I remember when it was released and the huge hype. I was already a Huge T1 fan but after I saw it I was let down by what was basically a remake. But the director's cut was a huge improvement and I have come to enjoy the film for what it is.
I actually love the way T2 repeats certain beats from T1. I think it contributes to them being a really nice duology. I know we criticise ''homages'' in later films but when it was the original creator homaging his own first film, well, I thought it was cool.
So A-Dev.. I did not read back far enough... Did you enjoy the film overall??
I did, I even gave it a provisional 7/10. That was just rating my enjoyment of that first viewing. I will be surprised if I continue to rate the film so highly going forward, I mean I already have in mind all the things that will knock it down in the future.
T3 will always get more credit from me for having well staged action scenes. In fact I like the action in T3 better then the Action in T2..
See for me T3 is where the action started getting really cartoony, which continued in Terminator Genisys with that CGI helicopter chase.
Terminator Salvation's also guilty of that, even though I felt the showdown with the T-800 prototype was better than anything in Terminator 3 in that regard, it still does things it logically shouldn't (like throw John Connor down a stairwell to safety instead of, I don't know, punching clean through him or tearing his head off at the neck) for the sake of plot convenience.
This is actually what destroyed that whole final battle for me. The T-800 had numerous opportunities to instantly kill John Connor - a real machine would have taken the first chance it got to deliver a killer blow like Terminators do to anyone who
isn't their primary target. I think they expected us to excuse a little too much in this sequence. They should have written the scene differently so that John was always out of reach.
As to the Connor/T-3000 thing in Genisys - it gets wrecked by an MRI machine at one point, not exactly menacing. Actually, come to think of it, if it's held together by magnetism and the magnetic field of the unfinished time machine in 2017 destroys it, how did it make it back to the 90's from 2029 in the first place?
Did that thing Arnie had on his hand have something to do with it? Maybe it disrupted T-Connor's ability to fool the time-displacement machine.
Original terminator seemed like a major threat... T-1000 I thought made a great villain but was not as scary as original... I think the reason for all of this is that Arnold was in between the T-1000 and it's prey... You knew Arnold was a hero... It just took away some of the suspense. Same goes for 3.
Now TS had a great moment with the terminator going after John in the Chopper (after the crash) and the t-800 going after the John and Kyle.
To me the other thing missing from TG is the sense of impending doom... The other films had that... This film was far to light and fancy free.
Certainly once Terminator protectors came in the films lost a sense of fear. With T2 you at least had what was at the time a novelty - the first time we'd seen a Terminator reprogrammed as a protector - it also enabled some ante-uppage with the action because a Terminator protector could do things Reese could not.
With T3 both the fear
and the novelty were gone and needless to say so were they gone in T:G.
T2 still had an overall sense of doom - a few things brought that:
the T-800's music theme (notably
not the usual DUNDUN DUN DUNDUN that they roll out at every opportunity in Genisys)
Also this:
T2 had humour but none of it took away from stuff like this^
The problem with T3 and T:G is they continued with the humour but there was too much of it and they had no sense of when it was appropriate to use it. You'd have comedy in the middle of an action scene where you're supposed to be on the edge of your seat. There comes a point where it's no longer comic relief and you're basically making a sit-com.
Hey! Sort of like the people that think that T1 is the perfect horror/B movie or that JAWS is the perfect blockbuster!
I love Alien, Aliens, T1 and T2. Let that be known.
My point on your observation was that people somtimes forget where Terminator originally hails from because of the action-oriented T2. He was a monster before he became a hero before he became a comedian before he became old.
Absolutely, it even annoys me that 'goodie' jokey Terminator became the default scenario just because it was really successful once.