T1 is the better movie hands down. T2 is a great movie and fun to watch but it is literally just a retelling of the first movie only with more special effects. Or maybe not literally but almost literally? Also the movie does not work at all on its own. You have to have seen or be aware of the first movie for anything that happens to make sense (not that time travelling killer robots makes sense to begin with, I’ll give you that) or for the story to have any weight to it.
Like, if you just see the second and have no clue about the first one it’s like what is this woman’s problem she’s traumatized I get it but jeez come on. The first one allows you to better empathize with Sarah Connor’s trauma and fears because you were able to experience them with her. Without T1 T2 is just another late 80’s/early 90s action schlock-fest (but with really rad state-of-the-art-for-the-early-90s CGI) but with T1 it becomes that “something more” that makes everyone want to put it above the first one.
I love the first simply for being a badass mid-80s action movie with an original plot and characters who actually come across as real people (aside from the Terminator, obviously). It’s a great movie in its own right that didn’t need a sequel, let alone an entire franchise, and in my mind is really the only True Terminator Movie.
T1 has a certain kind of dark 80’s aesthetic (with a lo-fi soundtrack to match) that makes it feel almost “slasher horror” in tone. i enjoy the tidiness of its scifi timeloop and the whole thing strikes me as a nice little atmospheric film
T2 is like this huge big budget action movie with kick ass violence, excitingly choreographed chase scenes and has this overblown melodrama plot (and a nuke scene that terrified me as a child) and does a lot of fun stuff and i dig all that, but i just kind of enjoy the first one’s mood and style more? also all the cutesy Ed Furlong teaches’ Arnie human swears scenes feel way too annoying now
[quote=“ronk, post:63, topic:2190, full:true”]it’s like Alien’s appeal over Aliens’ appear.
[/quote]
Pretty much! As a kid I liked the second a whole lot more because it just had more of what I liked about the whole thing: more shooting, more exploding, more swearing, more special effects, etc. but as an adult I’ve swung pretty hard around to the other view and given a choice between the two I always end up preferring the first one.
It’s just got a lot more atmosphere and the effects, while lower in budget, still accomplish what they’re setting out to do. The miniatures and the puppetry still look great today and there are more future war scenes that show you just enough of what life is like under the metal heel of robot oppression but not too much to let you notice the absurdity of it all.
Also the music! Tahee Cain’s Burnin’ in the Third Degree will forever be associated in my mind with the whole Tech Noir dance club scene.
I can’t decide if Kate McKinnon is hot, or I just want her to be.
Anyway about T2 it is The Perfect Action Movie. Especially if you can see the extended directors cut. Now that was a film. No love story just stuff blowing up and robots battling. T2 also wins over T1 because Arnold looks better with eyebrows. Plus my second favorite cheesy line of his “I know now why you cry.”
Aliens > Alien. Evil Dead 2 > 1
The best cheesy line of his is “Cohagen give these people dere air.” -phonetically typed
The extended cut of T2 only detracts from the film. We don’t need to see T-1000 look at a dog collar or ghost Michael Biehn and we definitely don’t need to see future Sarah Connor with her grandkid.
Yall Terminator fans ought to check out Near Dark, a vampire bloodbath film that has a lot of the sort of vibe the first Terminator had. It’s an Kathryn Bigelow joint made when she was starting her relationship with Cameron (and in hindsight it seems kind of obvious the influence she had on him with Aliens) and it has a lot of the cast of Aliens being redneck vampires. It’s kind of trashy and I love it.
The extended cut version of T2 is vastly inferior, it destroys the pacing and makes the movie longer than it needs to be with stuff we don’t need to see
