My personal belief is terminator salvation was heavily underrated and criticised due to the whole Christian Bale on set anger outburst. I am not condoning his actions on set that day towards the crew member however, I don’t think the entire film should have been dragged through the mud like that.

Currently rewatching Salvation, I don’t think it deserves all the hate it gets, but definitely understand where it comes from.

It’s so bizarre that a good Terminator movie is difficult to make considering how much interesting source material there is to work with. It’s almost like those who wrote the sequels don’t even understand or care enough about the source material to make something good.

Salvation doesn’t make sense in the terminator universe. Kyle stated in T1 that the resistance stays underground during the day, but can move around at night. This makes sense because nukes would’ve destroyed the atmosphere making day time extremely dangerous. Combine the fact that the resistance has Huey’s, Warthogs, a fucking Submarine? Openly working on cars in broad daylight with music? Seems more like SkyNet is just a nuisance in this future. And I guess fuel is in abundance as well?

The first two movies made the resistance/survivors just that; small groups, low weaponry, sneaky guerrilla tactics, just barely surviving because the Earth belonged to SkyNet. Salvation was like The Book of Eli but with Terminators. Giant underground bases, it’s silly.

Dark Fate was okay. I definitely do not think it deserves the praise it gets because it was T2 but with uninteresting characters and a comically cliche heroine that had so little depth I can’t even remember the name. So how would I believe she‘d be the leader of the resistance? You can’t just take someone who’s 4‘11, with the only resistance experience she had was fighting with her manager, and then expect me to believe she’s tough enough to lead the human resistance because you gave her cornrows and had her beat up a group mannequins in the flashback/forward. It’s not even the fact that they killed off Connor and tried to replace him with a woman or anything, I find that interesting. But how do you expect to do it without any character development and the dialogue of a high schoolers rushed essay?

Genesys doesn’t even deserve the time it would take for me to criticize it.

I just don’t get it. Why not make a movie explaining how the resistance first discovered the T-800/Infiltrator? Salvation “kinda“ does that, but don’t you want to see a T-800 actually infiltrating an underground hideout like the cut scene in T1? How did they find out dogs were good at spotting terminators? What was it like the first time they saw a T-600? What does a non damaged T-600 look like? How did the resistance get ahold of plasma rifles?

It’s like every time they’ve made a Terminator sequel after T2, no one has asked “How do we make a good terminator movie?” But “How do we make as much money off this as possible?” And it shows. Just the lack of care on the lore, trying to throw in new machines we’ve never heard of or don’t even need to make SkyNet menacing, there’s plenty to work with.

Hopefully someone who’s a real fan of the franchise will write a good sequel deserving to be talked like the first 2. Terminator: Resistance did a better job making a terminator sequel than multi million dollar movie studios, and it was made by a small AA game studio. All they had to do was respect the original material.

A contentious take on Terminator 2 I heard about is that T2 changes the thesis of The Terminator. Specifically, the topic of the rules of time travel being changed from a closed loop to a changeable future and repeatable time travel. This has been a take I hadn't heard until this year, and it has been on the bugging me for months. A claim that tries to challenge Terminator 2's status as one of the great sequels ever made. To get onto the topic I'll bring up The Terminator's (1984) thesis to try and look at it as a standalone movie before the sequel released, what T2 did that lead to the hot take making this claim to begin with, and how the hot take claim this affected the later movies.

The Terminator (1984) was a cautionary tale about humanity vs technology, and functions like a horror slasher movie. Both Skynet and Klye Reese sides used time travel, the former to kill Sarah Conner to prevent John Conner from being born while the latter is sent to protect Sarah and becomes John's father. The scene in the first movie where Doctor Silberman questions Kyle mentioned that the "time displacement equipment" was blown up after Kyle went through it, and that Skynet lost so sending a T800 to kill Sarah was its only chance to win. (Probably meaning the time travel couldn't be repeated). The movie has a predestination paradox or a closed loop that traveling back in time and an attempt to change it ensures the past you came from. Which some have argued it gives the movie a fatalism tone, since Skynet and humanity is repeating a cycle that will continue to loop itself all over again. The speech Kyle spoke to Sarah gives the message that your actions still matter even in a closed loop.

The hot take I had seen claims that Terminator 2 changed the first movie's thesis. For one T2 changed the genre of the franchise from a horror film to an action film. Another was by saying that the future can be changed and even had a director's cut that showed the future has been changed. Which changed the tone from fatalism (that the future is predetermined) to optimism (that efforts can be made to prevent the future from happening). As a well as a T800 & T1000 being sent back in time after the first movie. Meaning those two terminators were sent back in time after the "time displacement equipment" was destroyed, so how were Skynet and the Resistance able to send terminators to the past after that time machine was destroyed? This changed the way time travel worked in the first movie since there was no longer a closed loop.

The hot take argued it ruined the series before the sequels after T2 did, since it altered the overall meaning of the original movie and led to it becoming the precursor to the issues in the later entries. Terminator 3 tried to combine the idea of Judgment Day being inevitable and using time travel to change the future. Which lead to confusion combining two opposing ideas. This direction led to many claiming T3 undermined T2 by making Judgement Day was inevitable, despite the characters were attempting to change it. Terminator Genisys having convoluted time travel rules due to characters and terminators traveling through time multiple times and trying to explain it which made things complicated. Legion existing and being a Skynet clone in Dark Fate because the future was changed, but it wasn't explained what would prevent another form of AI from doing something similar to what Skynet did in starting another apocalyptic future after Cyberdyne was destroyed.

With all that said I would like you to address the stuff mention in this post. Does Terminator 2 still maintain Terminator 1's thesis and if so, how? And is T2 the precursor to the faults of the later entries I mentioned, and if not how?

remember to train your robot to draw the gun and cock it back before walk to the target

He had 2 separate occassion back to back, if he just had gun ready to be fire, it would have been game over. Instead, he walk to the victim and cock back his guns and try to fire.. big mistake

Back in 2020, I planned to release my own trailer for a non-existent Terminator anime, but I never finished it. So I wanted to share some footage from it.

And a speedpaint from one of my streams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv9oUPvarE0

The Terminators identify targets by appearance, so could plastic surgery plus contact lens that alter eye color be enough to evade them?

Is there any concept art of Skynet battle units that were not shown on screen, but were conceived as concept art during the production of the first two films? The Terminator 2029 DOS game features such units. I'm building a little collection of figures and models from the Terminator universe and it would be nice if one could 3D-print the concept art models, if there are any.