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PaperclipPerfector  20hr ago (text post)   449 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 1, 2026

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Why do you think it is impossible to create good Terminator and Predator sequels past part 2 (I stand firm that predator 2 is underappreciated)

Well, first of all, your premise is wrong, because Branches on the Tree of Time exists. Now, granted, it's only a fanfic, but in principle there is no reason why it could not be filmed and become the best Terminator movie since Judgement Day.

Secondly, I am of the opinion that most sequels are bad, because they derail a complete, satisfying conclusion. The only thing that justifies a sequel is if the original is not so good, and the sequel is much better. Terminator 2 fits that description. Predator 2 does not.

Terminator two had a plot such that making a sequel necessarily creates a plothole. It was a neat, tidy self-referential loop... which renders the whole plot irrelevant.

Terminator 1 is the neat, tidy self-referential loop. Terminator 2 had the "screw destiny" message and ended on a high note (Skynet was never created, Judgement Day was averted, John Connor grows up to become a politician and fights his battles with words instead of bullets, Sarah Connor has a grandkid, everything is fine).

"The future is not set" was part of Reese's message in The Terminator, and the villain's entire plan hinged on the idea that changing the future is possible. I don't think Terminator 2 invented the idea that maybe we can screw destiny, or that The Terminator required an unchangeable timeline.

I nonetheless find The Terminator probably a better movie overall, or at least, one that has a more powerful, emotionally resonant ending that Terminator 2's turn toward the saccharine, but there was at least a little groundwork.

"The future is not set" was part of Reese's message in The Terminator, and the villain's entire plan hinged on the idea that changing the future is possible.

Reese isn't the guy to ask, he's the pawn of the guy who actually has a holistic view of time travel, a reverse Isaac sent to his death by his son as a sacrifice.

Connor's actions in the film heavily imply he believes time is a flat circle, correctly. That's why he can blow up the machine and feel secure he won't need to send Reese any reinforcements.

Terminator

By the time T3 came out (in 2003), the style of action scifi that the Terminator 1 & 2 were was getting too far out of style. Since then it's only gotten worse.

This may be nostalgia but to me both Terminators appear to be more "grounded" than more modern action scifi films. Yes, there are killer robots but once you get down to it most of the on-screen action could be described as "Young man and woman try to escape a monomaniacal Austrian bodybuilder in a leather jacket while falling in love" and "An Austrian bodybuilder in a leather jacket tries to protect a teenage boy and his mother from a psycho killer while learning to be more 'cool'". If you remove that groundedness, a sequel just doesn't feel like right.

Then there's is the cautiously optimistic vibe. A part of what made both T1 and T2 feel so good was that neither had a downer ending or even setting. The end of T1 implies that the bad future has been averted while T2 finishes with Sarah Connor saying "The unknown future rolls toward us. I face it for the first time with a sense of hope, because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too". How do you make a sequel that manages to keep things reasonably optimistic without basically undoing everything that has happened?

Finally there's just the fact that both movies were just goddamn great and it really isn't easy to make a worthy successor for a movie of that caliber while having to stick to an established setting, never mind for two. Good plotting and directing, quotes galore, outstanding music and iconic characters. The T-800 is Arnold while Linda Hamilton starts as a fairly realistic slightly ditzy girl next door in T1 and evolves into a a fucking ripped warrior mama who leaves no doubt that she is capable of doing what needs to be done to protect her son all the while staying feminine (ie. no unrealistic freak territory).

Terminator 3 was a semi-ok movie as such if you're ok with John Connor looking like a hobo Beverly Hills 90210 / Dawson's Creek "teenager" but ultimately is what you get when a sequel loses the vibe and just isn't that good. Terminator: Salvation was a sequel only in name. Genisys tried to be a proper sequel but replaced Linda Hamilton with a silly little girlboss with zero credibility and the ending was frankly ridiculous. Dark Salvation was some weird dystopic and depressive attempt at probably being "gritty and real" but mostly seemed to just concentrate on removing everything good from Sarah Connor to the extent that I couldn't make myself watch more than a few scenes where Arnold showed up.

I think Terminator 3 (or perhaps right after it) was the final moment when a proper sequel was possible but that would have required involvement from James Cameran and for everyone to have been more enthusiastic about it. Any time after that there was too much baggage in modern Hollywood trends that prevented making a proper sequel (in addition to Arnold playing The Guvernator during most of the 2000s). Just compare Linda Hamilton with the girlboss replacement.

Dark Salvation

Yeah, they're starting to blur together for me, too.

How do you make a sequel that manages to keep things reasonably optimistic without basically undoing everything that has happened?

By not shooting the main character in the first three minutes of the story? Low bar to clear, but Dark Fate doesn't even manage that!

but replaced Linda Hamilton with a silly little girlboss

The series stopped being about Sarah-John (interestingly, you don't hear much about the other series that still should feature this, and I'm not actually sure why that is). That's part of why T3 was meh- sure, it's spectacular, but not as interesting with Just John.

T2 is timeless because it has to do with motherhood just as much as it does fatherhood. Dark Fate, and Genisys (to a point), intentionally spits in the face of both.

What strikes me looking back at the whole series, actually, is how much every film except Terminator 2 feels profoundly of its time. The Terminator is a 1980s action horror. I watch it and I am back there in the 80s. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is definitely a film of the 2000s, with a lot of early CG effects, trotting out a film star who is just starting to look too old for this, and a lot of military-industrial complex, War-on-Terror paranoia. I have not seen any of the films past 3 (I hear I'm not missing much), but I'd be shocked if anybody remembers Genisys or Dark Fate as anything other than interchangeable, forgettable action films.

Terminator 2, by contrast, feels fresh and timeless every time. Maybe it's because it was one of those seminal films that created the modern action film? It marks the end of the genre I think of as 80s action, creates the 'modern', 90s-and-onwards genre, and because we've spend the last thirty years or so in cultural stagnation, that still feels new?

Maybe it's just that Terminator 2 is really good, but I'm not sure that's it - if nothing else, I like the first film more! But notwithstanding, I think Terminator 2 transcends its origin in a way that The Terminator does not.

Agreed. With the exception of some questionable soundtrack choices and John's totally radical slang, Terminator 2 feels remarkably timeless.

It takes a lot of skill to create tension, in general.

T1 there was the whole "this is an implacable, nigh-invulnerable killing machine that is programmed to kill YOU, specifically. And your only defense is a squishy standard human."

T2 had that, PLUS the target was a child, who now had to befriend his own implacable, nigh-invulnerable killing machine.

Repeating the formula starts to break that tension, even if you ostensibly escalate with a bigger, badder robot. Harder to manipulate audience expectations.

Similar with Predator. You can keep iterating "now they're in the 1700s. Now they're in Japan. Now its an alien planet and there's 10 preds." But how do you get audiences to buy in a third, fourth, fifth time?

And the Alien series. "Oh man one of these things was terrifying. How about HUNDREDS of them?"

Where to do you go from there without being derivative?

I think this has also hurt the John Wick films. By the third, we know he's going to be pull his suit up to cover his head and will never take a serious wound during an action sequence.

By 4 he's surviving MULTIPLE 30 foot drops.

Its still great action, I still like the films, but the appeal in the first was that he did seem vulnerable.

Its should, I think, sometimes be easy to say that you can capture "lightning in a bottle" only 2-3 times and unless you're a generational talent at filmmaking, things will inherently get formulaic if you keep trying to recreate that success.

'80s horror series (including, interestingly, the ones that rip off that style like Stranger Things) also all suffer from this.

Ironically, the series that avoids this is, of all things, FNAF, to the point it blew up into an entire ecosystem. But FNAF is a game- a simple one, at that- that relies on abusing a fundamental quirk of human biology [re: a thing that screams at you and gets all up in your face when you lose] as the main tension driver (and everything else is pseudo-ARG for people who actually want to engage with it).

Episodics tend to avoid this, but they have different problems, which leads to the Half-Life 2/3 problem.

Hilariously, Predator was created in the first place due to this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_and_John_Thomas

The brothers took inspiration from a joke circulating Hollywood concerning the Rocky franchise and how its lead character would have to fight an alien as there was nobody left on Earth to fight, and wrote a screenplay based on it.

lol.

Sort of makes the point, though, doesn't it?

If you have an actually interesting idea for an existing franchise... maybe its better for everyone if you mold it into its own thing, first, so it doesn't carry baggage from said existing franchise that might weigh it down.

Me, I don't know how to tell when its sensible to take a new idea on an existing series and add it to the canon, vs. create a new, wholly unrelated work so it stands on its own.

I just know that more series than not end up wearing out their welcome when they go that route.

With regards to Terminator, every time travel story ultimately has to take a firm philosophical position on whether the past is mutable or not. The original The Terminator was an enclosed, self-contained story which took the stance that the past was immutable: the ending reveals the entire story to have been a stable time loop. Terminator 2 set out to surprise audiences at every turn (oh my God, Arnie is the good guy this time!) which extended all the way to its ending and its reveal that, in stark contrast to the original movie, the past is mutable. The film ends on a note of optimistic uncertainty, with the protagonists' actions appearing to have averted the future apocalypse for good. This was made even more explicit in the original scripted ending which depicts Sarah, John and Sarah's grandchildren in an idyllic future Los Angeles, which was thankfully cut for being too sappy, on-the-nose and tonally dissonant with the rest of the film. (James Cameron has a recurrent problem with indulging his inner Spielberg and wanting to end his films on a corny sentimental note, only for cooler heads to prevail in the editing suite and instead opting for something more ambiguous and restrained.)

Not having seen any of the sequels following the first two, all my knowledge of them is secondhand, but my understanding is that every subsequent sequel has set out to follow the example set by Terminator 2 and have its philosophical attitude to the mutability of the past directly contradict the attitude espoused by the previous film. This leads to an interminable game of "the past is immutable – no it isn't – yes it is — no it isn't – is – isn't". With a binary question, the number of times you can surprise audiences by changing the answer is exactly one. When Terminator 3 revealed that Judgement Day was still going to happen, audiences didn't find this exactly as shocking as Terminator 2's implication that Judgement Day could be decisively averted; rather, it registered as a regression to the original film's status quo. In spite of Cameron's strenuous efforts to reinvent the entire franchise from the ground up with Terminator 2, by the end of Terminator 3 the franchise was back almost exactly where it started. Eventually audiences just got sick of being jerked around and lost interest: no permanence, no stakes.

Another reason might be a bit more mundane. The Terminator made the most of its limited budget, but some of its visual effects looked pretty ropey even at the time. Half of the appeal of Terminator 2 was getting to see a story very similar to the original (indeed, the plot beats and structure are so similar that in some ways it's more like a remake than a sequel), but with an expanded budget and VFX wizardry. The visual effects of Terminator 2 were mind-blowing on release and have aged incredibly well. But you quickly run into the law of diminishing returns: while I'm sure the visual effects in the subsequent sequels were marginally superior to those of Terminator 2, they could never hope to match the quantum-leap sensation of the transition from The Terminator to Terminator 2. "Come see the Terminator, with visual effects that will blow your mind" is an easy sell, unlike "come see the Terminator, with visual effects very slightly improved over previous Terminator films".

Another reason might be a bit more mundane. The Terminator made the most of its limited budget, but some of its visual effects looked pretty ropey even at the time. Half of the appeal of Terminator 2 was getting to see a story very similar to the original (indeed, the plot beats and structure are so similar that in some ways it's more like a remake than a sequel), but with an expanded budget and VFX wizardry.

See also the Matrix Trilogy.

They did their damndest to keep the visuals impressive and upping the ante thanks to unlimited budget. And sort of succeeded but also sucked the actual heart and soul out in the process.

Yes, hence the joke about how there weren't any Matrix sequels.

On the other hand, there was a very nice prequel called "The Second Renaissance"; 20 minutes of animated goodness exploring the backstory to the movie's setting. The allusion to "Saigon Execution" goes hard.

Hot take incoming: I think The Matrix Reloaded is vastly underrated. Although nearly three years after posting that comment, I still haven't gotten around to watching Revolutions.

I would agree, and quite a bit of the issues are editing more than anything.

One thing the first film thrives on is efficiency. Most sequences are short, aside from two major action set pieces. The highway chase/fight in Revolutions AND the burly brawl are too long, and aren't really serving the story in the way the subway fight does in the first one.

Lot of fun ideas at play though. The films at least had somewhere to go after the sequel hook from the first.

I saw Reloaded three times in theatres. The action sequences were just sublime for that era.

2003 also had The Last Samurai, Pirates of the Caribbean, 28 Days Later, Kill Bill, Master and Commander, and X2 (which I also went to see three times).

Nobody hates Reloaded because of the action scenes (well, except for the highway scene that takes forever). We hate it for the shitty writing which takes a dump all over the original.

(well, except for the highway scene that takes forever).

Eh, this feels like a later conclusion. None of my friends complained about it at the time. It was actually quite popular.

After the third, I think a lot of good will and rose tinting was stripped off.

It had some really cool scenes. It's much better than the third film.

I think both Matrix sequels are vastly underrated. Leaving out the weirdness that the Wachowski brothers put in because they were all into gay sex clubs, the movies are cut from the same cloth as the first movie. Also, Monica Bellucci.

Also, Monica Bellucci.

If the music video for "Love Don't Cost a Thing" by J-Lo hadn't awakened my budding sexuality, Bellucci's dress in Reloaded would have done.

The visual effects of Terminator 2 were mind-blowing on release and have aged incredibly well.

Much of this is because they were used so brilliantly. A killer machine made out of liquid metal doesn't have to look realistic as long as it looks cool and plausible. I believe they only used fancy CGI for the FX that look like FX (ie. time travel, T-1000 morphing, terminator vision) and did most of the rest with traditional techniques where the viewers are going to be much more critical about realism compared to what was achievable with CGI at the time. Contrast this with Jurassic Park where the dinosaurs look almost like upscaled rubber toys because it turns out that people have a whole lot more practical experience of how real animals move compared to killer robots.

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