What really really pisses me off, is that trailer that I am in lurve with?

It was definitely weird to be waiting for the moment Marcus finds out he's a robot, but I couldn't quite tell whether WE were not supposed to know he was a cyborg. The opening scene pretty much implied that he was going to be a T-800 template—what else would happen if you donated your body to Cyberdyne?—but the first 45 minutes played as if he were a regular guy wondering what he was doing in the future.

Yeah, methinks there were some issues with the structure. Either/Or would have been great, but they instead went for BOTH. Either a 28 Days Later "dude wakes up and the world has changed and then Surprise!", or . . . something else.

That said, I wouldn't want to give up all the wonderful little moments of Marcus and Kyle and Star, or Marcus and Blaire.

Oh, I thought that was reasonably clever. And a nice way of avoiding the T2 problem, where we were supposed to think that we should be scared of Arnold for the first act, except there'd been months of publicity about how he was the good guy this time. So yeah, we know Marcus is Not Human, even though he doesn't. But we don't know why, or what he's meant to be doing, and he doesn't either. But I also thought that the opening credits kinda told us that the movie was from a Terminator's POV.

It definitely lost points in the last act. I don't think that Skynet should be all taunty like a James Bond villain. It's undignified.

There's also no reason Skynet should have any fucking idea who Kyle Reese is AT ALL. Unless Skynet's just sending Terminators back all the time and informing the current Skynet about everyone, in which case there's no way he should have lived this long.

I really really wish that this had been a movie about Marcus and Kyle, and Marcus v Skynet at the end. Take John Connor out of this movie and you've actually got a shot at an interesting story.

So I rewatched "The Balance of Terror." (My fave ST:TOS EP when I was a kid.) Stiles was the guy who suspected Spock of being a Romulan spy. He told Kirk there was a "Captain Stiles" killed in the Romulan war, as well as three other Stileses.

And in ST3:TSFS, "Styles" was the name of the captain of the Excelsior, whose pursuit of Kirk and the Enterprise was foiled by Scotty's sabotage. (I kept expecting them to make jokes about packing materials and wood slivers, but that shoe never dropped.)

Jessica,

Skynet found out that Kyle Reese is John Connor's father from John Connor. He shouted all of that information to Marcus when they captured him. However, Kyle was on a "kill" list with John earlier in the movie, wasn't he?

LeN, exactly - the reason for Marcus' whole existance was to get him to bring Kyle and John to Skynet so they could be killed. But at this point in the timeline, there's no reason for Skynet to know who Kyle is OR why killing John Connor should be a priority.

Okay, it may be that I'm giving the movie too much credit, but I thought that there were others like Marcus (or they were working on others like him) so if he failed, they would try a different kind of hybrid to get John Connor. It isn't clear to me if he got the instruction to get Kyle as part of battlefield instructions (they were clearly sending signals to him throughout his awakening)

what get me is why they decided to go after John Connor and not take out the second tier of leadership (they already took out the first through the sub of course). Skynet is still thinking too small it seems to me - and yet they are still winning so what do I know?

what do you think of this Esquire list of 75 movies "every man should see."

[link]

what do you think of this Esquire list of 75 movies "every man should see."

1) That's a pretty solid list of good-to-great movies.

2) This is one of the few lists like this I've seen where I've seen 90% of the movies listed.

Not sure what that second point says about me.