Ranking Terminators

We've ranked a lot of other stuff, so why not rank the Terminator movies!

6.  Salvation:  By 2009, after 3 movies in the franchise, it seemed they'd gone as far as they could go in present day.  So why not a sort of prequel about John Connor's adventures after Judgment Day?  They brought in Christian Bale, fresh off two Nolan Batman movies to play Connor.  What could go wrong?  Just about everything.  It wound up with a lot of subplots and while Bale is usually great, in this case he didn't do a great job of looking like an inspirational military leader.  This is notably the only movie in the franchise that didn't feature the actual Ahh-nold Schwarzenegger, just some CGI footage of an original T-800.  Bale's rant at an underling on the set also gave this some bad press before it aired, certainly not helping.  So more prequel/sequels were scrapped.

5.  Dark Fate:  Maybe you'd consider it ironic or something like that that bringing James Cameron back to the franchise didn't really help.  Of course Cameron was only one of like 20 people involved in the story and "produced" it, which I imagine him sitting in a chair counting his money like Gus Van Zant in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.  The other irony is people didn't like the third movie, so...let's pretty much do the same thing as the third movie only worse.  So...we still have Judgment Day only now SkyNet is "Legion" and since John Connor is killed in 1998, there's some Mexican girl named Dani who's going to lead the resistance.  And we have a Terminator sent to kill her that's part liquid metal with an old-school Terminator underneath--just like the third movie!  Though it's like a Transformers Pretender in that the outer "shell" and inner robot can completely separate to create two attackers.  This time instead of a normal human or a Terminator to protect John Dani, we have an "Augmented" woman from the future to defend the girl.  Plus there's a geriatric Sarah Connor to provide life lessons like put your phone in a potato chip bag so the government (or Terminators) can't track you.  It's kind of funny that in this future you have robots who cover themselves with flesh and humans who implant themselves with metal--so we're kinda meeting in the middle to where if both sides didn't kill each other they might become indistinguishable.

It occurred to me about 2/3 through that movies like this are like their theme songs:  they can ape the iconic score and yet it's never quite the same.  In this case, it's because all those 1000 people working on the story and Executive Producing it seemed to forget that the Terminator movies that worked weren't just big stunts and catchphrases; there was heart too.  The first movie is a love story between Sarah and Reese.  The second movie was a boy and Terminator bonding.  Even Genisys had a half-assed relationship with Sarah and Reese.  This movie, because they wanted to go all "girl power" with it winds up not really having much heart at its core.  It takes far too long to get to the real relationship between Grace the Augment and Dani the future savior when that should have been the emotional core of the movie.  I guess they wanted to save that as a big twist when it probably would have helped to know it earlier.  That's why the whole movie winds up just feeling like a bad copy.

 If you can find it on YouTube, the "Honest Trailer" really nailed what was wrong with the movie.

4.  Genisys:  This was a soft reboot where everyone except Schwarzenegger was recast.  To explain why Arnold looks older, they had him go back in time to Sarah Connor's childhood to protect her, which had a creepy Time Traveler's Wife vibe.  The rest wasn't terrible as it brought in a lot from the previous movies, but in the end it just didn't work for people.  The one thing that didn't make sense was at the end Sarah and Reese are in 2019 and haven't had sex yet, so how can John Connor be born to lead the resistance?

3.  Rise of the Machines:  A lot of people didn't like this, but I thought it was good.  It wasn't quite as epic as T2, but it was far from a bad movie.  It focuses on a young adult John Connor and his future wife Kate Brewster.  Since the terminator sent to this time can't find John, she starts killing other future resistance leaders, which is how John and Kate wind up meeting.  Of course another terminator in the form of Schwarzenegger is sent back to fight her.  The evil terminator this time has a T-1000-like liquid metal skin over a metal skeleton that includes weapons like a flamethrower.  Sarah Connor is supposedly dead, but in her "coffin" are just a lot of weapons.  A fun part is that the good terminator takes its orders from Kate since she's the one who sent him back after he killed John in the future.  There's a good twist in the end as Kate's father tells them to go to a place where they think they'll kill SkyNet only to find it's an old bunker so they can survive Judgment Day.  So we went from "Maybe Judgment Day won't happen" to "Judgment Day is inevitable."  Kind of sad.

2.  The Terminator:  The OG Terminator movie!  It set up all the rules of the time travel and the back story of SkyNet, the resistance, and John Connor.  Plus it really made Schwarzenegger a movie star and forever gave us the catchphrase:  "I'll be back."  The love story between Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese works, so long as you ignore his creepy obsession over his former leader's mom.  The effects, especially the terminator vision, don't look great in modern times but they were top-of-the-line in their day.

1.  T2:  Judgment Day:  Like the original Star Wars trilogy, the first movie laid the foundation, but the second is what built the house.  It features an epic story as the shape-changing T-1000 tries to kill the teenaged (I guess) John Connor.  John has been living in a string of foster homes because his mom is in a mental institution since she refuses to deny what happened to her in the first movie.  Since Schwarzenegger was such a star at this point, it made sense to have him return as a reprogrammed terminator who's sent back to protect John from the T-1000.  The bond between the good terminator and John becomes really touching as John teaches the "cybernetic organism" about being human.  Even Sarah Connor starts to respect the terminator by the end, finally accepting that it's not just a heartless machine.  About midway the story turns from just trying to protect John to trying to avert Judgment Day by destroying the technology that would become SkyNet.  It was a really great, epic story.  The only thing I haven't understood for a while is if the original is in 1984 and the second came out in 1991, how is it that John is like 13?  Judgment Day was supposed to be in 1997, so if he's a teenager, that'd mean Judgment Day was imminent.  Which means SkyNet should have been a lot farther along.  I'm just saying, the math doesn't make sense there.

There you go.  Not really a big surprise at the top.