The other day I was pretty bored and so I decided to stick the Blu-ray of James Cameron's seminal classic - Terminator 2: Judgment Day. 21 years after its release, the film still stands as one of the finest action films ever made. Considered by some to surpass its predecessor in quality, it's a film that still holds up today and looks bloody lovely in high definition. I finished watching and I felt just as I did when I first watched it at the age of nine. Gripped by the rich story and characterisation, I was left stunned once again by the perfect ending in which (spoiler alert), Arnie's T-101 sacrifices himself in order to thwart judgment day and help John Connor live a normal life. It was as good an ending as you can hope for.
Fast forward to 2003 and, for some strange reason, we've got another Terminator on our hands. Not directed by James Cameron and only featuring two of the cast of the previous installments, it was a film pretty much doomed from the start. Nevertheless, as a completionist when it comes to DVD and Blu-ray, I bought the high def version and had a watch a day after watching Judgment Day. Having not watched the film for a few years, I popped the disc in, primed to hate the film anew. However, after an hour or so, I was once again hooked into a pretty decent Terminator installment that featured a gripping plot, decent effects and was pretty ballsy. The credits rolled and I was convinced I'd watched a film that wasn't half bad, but something still didn't sit right. Afterwards, I had a look online to see what other reviewers had said about it and I was surprised to see that the general consensus was that it was a decent actioner. Not as good as the first two, but certainly not awful. Still though, something didn't sit right with me. I thought about it and thought about it until it finally clicked. There's no need for the film to exist.
As I said earlier, T2 finished with the Connors stopping Judgment Day with the help of the T-101 - who could have stuck around to look after John but instead chose to dunk himself into the molten steel in order to make sure he was safe. Then 12 years later, a film comes along and, simply by its nature of existing, it pisses all over the ending of T2 - which is a bit of a middle finger to James Cameron's work. It made me feel the same way I did when I watched Alien 3. Having watched Aliens and rooted for Ripley, Hicks and Newt to evade the queen alien and survive, the flick finished and we all felt relieved that our heroes lived. Then Alien 3 rears it's ugly head and kills two of the gang off screen! Again, it's not a bad film, but it just smacks a little of disrespect.
Anyway, back onto T3. Rise of the Machines would have been forgivable if it were better than T2 but it's not. The T-X is hot alright, but is she as menacing as the T-1000? Hell, no. Schwarzenegger putting on Elton John's sunglasses? Well, that's just cheesy and taking the piss. When it's a part of a film series that doesn't play for cheap laughs, it's a little jarring to say the least. Sarah Connor is dead, John is played by Nick Stahl instead of Edward Furlong and the whole thing plays out a little less grandiose than T1 or T2. As such, it just feels like a throwaway installment rather than a big, brash concluding part of a trilogy - and that's a bit of a shame. As I said, there's plenty good about it - the cast are all great (especially Clare Danes), the ending in which the nuclear apocalypse goes off is a great, gutsy move considering the efforts that had been put into stopping it, and it's a nice twist that Skynet is revealed to be software and not hardware. It would have been a totally worthy installment had T2 not been so great. The thing is it also led to Terminator Salvation - again, by no means an awful film but a movie that stretches out a franchise that was completed back in 1991. In order to try and cover up T3 and T4, TV series, The Sarah Connor Chronicles ran for two seasons and basically did the same thing in continuing the story after T2 when it was unnecessary. This time by spending most of the series cooped up in a house. A little dull, but featuring some neat series developments, TSCC was an okay series that tried to right a wrong that wasn't too heinous but ended up compacting the issue by lumping more lesser quality Terminator onto the pile and obscuring Cameron's originals even further.
Still, the one saving grace is that at least none of these later chapters have been utter shit. I just wish that sometimes decent franchises should be left the hell alone.
