Customer Reviews

Terminator Salvation: The Machinima Series

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Machinima, for those unaware (a group that included myself until a few moments ago) is the process of using a video game engine to produce cinematic visuals. Somehow this apparently red-hot trend has managed to completely elude me until my on-a-whim purchase of Terminator Salvation The Machinima Series on DVD; it was recommended at the time of purchase of the Terminator Salvation DVD so I figured what the hey...

Broken down into six individual episodes, Salvation the Machinima spans a single DVD packaged within a standard clamshell case and comes in at a runtime of 74 minutes. Extras include a Making Of featurette and a profile segment on lead character Blair Williams.

Though unrated, the picture consists of standard-fair science fiction action, violence and occasional blood splatter (all animated of course).

The story goes something like this: Two years before the events of the Terminator Salvation motion picture (2016), Resistance member Blair Williams finds herself a survivor of the events of Judgment Day, basically running ground missions when not piloting a fighter plane. Her most recent assignment has her tracking down a "ghost"; a presumed machine responsible for the Resistance having temporarily lost communications. To her surprise her target is in fact a fellow human survivor who, through hacking, discovered an inherent flaw in the machines' short-range communicators that allows for disturbance when his algorithm is activated.

Though her orders are to eliminate the target, Blair finds herself in a situation of disobeying for the greater good of humanity.

The plot's pretty interesting and does a solid job in painting some colorful back-story to one of the primary characters of Salvation. A nice tough was the inclusion of the vocal talent of Moon Bloodgood, who happens to play Blair in the film as well. She nails the role with the requisite monotone narration required of all of the Terminator's leading ladies. Chalk it up to accurate scripting, but at times the opening narration of each episode could very nearly be coming from Linda Hamilton herself.

The prose is quite action-laden throughout with no shortage of gunfights, hot pursuits, and big explosions. Like in the film, the T-600 is the primary assassin choice of the machines while Aerostats and Hunter Killers (HKs) fill the post-apocalyptic skies.

As solid a story in summation, the pacing is a bit erratic with some episodes chalk full of action while others drag on with seemingly little plot progression. In all the prose manages to succeed but it would have been nice to have the option of playing the episodes in one continuous 74-minute feature as the episode breaks have the annoying habit of popping up just as the going gets good.

Visually the film is a bit of a mixed bag. The background textures are impressively detailed and some of the mood/ lighting looks as though it could have been lifted and transplanted right from the Salvation film. However, the character models are a bit stiff and cobbily animated throughout. Mouth flap detail is at times downright painful and even the enemy robots look a bit too, um, robotic. However, such things are to be expected when using an engine that was designed to produce video game visuals in filmmaking I suppose. The positive spin on this is that visuals rendered in a fully 3-D gaming environment provide directors with the ability to literally decide which "camera angle" works best for each and every single shot. Once all of the virtual pieces are set into place, viewing a given scene from every conceivable angle becomes a reality. As such, the direction is nice and tight, with well-framed shots and some unique perspectives.

In all, Terminator Salvation The Machinima Series is an interesting little prequel that ties pretty neatly into the film much in the way the Animatrix was integral to the Matrix trilogy. Of particular interest was the concept that the machine weakness discovered by the Resistance in the beginning of Salvation's origins can be traced back to Machinima's plot. Additionally the bonus material included acts as a nice perk to DVD holdouts who forgone downloading the episode clips from iTunes, Amazon, X-Box Live or to their Sony Playstation.

Terminator Salvation: The Machinima Series is a series of six short episodes, totaling a little more than an hour, set a year or two before Terminator Salvation, and created with the graphics engine used for the Terminator Salvation video game.

The episodes tell the story of Blair Williams, the A10 pilot from Salvation, as she is sent on a ground mission to discover, and terminate, the source of a disruption in Resistance communication.

She finds that the source is Laz Howard, a young computer hacker who is able to disrupt not only Resistance communication, which he did by accident, but also the internal communications between Skynet and its Terminators. Williams realizes his skills might be useful to the Resistance, so disregards orders to kill him, and instead tries to bring him in.

I've never been a gamer, so really had no idea what video game graphics look like. I suppose they're ok when you're controlling the action in a game environment, but when used for a full length movie, they're a bit lacking. The buildings and streets of post-nuke LA were great, but the main characters' faces were like mannequins; they never had any facial expressions and their lips barely moved when they were talking.

But unfortunately, even worse than the graphics was the story. Again, it was very video game like; the T-600s couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, even with their miniguns blazing, and the airborne hunter killers were good for pretty much nothing.

But overall, even with it's faults, I'd say it's a worthwhile watch. The story is nothing to write home about, but the settings and background visuals were not bad at all, and how many full length animated post-apocalyptic movies are out there? And for the price, I guess you shouldn't expect much anyway.

This is a movie filmed in a video game, which is different than an animated movie. You can tell because the animation like walking is clunky and the lips don't sync. Its like puppets. I love Machinema, but this was sub par and pretty dull and poorly animated.

This "Machinima" movie follows Blair Williams from the Terminator: Salvation movie and is a direct prequil to that movie.

Its broken into 6 parts, that are each 10 minutes long. Each episode is pretty boring and ends with a cliff hanger. The final cliffhanger leads up to the Terminator: Salvation movie.

Basically, these six episodes were meant to be shown on the web, which is great, but to compile them on a DVD isn't the best idea.

Everything felt very flat. The characters were flat too. I got tired of hearing the same machine gun sounds over and over by the end of the 1st ep. There was no depth to the sound, like if a gun is being fired far away, it should have less of a sound than if it is right there.

There was no sense of danger either. Evil cyborgs come... just shoot them. If a machine hasn't found the characters... just shoot them first! Walk in the middle of the streets instead of hiding. When an evil cyborg chokes you, you'll survive, it won't snap your neck instantly. No sense of danger.

There are far better Machinema movies like the one for Red Dead Redemption.

Terminator Salvation - The Machinima Series... taking place about 2 years before the movie. I enjoyed the premise of following the missions of Blair Williams, encountering several Terminators and one `survivor'... determining whether he is
friend or foe. It's mainly cut scenes from the game put together and modified....
divided into 6 episodes. A full CGI movie would have been better. Still, seeing Moon Bloodgood is worth the whole DVD.

Far, far better than that limp fourth movie since the story is far more concise. Yes, the graphics of that game is truly lacking of which this was taken from but again, it's the story that grabs you in the end. In my opinion, this should be enjoyed for the story itself. It told a tale of people trying to survive the aftermath of "Judgment Day" and since it was only an hour long at most video, tying in the Connor tread would of made it even better.

On its own, the action choreography was excellent with a climax of a train chase worthy of any live action flick. The main protagonist showed more cunning in this video then she ever did in the movie. You sorta got a retard there in the movie if you compared that character in this video!

Sadly, the producers didn't go the distances and combine the six chapters to make a complete package. They just slapped all six chapters into the disc and threw it out. Something close to 4~5 minutes in total was wasted in recaps of the previous episode. Watching the making of, I saw that some extra movements not in the game had to be put into it so I wondered why didn't they try to make the the faces just a little bit more animated?

I would of rated it a solid four stars, but for the mistakes mentioned in the last paragraph I had to knock off a star. I recommend a purchase since its one of the best out of the Terminator series in these last few years.

Originally saw this at BestBuy but it had a $9.99 price tag so I bought it at Amazon because it was a lot cheaper and I wasn't in a hurry. Good effort for the crew that made this dvd but they wasted the talent of Moon Bloodgood for such an inferior movie. They had the right idea but the technical crew messed it all up. The animation looks highly unpolished and the dialogue is cheesy and repetitive. You will notice even the mouth movements were not synchronized with the lines. I ended up fast forwarding the dvd 70% of the time just to get closure and somehow get my money's worth.

I love animated movies but this one is probably lightyears behind what our current technology has to offer. I thought this was going to be similar to Appleseed Ex-machina but I was mistaken. Appleseed Ex-machina should probably be treated as the model for this kind of animation although the process in making then I think is somewhat different.

I really enjoyed the dvd. If you are a Terminator fan of the first generation then you will enjoy it too. Good stories with a bit of action. Some younger viewers might be disappointed by the graphics becauce of being used to the next generation of video games.

This is a truly intriguing look at Blair Williams. We get to see her in much more of a leadership role in this series than we did in Terminator Salvation. If you liked the character in novels and/or the movie, you'll like this series quite a bit.

The main item that lacks here is the animation. Normally not a bit deal for me, but when you have artwork from the video game cracking from the creation in a lower resolution universe, it starts to get annoying.

The story is fine, relatively simplistic, stretched out a bit... much of this is action, unfortunately you loose interest early on.

After watching this little film I found the front cover of the DVD to be a bit deceiving, on the DVD it looks pretty good as far as what you would expect from video game animation these days.

I went in thinking this will be like watching a really long cut seen from a new next gen video game, boy was I wrong. Lets take a step back in to time to the height of the PS2 wonder years, ahh those where the days, the cut scenes where bad but no one cared because they didn't have anything to compare it to. And that's what this is like, but we do have something to compare it to now. And those days are over, I have standards now, so do many others.
I can almost guarantee if the animation was the same as say MSG4, UT3, MW2,KZ2 or any of the other great alphabet next gen games that have good cut scenes then most of the reviews would be 5 stars, because the story is, I think, pretty good, and voice acting, not to shabby either.

So what's the deal here, I'm I missing something? Why the crap? Anyway, this is only for hardcore fans of terminator (that's me...) So over all my Title says it all

2 stars for amimation
4 stars for story
= 3 star flick