations were made by Kevin Fahey, US Army program executive officer for ground forces, at the recent RoboBusiness conference in America.

Speaking to Popular Mechanics, Fahey said there had been chilling incidents in which the SWORDS* combat bot had swivelled round and apparently attempted to train its 5.56mm M249 light machine-gun on its human comrades.

“The gun started moving when it was not intended to move,” he said.

Apparently,

...
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Chris Knight's avatar

This does not need to happen. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines did not need to happen either (although I will admit there were some pretty good sequences in that movie). For me, the Terminator story neatly tied itself up at the end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But I guess Hollywood is running on fumes so far as new ideas for movies go, hence this whole new “Terminator trilogy” that will almost certainly tank at the box office....

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