Readers are rallying to my banner. A few examples:
Jonah,
I’m reluctantly more in your camp than not. I loved it initially, but
the sad truth is that, while T2 was awesome when it came out, 90% of
that awesomeness was the new digital effects. Now that those techniques
are commonplace, the movie has to fall back on its characters and story,
which were weak, annoying, and confused. Unfortunately, the writers
bent the story to the special effects, sacrificing continuity with the
original Terminator narrative and generally mucking things up with bad
logic. (The T1000 must touch an object to be able to replicate imitate
it? That’s even dumber than midichlorian – I could look up the
spelling, but I won’t give Lucas the satisfaction – count determining
one’s “force-worthiness”.)
Bottom line, ask yourself under what circumstances you would watch the
Terminator movies:
T1 – Any time it is on TV and I don’t have immediate parental
responsibilities
T2 – If it is on TV late at night, I can’t find the remote, and I’m too
tired to get up but not tired enough to sleep.
T3 – After losing a bet.
Can you think of a sequel that time has been less kind to than T2?
And:
Dear Jonah,
You are so not wrong about T2. My moment of disgust was when she was looking at Arnold interacting with her son and goes into a monologue about how a robot may make a better man than a man. Blecch.
Cheers.
And:
You’re right. She has to raise the future commander of all human armies that will save civilization so she runs off to the Third World and sleeps with some mercenaries or drug dealers or something because they’re the ones that know how to do that. And, the savior of humanity is a snot-nosed punk on a skate board. Because I’m sure that’s what Patton, Ike, Macarthur, Sherman and George Washington were like as teenagers (I know they were all flawed humans in some way or another, but not that screwed up). Going to school and learning something might help if you have to become a great general, which is more than a few guerilla tactics. The beginning 20 minutes or so of T2 was good, but it would have been outstanding if you had thought that Arnie was the bad guy and the cop was the good guy.
And:
Jonah,
I’m so happy about your impressions of T2. Sarah and her kid were such unattractive characters, I was hoping they’d get whacked even while I was watching the movie. One other thing that really degraded the flick were the capabilities of T2. They were so phantasmagorical, you could not suspend disbelief. So whacking him at the end become too contrived.
T1 was a great Sci-Fi flick, T2 much less so.
[Name withheld]
Arlington, VA
P.S. Arnold’s best movie has to be Commando. It’s a human cartoon with only 9 lines of dialog. “What did you do with Sully?” “I let him go.” Priceless!
Me: Hmmm this raises an intriguing question, What was Schwarzenegger’s best movie? This has to be rated on pure entertainment and Ahnoldness. Perhaps it’s my D&D and comic roots showing, but I think I’d have to vote for the first Conan movie. Note: I said the first one. Not the second one. Really, just the first one. Seriously. I would also say that Predator and Total Recall rank pretty high, and that Kindergarten Cop is a much, much better movie than Twins. And Pumping Iron is a great documentary. But what’s really amazing is how many of his movies were so, so, bad.