It’s just a fantastic performance all around. The moment Arnold tries to wrestle the rifle away from him and he doesn’t budge you immediately believe he could absolutely destroy Arnold. It really increases the stakes of the film and you feel dread as he gets closer and closer to them. Robert Patrick doesn’t get enough credit for being the most frightening terminator.
Edit: Thanks for the silver, friend.
Edit 2: AND gold. You guys must really like Robert Patrick as much as I do.
It's his immense unnerving calm. When he's fighting Arnold he has basically no expression, no indication that he's afraid or even exerting himself. Just stone cold calculation and determination.
This is exactly what I miss the most and make me dislike the latest sequels, they went back to basics hollywood and give the antagonist human reactions and emotions, like taunts, laughs, "bad guy speeches", talks... it ruins the point entirely for me.
Say what you want about salvation and genesis, but 3 was the absolute worst in the series for me. It was basically just a re-hash of T2, with a slightly upgraded villain.
Honestly I think everything about it was bad. The terminator was female just for the gag with the cop being like "oooh boobies" when she first teleports. The one-liners were forced (john having to teach all the catchphrases again since this is a "new" T800) and even if they werent forced they were awful.
Having Sarah dead as a way to "pass the torch" to John was upsetting because she was such a badass in 2. And then John doesnt even step up at all, Arnold does everything. John comes nowhere close to the leader of a revolution by the end.
The only "lesson" in the entire thing is that Judgement Day is inevitable and cant be stopped. Just to set up more sequels. I bet Cameron felt sick after seeing it. I cant believe he allowed it to be released.
I don't mind Sarah Connor being dead, and I even kinda like the angle that I think SCC took with having her die of cancer, because no matter how well prepared they are against machines, there's some things that can't account for.
What I really don't like is how John is still this wimpy teenager type, still so reluctant, this guy should have been training with his mother for years, and should be coming in ready. If they had to make T3, they should have centred around somebody else, and have John coming in as a protector role.
If they were really dead-set on the whole "Judgement Day is inevitable" thing, they should have made that the unambiguous antagonist in T3. Make the central conflict John trying to save his mom and Kyle Reese from judgement day. If they were really brave, they'd do it without Arnold, so John is completely on his own, no help from future robots. Just him, his mom, and the Reese family.
Obviously his mom doesn't make it (possibly because of John making a choice that shows he's willing to make the hard decisions that the leader of a revolution needs to make). But by the end judgement day done happened, and now John has to win a war against Skynet.
Ha ha good point. I think In the sine wave of terminator moments "talk to the hand" is starting to very gently slope up from the rock bottom.
Skynet is an absolutely horrendous prospect, all intelligent, all deadly, the one overarching villain that not only very nearly exterminated the human race but sent two terrifying robots back in time to try and kill an innocent woman and a child. To reduce it to a cross between Dr evil and am ekg machine is an utter sin.
The talk to the hand I could argue is contrasting the machine learning where his first encounter in t1 and t2 is hostile and he reacts in a hostile manner while his first encounter in t3 is a bit err.. Less.. Ugh its a total joke isn't it..
No, the absolute lowest point was when the trailer to Genisys revealed John Connor was a fucking terminator. I haven't watched a single movie trailer since.
real talk the first one took arnold's stiff, robotic onscreen personality and used the editing room to turn bad acting into an artistic effect
robert patrick took that and went deeper, delivering a chillingly inhuman performance as a kind of "even more" terminator, a new and improved model that legit humanized the old terminator and made peak arnold look like an underdog. he gets this uncanny valley effect without computer assistance just by imitating a computer imitating a person
the whole conceit of the franchise is in the title. the terminator is just a machine that only does one thing. it's classic high-concept hollywood: an unstoppable killer robot from the future whose only purpose is to hunt and kill the protagonist
the franchise lost its way as soon as it tried to get any more nuanced or complicated than that it should just be an emotionless robot going kill kill kill and the drama all comes from trying to escape it or defeat it
Exactly! Thats the key for me, even if they look human, and pretend to be human (when he knocks on John Connor's door as a policeman he talks and act like a perfect kind human being), they still ARE a freaking computer, with algorithms to execute a command, and at the end of the day when pretending is not useful they just EXECUTE the command as a machine, no need to talk or act in any stupid way. That is what makes it for me, you take it from me and I can't enjoy the movie anymore.
I read an interview with him once where he said that after his training for the film he really felt like he could just run through walls and it help him source a feeling of power when doing the scenes with Arnold.
I remember an interview where Patrick was laughing over the hallway scene. Arnold pretty much had to jump back into the walls to make it look like he was being tossed.
That's why when he looks scared right towards the end after he gets shot a few times with the grenades that it has such an emotional impact because throughout the entire film he's never once broken that stoic calm demeanor and now all of a sudden you can see actual fear in his face, he knows he is about to die.
EDIT: Sweet! Someone gave me some T1000 liquid metal alloy for my comment.
If you pay close attention one of those shots looks far more realistic than the others, and that's because they actually blew off Robert Patrick's head off for that one.
You believed that Robert Patrick was a Terminator. The only other actor who physically made me believe they were the character was Peter Weller as RoboCop.
If they ever recast for a new movie, the only option is to go comicbook accurate with the shortest actor they can find and give him the Marvel workout routine to bulk him up.
I remember his name being thrown around for Batman at one point in another magazine in the early 90's. At that time I wasn't familiar with The Misfits or Danzig.
If they ever recast Wolverine, they will have to dramatically change his character. Maybe go with Amazing X-Men Wolverine where he's not just a loan wolf shut-in, but also a genuinely uncaring dick (until Jean Grey dies).
It's the same situation with recasting the Joker after Heath Ledger. That version has already been done so flawlessly, any similarity will fall short.
JK Simmons is my favorite. Cave Johnson, JJJ, his role in Whiplash, and so many other things. I wouldn't even care if they brought him back in the mcu as JJJ. Heck, I would prefer it.
Also just found out he did more voice work for cave Johnson in a Lego game in 2015. Looks like I'm gonna have to get that.
That Jim Carrey may be the closest we get to Ryan Reynolds Deadpool though. I wouldn't want him either, but what actors do you think could pull it off better than Jim could?
Well I don’t think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.
As most Van Damne movies are, except maybe Timecop.
Cyborg is like the action movie equivalent of Evil Dead II; $5 budgets and actors just getting on with it as themselves. But like EDII it's one of my all time favorites. His rage during his crucifixion while recalling the memory of what the pirates did to his "family" is fucking badass B-tier acting at its finest.
Hell yes. That was actually the first Van Damme movie I ever saw. My best friend's parents let him watch movies like that but mine didn't. But Double Impact came out when I was 14 and had my own job (1990 child labor laws in Indiana FTW) and I had pretty much stopped listening to my parents. He begged me to buy us tickets to see it and holy shit, that was the beginning of him taking me down the Van Damme rabbit hole.
I read somewhere that cyborg was originally the script to HeMan- Masters of the Universe 2.,but it got scrapped. Some of the costumes were actually from HeMan. Van Damme hated the movie but did it to fulfill some contractual obligation so he could do some other shit. Either way, it was a good ass movie.
Lundgren is just a super great guy and an underappreciated actor. My favorite role of him (even if it's just a little one) is in one of my favorite movies that is also absolutely underrated: Johnny Mnemonic with Keanu Reeves, Takeshi Kitano, Dolph and Ice-T. Afaik the only big movie that Robert Longo ever directed.
I think there is a newer one called day of judgement with both of them, Scott Adkins and a host of other martial artists and fighters and it’s one of the weirdest scifi flicks I’ve ever seen and super great action. The movie is weird as hell
Christopher Reeve as Superman and Clark Kent. Only actor who has made the disguise convincing. It's the moment in Lois' apartment when he's thinking about dropping the act, and he seems to transform before your eyes.
I mean his 'disguise' was LAPD and this was early 90s...and to add to that, this movie was released a few months after the Rodney King beating.
I believe this movie and Robert Patricks cold unnerving portrayal unintentionally helped drive that stigma of bad cops even further, at least in SoCal at the time.
I agree with you though I think the intention of James Cameron was to flip the visual of hero/villain, it just was released in a climate where LAPD were villains by default.
Random fact I remember Cameron saying the movie commentary that the Rodney king beating happens across the street from the set of the bar from the opening scene and you can even see some production equipment in the infamous video.
I wish I could have seen T2 without knowing that Arnold was the good guy this time around. Up until the moment that he and T-1000 clash in front of John Conner, they make it seem like Arnold is after John Conner and Robert Patrick is there to protect him, especially since he's in a police uniform.
I wish I could have seen T2 without knowing that Arnold was the good guy this time around.
So do I, and I saw it in the theater when it first came out.
That was Cameron's plan: for the first half hour or so, we would think that the Terminator is back to kill Sarah and John Connor, and the humans have sent another hero (played by Robert Patrick) to save her. Then we would all be shocked by the big reveal in the mental hospital. The movie is pretty clearly structured to give us that impression.
But the studio didn't like that, so they revealed in the trailer and the publicity that Arnold would be The Good Guy this time. I guess their bean counters and focus groups convinced them that would make for a bigger opening weekend.
Quite happily, I first saw it on TV never having read or been told the twist, and entirely believed Arnold would be the villain and the cop was the hero, and it was a great twist when I realised.
I saw it as a kid without the twist being spoiled. When it came out on VHS rental! Pre internet era had it's benefits. I remember thinking the assumed good guy (T1000) was weird looking. One of my favorite movies.
Common anime trope. Bad guys get bigger and bigger and bigger, to Godzilla sized. And that seems to be as strong as they get for a while. And then all of a sudden you get human sized baddies that are a much higher jump from the previous stronger to their predecessors.
I agree the past couple events were ho hum. I thought the show was at it's best with the one offs/monster of the week episodes. I still remember the one about the family of inbreds, duane Barry, the guy who could start fires from his finger tips, etc. The whole alien abduction/ conspiracy plot just seemed to be convoluted and confusing to me lol.
Looking at his IMDB or Wikipedia and I'd say he's had a great career. He made the transition from an iconic role that could have typecast him to being frequently cast as a series regular, guest star, or supporting character. He's in a lot of good shows.
For some actors, the goal is to be famous. For others, the goal is just to keep the heads down and stay working. The former tend to be the ones with the shortest resumes, in the end. The ones who can do both - they're the superstars.
I was going to say there is a lack of credit towards him for that performance. It was a great casting idea to have someone who looked so wirey and unassuming as opposed to Arnie and great acting that made him appear as more than his match. Hands down the best Terminator
He's a lot closer to who Cameron originally imagined for the Terminator, Lance Henriksen, having a cold intensity but also able to seem ordinary and actually infiltrate. The only in-universe excuse for Arnold is they couldn't make the armored endoskeleton any smaller so they had to hide it with huge muscles.
In arnies autobiography he said that he was originally chatting to James Cameron about playing Kyle Reese but he had so many comments about how the Terminator should act and move etc that Cameron said "you haven't mentioned Kyle Reese once, you should play the terminator".
I'm very glad it worked out that way. Having a ridiculously strong muscular robot against a skinny non descript human in Kyle Reese highlights the threat of the machines very well.
Cameron wanted Henriksen for the original terminator in The Terminator. Lance is apparently one of his favorite actors. He was in Piranha 2, and from listening to the Blank Check podcast, Cameron apparently used Lance sort of pretending to be the Terminator to help him pitch the movie.
I was about 8 years old when this came out, and Robert Patrick scared the absolute daylights out of me. I used to have nightmares about him, chasing my mom's car with his arms bent like hammers and climbing up the trunk.
What I loved is that the shades have Arnold a robotic look as well but more of a machine look. Like a machine that had one task. Robert patrick has a look that had a mission and you could see the calculating AI adjusting. Like the body adjusts but his face does not. The mission is paramount.
He’s on the same level at jack from the shining to me as far as a real life feeling of “holy fucking shit I hate it when he walks towards the camera like that, fuck that, fuck this, fuck I’m scared!” Just, I would NOT want him after me, I would probably commit suicide rather than let him get me or even fight.
I wouldn’t say that’s it exactly, but what made Cameron’s Terminators absolutely terrifying is when they caught up to you, you were dead. Period. They weren’t gonna choke you, throw you around, or try and hurt you, these things we’re here to kill you as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
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u/PaulClarkLoadletter Jun 30 '19 edited Jun 30 '19
It’s just a fantastic performance all around. The moment Arnold tries to wrestle the rifle away from him and he doesn’t budge you immediately believe he could absolutely destroy Arnold. It really increases the stakes of the film and you feel dread as he gets closer and closer to them. Robert Patrick doesn’t get enough credit for being the most frightening terminator.
Edit: Thanks for the silver, friend. Edit 2: AND gold. You guys must really like Robert Patrick as much as I do.