I now talk about the best Terminator movie, hands down. Many will disagree with me about that, but nobody will disagree with it being one of the best two!
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was just recycled and pointless, except when I got to stare at gorgeous Kristianna Loken’s gorgeous bottom (really too bad she never went on to greater stardom!*) It did okay at the worldwide box office but its events were ignored in subsequent installments, including the TV show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Cjronicles.
Terminator: Salvation deserves props for eschewing the time traveling for once but it became more famous for star Christian Bale’s infamous rant at a crew member than for anything in the film itself. That’s all I can say about it since I haven’t seen it. Neither have a lot of people apparently, since it was the one film in the series that was a bona fide flop – until this latest one.
Terminator: Genisys I never even considered watching, as I thought the series was already as good as dead and I was definitely no fan of Jason Clarke (taking over from Michael Edwards, Edward Furlong, Nick Stahl, Thomas Dekker and Bale as the latest John Connor). It deserves props for its Back to the Future II-esque plot and it was profitable financially, but it got even worse reviews than Salvation. Plus, seeing Emilia Clarke nude is nice but you can do that so many times on Game of Thrones.
Both of those last two movies were supposed to be followed by direct sequels, but underperformed enough for those to be scrapped. In that regard Terminator: Dark Fate has carried on the legacy perfectly, LOL.
As far as the original’s comparisons with its immediate sequel, Terminator 2: Judgement Day was revolutionary in its use of special effects, with Robert Patrick’s morphing into the silver humanoid T-1000 arguably the best visual ever seen in a movie up until that point. The film also featured action sequences previously unseen in their level of scope and choreography (reflecting a record-breaking budget of about $100 million) and has become iconic for turning Sarah Connor into a warrior like VERY few women had been onscreen by then. T2 was rewarded for all its efforts with a box office gross of over $200 million domestically, back when only about a dozen movies had ever accomplished that!
I recognize all the movie’s strengths, yet it felt a bit too bleak and nihilistic for my tastes. I particularly didn’t care for the heartless way the filmmakers (and the characters) treated Miles Dyson. I’ll admit I’m not that much of an action fan in general so this wasn’t an ideal movie for me.
On the other hand, horror is my favorite genre! Terminator and Terminator 2 movies followed a similar path to Alien and Aliens (the latter also directed by Terminator series mastermind James Cameron) in that the first film was a low-budget scary thriller while the second was all about expensive violence. In fact, this little gem, made for only $6 million, was actually more than twice as successful in terms of profitability ratio than the spectacle that was T2.
The plot is so original.** I remember when I was 10 I first discovered the book of classic movies that made me a film buff and one day when my older sister’s friend Ajay, who was kind of a big brother to me in his own right, saw me with the book he asked about it. I showed it to him and he specifically looked for The Terminator, as T2 would come out later that year. He described the plot to me, saying “Imagine someone traveled from the future to kill me because my kid would do something in the future they didn’t want.” It sounded like so awesome a story!
Of course if Ajay, as this 6’1” 200 lb. man, was the one being targeted he likely wouldn’t need anyone sent back to help him. Nowadays there would be complaints about the woman in the story, Sarah Connor, needing a man, Kyle Reese, to help her but this was 1984.**** Moreover, I love Sarah’s growth as a character, beautifully portrayed by Linda Hamilton. She starts out so meek and understandably terrified not only by the killing cyborg but by the strange man from the future claiming he’s there to help her yet eventually she draws upon unbeknownst inner strength to battle the T-800 for the sake of herself, as well as for the sake of Kyle, with whom she’s fallen in love.
Michael Biehn is amazing as Kyle and shares wonderful chemistry with Linda Hamilton. He’s a nice guy in real life (I actually got his autograph this year at a Terminator screening!) and people often wonder why he didn’t become an A-list star in spite of all the huge roles Cameron gave him in the 80s. The easy answer is that he was always overshadowed – in The Abyss by the creature, in Aliens by Sigourney Weaver, and in The Terminator by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Schwarzenegger is of course the real star of this movie and the original Terminator turned him into a legitimate box office force. Apparently Lance Henriksen was originally supposed to be the T-800 but got bumped down to a forgettable cop role when Schwarzenegger wanted to play that cyborg. With all due respect I think we can agree it wouldn’t have been the same movie at all with Henriksen in the title role.
Someone else in contention for the lead role was O.J. Simpson; Hollywood folklore has it that Cameron turned him down because he didn’t think Simpson would be convincing as a killer! Cameron never considered the idea though, despite the Orion Studios chief suggesting him. Simpson’s likability (AT THE TIME) was only one reason, the bigger one being that Cameron just thought it would be in poor taste to make a movie about a black man trying to kill a white woman the entire time.
Hats off to Cameron, not only for being socially conscious (and for thus inadvertently preventing the movie from aging HORRIBLY) but for the terrific job he did directing. He actually utilizes the low budget to his advantage, as we feel trapped with this monster in deserted buildings in night. The editing, the cinematography, and of course the iconic score all contribute to the effect amazingly.
Wow just writing about this movie makes me want to watch it again. I hope reading about it has done the same for you. And if you’ve never seen it WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR??!!!
Bottom Line: STELLAR!!!
*I guess this is the part where I say “I’m a poet and I don’t know it!”
**Admittedly Harlan Ellison sued for copyright infringement of his Outer Limits episode “Soldier” and got an acknowledgement in the credits as a result, but from what I’ve heard Ellison was really whiny and lawsuit-happy and people would make deals with him just to shut him up. I’ll acknowledge that I haven’t seen “Soldier”; however I can’t imagine ANY Outer Limits episode having a story this good. #TwilightZoneAllTheWay***
***Okay after making that joke I need to mention that during the heyday of the DVD market my friend Christian and I used to go “shopping” as a hobby the way women do. By that I mean we’d go to places like Best Buy just to look at the DVDs for fun. One time I asked him, while we were in the “TV on DVD” aisle, if he’d ever seen The Outer Limits. He said only a few episodes, as it was just okay, and when I pointed at a Twilight Zone box set and said “No comparision to that show there” he made the best analogy in all of human history: “Heathcliff to The Twilight Zone’s Garfield”.
****It was actually Terminator 2 that turned Sarah into a warrior herself, going so far as to remove the one scene with Kyle so as not to make her seem like a damsel in distress. That was revolutionary at the time, as people had never seen a major movie action heroine other than Ellen Ripley (there’s another Aliens tie-in). Thinking about that gets me even more infuriated Dark Fate acted like it was breaking ground that 1) Had already been broken in movies decades earlier 2) Was so in a large way by this very series already!
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