How do you rank the Terminator?

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Favorite Terminator

  • Terminator

    Votes: 214 39.5%
  • T2

    Votes: 302 55.7%
  • T3

    Votes: 8 1.5%
  • TS

    Votes: 18 3.3%

  • Total voters
    542
I dont see how people can say T3 was better than T:S, T3 was embarrassing. At least T:S has Good actors and takes things more seriously than T3.

Both have pros and cons...but they are piece of craps. TS is not even a Terminator movie while T3 is a joke in itself (That is not to say TS is not.). Honestly it's hard to decide about which one is really worst.

Why no one has thought to simply to tell the story of all the 2029 events leading up to the Terminators and Kyle Reese travelling back through time is beyond me. Just make a film about the future that Kyle Reese talks about in T1. Simple, everyone would love to see it.

Amen!
 
Both have pros and cons...but they are piece of craps. TS is not even a Terminator movie while T3 is a joke in itself (That is not to say TS is not.). Honestly it's hard to decide about which one is really worst.

Amen!

I wouldnt say T:S was a piece of crap, Its good as a stand alone film, But of course its not good when you compare it to T1 and T2 which are both a 10/10 IMO.
 
Take out any relation to the Terminator, and you could mold TS into a perfectly decent sci-fi action movie.

T3 on the other hand is an insult to the Terminator legacy through and through.
 
T1 > T2 > T3 > T4

The first Terminator is the best for my money. The story itself is tighter, the storytelling is more crisp, and Arnold is better as the villian (the less speaking lines he has, the better). Arnold can barely speak, so, they just had him play a machine who hardly talks. Brilliant!

The love making scene is very important to the story. Reese nearly lost his humanity, turning off his pain, never knowing love. They are not only saving humanity in the broad sense in conceiving John Connor, they are saving Reese's humanity in another sense. And Reese always wondered what Sarah was thinking about when that photo was taken. At the end we learn she was thinking of him ("we loved a lifetime's worth.")

And who doesn't love the 80's cheesiness that the film is steeped in? I have Tawnee Cain's "Burnin' In the Third Degree" on my ipod. The TechNoir scene is the best scene in any Terminator movie (Arnold going into the molten steel is the next best) and definitely a highlight of the 80's and my film-watching childhood.

The premise might make no sense, but at least the film stays internally consistent with its own logic, i.e., there are no "ray guns" because nothing dead will go; there is only the Terminator and Reese because the time lab got blown up after Reese left. You only have to suspend your disbelief once, for the premise itself; after that, the story stays very tight.

T2 was a worthy follow up. Great emotional payoff at the end. There are not too many times that I cried over the death of a fictional character, and this was one of them. And it's not even a human being's death! Amazing storytelling, for me to become so emotionally invested in the death of a fictional machine.

T2 was a masterpiece, but it was a flawed masterpiece. There were some deep flaws, i.e., the irritating presence of Eddie Furlong. Also, T2 introduced many internal inconsistencies to the Terminator story.

Why are the T800 and T1000 even there at all? They blew up the time lab after Reese went through. That made sense in terms of storytelling because if you had a time machine and wanted to kill Sarah Connor in the past, you wouldn't only send one or two or three guys. You'd send a thousand. Well, why not? You have a time machine, and so, as Marty McFly said, "I have all the time in the world." Why not send a thousand guys, to make sure it gets done? Why not overkill?

The way that the first Terminator smartly avoided this problem was to have the time lab blown up after Reese went through. ("You see how his story doesn't require even a shred of proof? Most paranoid delusions are intricate, but this is brilliant!")

But if, as T2 has it, the time lab actually wasn't destroyed after Reese went through, and more Terminators went through afterwards, it makes you wonder why there aren't a thousand Terminators between 1984 and 1997, trying to off the Connors. Because once you have two, once you allow that the time lab wasn't actually destroyed, you wonder there are ONLY two. Big logical problem. T1 cleverly avoids this problem; T2 doesn't.

Also, if nothing dead will go, how did the T1000 go? Yeah, I know, he mimics human flesh, But he doesn't actually BECOME flesh, does he? No, he only takes on the color and appearance of flesh. He can't form complex designs. Human flesh has chemicals, moving parts. It doesn't work that way.

So apparently they must have found a way to transport dead things. So why didn't they bring any ray guns, or even any clothes?

Also, the whole notion that the T800 is a stealth, infiltration unit went completely out the window in T2. That concept was already strained in T1, because how inconspicuous is a huge Austrian bodybuilder in a post-apocalyptic America where everyone is starving and living off of rats? But it went totally out the window when we find, as we did in T2, that they actually make more than one with the same face, like on an assembly line. It doesn't work for stealth at all when they all look the same.

Despite these flaws I still love T2 and consider it a great sequel. T3 was simply awful and T4 even worse. I ignore them completely and don't even consider them part of the Terminator story.

T3 strained credulity to the breaking point with its "everyone involved in the making of Skynet died but someone else invented the technology 6 years after Judgment Day was originally supposed to happen yet somehow every event still happened the same way." That's like killing the Wright brothers in 1900, yet somehow every single aerial battle in WW1 still goes down in exactly the same way regardless. Pure drivel, nothing more than a terrible excuse to make money off the franchise name.

T4 somehow managed to be even worse. Skynet became Dr. Evil; instead of neatly and logically killing Marcus after he had accomplished what they needed him to do, they re-fleshed him ("Do you like your quasi-futuristic clothes, Mr. Powers?") and gave him the chance to save the day ("What, you're feeding him? I have a gun in my room . . ."). Then Skynet pullled the cliched supervillian psych-job where the villian tries to convince the hero that he is no different than the villian ("You know, Mr. Powers, we're not so different, you and I . . ."). And the part about the human heart was so heavy handed, so aggressively un-subtle, I nearly had a physical reaction.

So I guess you could say that I didn't like it.
 
While I don't agree that T3 is better than T4 I do agree with your individual points on those films, particularly the reduction of Skynet to the level of a Dr.Evil type villain in T4. Laughable.

About the T2 plothole, Sarah connor's narration sorta backtreads and says that "Skynet sent 2 Terminators back through time" meaning the first T-800 and the T-1000. Now of course we know this was only so they could capitalise on the success of the first film and make more money on a sequel but, if we think inside the Terminator universe - it is possible that as far as Kyle Reese knew he and the T-800 were the only ones who went through the time portal and he knew of the intention to 'blow the whole place'. However he certainly couldn't have witnessed the resistance destroying the complex. Therefore he also would not have witnessed, say, the resistance discovering that another Terminator had been sent through aswell and taking action on that front.
 
a-dev: I considered this. Kyle couldn't have known for sure that they blew the place up immediately after he left because, as you said, he wasn't there to witness it. After he left, they could have said, "oh wait! Two went through! Better send another protector. Somebody get me that T800 that we captured and reprogrammed!"

However, that's just a little too cute, isn't it? They brought their captured and reprogrammed T800 with them into Skynet's base when they "smashed their defense grid"? They must have, because they didn't have time to go back to base and get him. That would take awhile, and while they were doing that the machines could have been sending Terminator after Terminator back in time.

If we accept that as what happened, then we have a new problem. They had a T800 that they captured, but they sent Kyle Reese instead? That doesn't make sense either.
 
T3 is retarded. Who cares if arnold was in it, I bet he wishes he wasnt. Even if T4 wasnt great, it was still WAY better than T3. Terminator 3 pokes fun at itself, while trying to maintain an extremely serious plot, the rise of the machines.
 
T3 on the other hand is an insult to the Terminator legacy through and through.

Yeah without a doubt in my mind T4 was better than T3. Thats not really saying much of course.

T3 is retarded.

I honestly have no idea what you guys are talking about.

terminator31.jpg
 
^^^ My point exactly. At least Terminator Salvation had decent actors and took things more seriously.
 
a-dev: I considered this. Kyle couldn't have known for sure that they blew the place up immediately after he left because, as you said, he wasn't there to witness it. After he left, they could have said, "oh wait! Two went through! Better send another protector. Somebody get me that T800 that we captured and reprogrammed!"

However, that's just a little too cute, isn't it? They brought their captured and reprogrammed T800 with them into Skynet's base when they "smashed their defense grid"? They must have, because they didn't have time to go back to base and get him. That would take awhile, and while they were doing that the machines could have been sending Terminator after Terminator back in time.

If we accept that as what happened, then we have a new problem. They had a T800 that they captured, but they sent Kyle Reese instead? That doesn't make sense either.

Hmmm, I see what you mean. If the resistance initially didn't realise that a T-1000 had also been sent through time then why wouldn't they expend their best option (a T-800) on the 1984 mission - only later to realise 'oh _____, another more powerful Terminator was sent to 1995 aswell and we've just used up our big gun!....erm...well, guess all we can do is send Kyle Reese after this T-1000 and hope for the best :eek:'

I just don't know, headwrecking stuff. I was going to suggest that due to the time paradox John Connor in 2029 already knows exactly what did and is going to transpire, so he knows sending Reese to 1984 is imperative and that they need to have a T-800 on hand to send to 1995 but does this mean that both time incursions are always destined to play out exactly as they do without deviation? :panic::cuckoo:

I honestly have no idea what you guys are talking about.

terminator31.jpg

That was a spoof filmed specially for the MTV awards that year am I right? Because theres no way anyone was stupid enough to actually put that in a Terminator film.
 
T3 is retarded. Who cares if arnold was in it, I bet he wishes he wasnt. Even if T4 wasnt great, it was still WAY better than T3. Terminator 3 pokes fun at itself, while trying to maintain an extremely serious plot, the rise of the machines.

I agree that T3 needed to be much, much grimmer considering the subject matter. But it's not like TS was sufficiently grim either. Who was that hottie that Marcus saved and then got to snuggle with her all night? She looked like a model. I bet that actress WAS a model. Can the future really be so bad with hotties like her to cuddle with?

Too many of the humans in TS looked too good to believe that they were starving and living off of rats. It didn't paint nearly a bleak enough picture IMO.

And that garbage about the human heart, where they actually equated the metaphorical human heart i.e., the human spirit, with the LITERAL human heart i.e., the organ, was one of the most cringe-worthy things I have ever seen in a movie not on MST3K.

And why do Terminators just pick people up and throw them in TS? That's a very ineffective way to kill someone when you're strong enough to punch your hand through their torsos. Even more ineffective since all of Christian Bale's bones are indestructible, apparently, since he always gets up. If my memory serves me correctly, the T800 CGI-Arnold actually punched a massive steel door that looked to weigh many hundreds of pounds right into Bale's face and Bale just got right back up like nothing happened.

And how nice of the machines to design their batpods, I mean, their killer automated motorcyles with like, handles and foot rests so that humans can just get right on them and go. Those things have scanners that see everything except for a huge rubber band right in front of them. Seriously, I thought I was watching the Road Runner set a trap for Wyle E. Coyote there for a minute. The only thing missing was a cartoon wooden crate with "Acme rubber bands" on the side.

Oh, and the young Kyle Reese looks like Doogie Howser M.D. That's neither here nor there but I think it's pretty funny.
 
That was a spoof filmed specially for the MTV awards that year am I right? Because theres no way anyone was stupid enough to actually put that in a Terminator film.

Erm, no :)
That is actually screenshot taken from the movie...You don't remember that? You're the lucky one then! :D
 
And why do Terminators just pick people up and throw them in TS?

Well if you recall it was the same in T2, When arnold went to the biker bar, instead of killing all the bikers(like he killed the punks in the first movie)he simply just tossed them around.
 
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