Why I hate the Terminator movies

[Eirik]

"Eirik : Just specificaly was the cheese factor in the happy ending,btw."

I have nothing against happy endings, but I really liked the first movie's bleak apocalyptic final note and was put off by part 2 having what seemed to me a more "commercially appealing" ending.  It would be like if they made a sequel to Casablanca where Rick finds the girl and wins her back from the French Resistance guy and they live happily ever after.  Not comparing T1 to Casablanca, just using it as an example.

[Eirik]

Amen, Susan.

[raj]

jmc wrote:

> It would be like trying to analyze what the RAMBO films have to say
> about geopolitics.

That we won the Viet Nam war.

[Flangepart]

Eirik : Humm....oh,okey. So it was a matter of taste. Cool. Still....i gotta admit, i could live with the "Commercially appealing" end. So i guess the question still remains. I see more to your answer, perhaps, then you may. Is it because the "Happy ending" was once such a cliche, that you prefer the bleak, suposedly more "Realistic" end, or was it maby, just in how they did it?

[wickednick]

Susan wrote
Terminator, the original. There is no need to even watch the sequels which further confuse, exploit and screw up a perfectly good story

Personnaly I find T2 to be the best of the series.Not because of better special effects, but because it has a great story,and awsome action.Big deal if T2 had a more happy ending, there are always going to be some victorys for the good guys.
T3 is the movie they screwed up though.That movie was cliche after cliche.The story was ok but nothing any were near as good as the first two and did anyone think that the TX was a p***y.Sure the TX was sexy but it just didn't seem as bad ass as the first two terminators.I mean look at how hard it was to kill off the T1000.



Post Edited (12-06-03 00:05)

[Velvet Brotha]

Well of course the TX was a p***y. She even had one... and a really nice one I bet! ;)

[Susan]

>>Personnaly I find T2 to be the best of the series.Not because of better special effects, but because it has a great story,and awsome action.Big deal if T2 had a more happy ending, there are always going to be some victorys for the bad guys.
<<

Most guys do. I found it to be too commercial, they were really milking arnie's persona in that his character became a caricature. Add the hot GNR song (which at the time was clearly targeting a certain age group), some catchphrases intentionally put in there for recapturing the accidental "i'll be back" hit, and over the top explosions. Then add that annoying little kid...which IMO, should have been popped like a tick in scene 1. ;-)

 I thought T2 was good for effects only, personally I'm not a fan..it didn't need to be done, it was only done to ride the coattails of the original and arnolds popularity at the time. It felt nothing like the original. I liked seeing the character development of the mother even tho it was very 2 dimensional. I liked the original because it was fresh, it was bleak and it left you with a sense of unease at the end. Where it seemed everything was fate, and yet a sense of hope that maybe you could change things. So you know as little as she does about what may lie ahead. I don't need a sequel to tell me what happened next.
I won't even watch T3 (reminds me of a scene in Spaceballs where the newsguy says something like "stay tuned for scenes from Rocky 5......thousand

It's like the matrix, I like a movie that leaves you with question at the end. I don't NEED answers, and I hate hollywoods incessant desire to constantly barrage you with them in sequels.



Post Edited (12-06-03 11:57)

[Eirik]

"Sure the TX was sexy but it just didn't seem as bad ass as the first two terminators."

That's a good point.  TX seemed like a huge step down from the T1000 in terms of resilience and capability.  Not to mention that the T1000 actor was way more menacing while TX was simply a cute girl.

[Eirik]

Flangeport:  I guess what I was saying was that I really liked the unhappy ending of the first one the way they did it.  That doesn't mean I'm a dreary person who only likes sad endings, but in that particular movie it really worked for me.  The second movie, almost from the outset, had an annoying PC undertone (beginning with that whiney kid telling his Terminator not to kill anyone) that you just knew would culminate in a shiney happy ending.  It didn't work for me.  If it worked for you, then I'm glad at least one of us enjoyed it.

[Flangepart]

Eirik : Fair enough. I agree with the handleing of the end in the first film. And the P.C. nature of the second may have been inevitable regards the need to establish John as a Hero type.
Sounds like a film that can wait for the Library copy to come in.

[JohnL]

>But the Terminator movies don't have your view on time travel. They say that
>fate is fate and no matter what you do or how much you try you can't escape it. If
>John Connor can't escape his fate, then neither can the machines. So there's no
>reason for the machines to do what they're doing, and they wouldn't do it, if not
>for the incredibly incompetent writers of the movies.

But the machines don't know this. In the first one, the terminator didn't say much of anything, let alone about fate. In the second, it was John who told the terminator about fate. True, in the third one, the terminator does do a lot of harping about how fate can't be changed, but since machines only know what they're programmed with, who programmed his information about fate? It doesn't seem logical that Skynet would have given him that information, so maybe Kate taught him that in the future to impress upon him how important it was that he protect them in the present. You also have to consider that T3 was a hack jobnot done by the same filmmakers, so naturally, they were going to screw it up.

>It's like the matrix, I like a movie that leaves you with question at the end. I don't
>NEED answers,

Then you must have loved Solaris...

[jmc]

For some unknown reason, they're playing the first Terminator film three times in a row tonight on IFC.   I may start hating the first film now.  

Was the first film independent?  Maybe it was.....

It was obvious early on that T3 was a parody of the first two films, not to be taken seriously.   I think the series began losing something the minute they had Schwarzenegger as a "good terminator" in the second film.  It began reaching the James Bond level of silliness at that point.

[wickednick]

Any one notice the orginal Terminator hater Will has not responded in a while.We are kinda just rehashing the same old s**t, with out him making more dumb reasons for hateing the movies.

[Will]

You know, "wycked," there's no reason to be rude about me not liking the movies....I haven't been rude to anyone as far as arguing my points as I see them, and yeah, I haven't responded in a while because people have been repeating themselves.  But JohnL has made a pretty valid practical point which may actually affect my view, so thanks.

[Susan]

Will - don't get the impression we're trying to convert you or anything...


"We accept you, we accept you..gooble gobble gooble gobble, one of us, one of us."
"Freaks" 1932



Post Edited (12-07-03 11:18)