Terminator Week day Two: Terminator

Lemme explain to whoever keeps making these awful Terminator sequels why Terminator works.

James Cameron made an action-scifi movie with a brilliant time travel twist. He did it on a budget of something like eight million bucks. Which means the film had to be tight and the characters had to carry the film along; people had to care about them. Big action sequences were not going to cover up flaws. 

Terminator didn't have Christian Bale, it didn't need Christian Bale. It had Arnold, who was originally slated to be the good guy, but who realized the film would work so much better with him as the bad guy. Don't tell this blog that Arnold doesn't know how to make movies.

Terminator taps into 80's psyche. Unlike the modern zombie craze, Terminator is a twist on something that was very possible, nuclear war. Every kid watching Terminator on Cinemax at 10:00* on a Saturday went to bed that night, and every night wondering, 'Will they press the button tonight?'

Had James Cameron decided to, he would have been an excellent horror film director. He made Terminator a goddamn horror show with scenes that have stuck with us our entire life.  Reese's flashback scenes are brilliantly executed nightmares that tell us about the world from which he came. And let's not talk about the police station massacre.

Terminator is a small, brilliant idea brilliantly executed.

*While waiting for the Skinimax stuff to come on, or if necessary, negative porn. You Millennials are just gonna have to google that last one. I hang my head in shame.

Terminate This: Part Un

We haven't really bothered with any of the Terminator movies since T-2 which we wrote about here. Nut graph as the J-school losers say, T-2 was the most enjoyable movie experience of our life.

We did watch T-3 and thought it was...not terrible (said with an uptalking question mark). Making the Terminator a chick was boring. But she was ever so slighly big in the hips and we kinds dig that...

[!@#$ knobhead-Ed]

Anyway, we saw the commercials for Dark Fate, and while having zero faith the movie would be any good, did think the idea of a Terminator hunting Sarah Connor was pretty cool. So did Breitbart's John Nolte. 

Nolte, who is right about everything, is certainly right about this:

One of the many questions Dark Fate has to answer is what Sarah Connor has been doing since 1991, since the end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. As I mentioned in my review, it’s actually a cool answer. It turns out that before Skynet was destroyed in T2, they managed to send back a bunch of Terminators, stragglers if you will, and Connor’s dedicated her life to destroying them. Like I mentioned before, that’s a concept that might have made for a pretty cool movie: a stripped out, Logan-style, down-and-dirty genre feature… A weathered, aging, grieving, emotionally empty, alcoholic Sarah Connor roaming the world as a Terminator hunter. Sarah Connor is now a Terminator. If done right, I’d pay to see that twice.

Kinda cool, right? Needless to say, they fuck up the entire movie. 

Terminator-2, a damn near perfect movie, ended the saga perfectly. Stop fucking around with it!

We'll be discussing Terminator all this week here at William Stroock dot blogspot dot com.

[Don't say, I'll be back-Ed]

Ok. Hasta la Vista, baby.

[SMH-Ed]