Warning: If you’re 6 to 25 years behind on the Terminator film franchise – Spoiler Alert!!! But I haven’t yet seen the new one, so if you’re only a few days behind, it’ll be alright for you to keep reading…
Thanks to a 3 for $20 sale at a certain retailer who shall remain nameless, I just spent the weekend re-watching the old Terminator movies. I did have the first two on VHS, but seeing as I no longer have a VCR, I felt it was time to update to DVD (I’m not on the Blu-Ray bandwagon just yet). Needless to say, it has been a fantastic weekend!
So I’m not about to write a review of the entire weekend’s viewing, but I do have some newly-formed thoughts on the Terminator movies. Ummm.. where to begin.. ok, so T2 is still the best of the three, but for better reasons than I had when I was 10 (which was my crush on Edward Furlong). Most notable is the tremendously well-done characterization of Sarah Connor, something I think it is beyond the intellectual capacity of a 10 year old to reflect upon. The changes in Sarah that occur over the years between the first two films are, well they are sad, but also terribly believable. I never really got that as a kid; I just thought she was inexplicably crazy in the second film.
Sure, she IS in fact a little crazy, but heck, I would be a little crazy too if I was hunted by a machine when I was 18(?), knocked up by a guy from the future, locked away in a mental institution, rescued from said mental institution by the very machine that previously tried to kill me, and all the while saddled with the responsibility of making sure my son grew up prepared to lead the resistance against Skynet and a virutally indisctuctable enemy force that doesn’t even exist yet. Rough lot in life. Eff would she have been pissed to see Arnold show up again in the third film if she were still alive.
So, T2′s ultimate awesomeness aside, Rise of the Machines wins for humour. Maybe it’s just funnier when you watch all three movies together, but I laughed my ass off. Dry, cyborg-straight-man humour always gets me.
But here is what sucks about having watched all three films over a short period of time: time flaws. Eff, I wish I hadn’t noticed them. Seriously, why don’t they just check for consistency flaws when they make a sequel? T1 happens in 1984, T2 in 1995. Even a simpleton can put together that Sarah would have been 18 in the first film, as per Dr Silverman referring to her as 29 years old in the second film, making John 10 in T2, which fits the police computer profile seen by the T1000. Shibby. So why the heck does Sarah’s grave in the third film put her birthdate in 1959? And why does John say he met the terminator when he was 13? Wrong, wrong wrong!! Although, admittedly, it is hard to buy that he is only 10 in T2, but whatev. Unfortunately we can’t chock these mistakes up to changes caused by time travel, because, although events may be changed, time travel can’t change someone’s age – unless the changes are such that one’s time of birth is moved, but that would likely result in an enitrely different person being born, and besides which, none of the time travel in these movies effected Sarah or John’s births. Too bad. I guess I just have to let it go.
I hope the new one doesn’t add to this mess. I’m hearing terrible things about it, but nothing about completely effing up the timeline in ways that are inconsistent with the philosophy of time travel, so, awesome.
Christian Bale still freaks me out though, so I’m scared about seeing him as John Connor, since all previous portrayals of John Connor have been crush-worthy (and, of course, I’ve crushed on them all), but Chrisitan Bale is most definitely NOT crush worthy for someone who still bares the emotional scars of having seen American Psycho at a young and impressionable age. I did manage to get through The Dark Knight without having nightmares of him however, so maybe it will be ok. Of course, the nightmares I might potentially have had of Christian Bale resulting from The Dark Knight were probably just replaced by nightmares about the Joker who was scary as f*ck, so maybe it won’t be alright after all.
I suppose I will find out tomorrow.
UberFanGirl
student.
