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With the dust settled, what was the better sequel to Terminator 2?

Better T2 sequel?

  • Rise of the Machines

    Votes: 122 43.0%

  • Dark Fate

    Votes: 162 57.0%
  • Total voters
    284
cj_iwakura

cj_iwakura

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
10,195
Coral Springs, FL
Spoilers abound, obviously.

I saw Dark Fate about a week ago and just rewatched T3.

T3 is fantastic from start to finish, has almost no dead weight.


Dark Fate has highs, but good lord, does it have lows.

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Rise of the Machines:
+Fantastic action
+Great focus on John(Nick Stahl is great) and Claire Danes pairs up with him very well
+Dr. SIlberman comes back again
+TX is a force of nature
+Great practical and CG visual effects that still hold up (thanks Stan Winston)
+Judgment Day is inevitable
+Arnold has hilarious dead pan humor("I lied.")
+Badass future war segments

-No Brad Fiedel
-Subverts T2's ending with Judgment Day being inevitable
-Wacky comedy
-Ignoble end for Sarah
-"Talk to the hand"


Terminator-Dark-Fate-2-600x938-600x380-600x380.jpg


Dark Fate:
+Way better than Genesys(low bar)
+Linda Hamilton is badass
+New characters aren't bad, hybrid is badass
+Rev9 is a force of nature, actually has charisma

-Ignoble end for John
-Sarah goes full bitter(even if still badass)
-the 'New' John pales in comparison as a leader
-the Rev9's abilities aren't half as scary as what the TX or even the T-1000 can do
-"Legion" is a weak replacement for Skynet
-No Brad Fiedel
-also subverts T2's ending
-lame future war

etc.
 
dark_prinny

dark_prinny

Attempted to circumvent ban with alt account
Banned
Oct 26, 2017
5,374
Watched it yesterday. I enjoyed quite a lot šŸ˜Ž
 
Masterz1337

Masterz1337

Member
Oct 25, 2017
4,795
I've always loved t3. I don't think it's fair to compare the two yet, because dark fate isn't an open and shut movie, the adventures of Sarah Connor and the fight to prevent the machines continues, while t3 was a nice closure to the series.
 
Foxashel

Foxashel

Banned
Jul 18, 2019
710
Salvation because it proved that Sam Worthington was as good a leading man as Arnold, perhaps better.
 
imbarkus

imbarkus

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,645
I've enjoyed Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines this whole time.
Weaker follow-ups were not required for me, to make it look better.

This movie deserves the credit for making Judgment Day inevitable.
 
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cj_iwakura

cj_iwakura

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
10,195
Coral Springs, FL
imbarkus said:
I've enjoyed Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines this whole time.
Weaker follow-ups were not required for me, to make it look better.

This movie deserves the credit for making Judgment Day inevitable.
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Yeah, the ending is fantastic, and keeps you thinking they're going to stop it right to the very last second.

But even the ending still has hope, because the first thing you see is John victorious.
 
ThereAreFourNaan

ThereAreFourNaan

Member
Nov 8, 2017
13,110
They're both deeply unnecessary films. Dark Fate being so uninspired as movie 6 in the franchise is arguably worse? It's better in certain ways but also worse in others. T3 actually showed the rise of Skynet and the Terminator had more than 1 mission which sort of differentiated it structurally, particularly with the ending of Judgement day actually happening.

Dark Fate is probably better in action terms, but I don't think I can give it the nod.
 
ThereAreFourNaan

ThereAreFourNaan

Member
Nov 8, 2017
13,110
jwk94 said:
Dark fate, but the real answer is The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
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My recollection of the show is fuzzy, but the direction they were going with a terminator attempting to create a version of skynet that will be able to coexist with humanity peacefully was an interesting direction for the series, if I'm remembering it correctly. That's kind of status quo disruption that the franchise needed.

Salvation suuucks but showing the future war, while unnecessary, is a lot better conceptually than continuing to circle the drain with T2 pseudo-remakes.
 
Cerium

Cerium

The Former
Member
Oct 23, 2017
1,741
T3 felt like something from a different series.

Dark Fate at least was recognizably Terminator.
 
imbarkus

imbarkus

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,645
cj_iwakura said:
Yeah, the ending is fantastic, and keeps you thinking they're going to stop it right to the very last second.

But even the ending still has hope, because the first thing you see is John victorious.
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Love that montage over the final speech. No comedy here:

By the time Skynet became self-aware it had spread into millions of computer servers across the planet. Ordinary computers in office buildings, dorm rooms; everywhere. It was software; in cyberspace. There was no system core; it could not be shutdown. The attack began at 6:18 PM, just as he said it would. Judgment Day, the day the human race was almost destroyed by the weapons they'd built to protect themselves. I should have realized it was never our destiny to stop Judgment Day, it was merely to survive it, together. The Terminator knew; he tried to tell us, but I didn't want to hear it. Maybe the future has been written. I don't know; all I know is what the Terminator taught me; never stop fighting. And I never will. The battle has just begun.
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Officer Big Mac

Officer Big Mac

Member
Oct 28, 2017
22,596
T3had many stupid puns and juvenile humor in it. Arnie says so many one liners and we have one boob sight gag and a crotch grab of the T800. Fission mailed.
 
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cj_iwakura

cj_iwakura

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
10,195
Coral Springs, FL
Officer Big Mac said:
T3had many stupid puns and juvenile humor in it. Arnie says so many one liners and we have one boob sight gag and a crotch grab of the T800. Fission mailed.
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And those one liners are hilarious, he has great comedic timing. At least it's funny, which is more than I can say for anything since. I think they did that to lessen the sting of how bleak T3 gets. There's nothing in DF half as gory as the TX eviscerating a guy and driving a car with her arm plunged through his torso.
 
Calamari41

Calamari41

Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,099
I've enjoyed T3 since the day I saw it in theaters, and I've never understood why people treat it like some horrible mistake of a movie.
 
imbarkus

imbarkus

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,645
Here's an unpopular opinion: Terminator 2 is actually the first cheesy one of the bunch. Arnie's smiling scene. "He'll Live." The thumb ending left me really unmoved. And stopping the inevitable future by melting the arm that... started it?. Edward Furlong also.... annoyed me. More so in rewatches too. It gets a lot of props for the effects work, deservedly so, but then again the T-1000 doesn't make very much... actual sense, too. How did it even time travel?

I think maybe I agree with some quiet mutterings that the whole issue with this series has been trying to follow up T2, when T1 is still the white-hot purest form of the concept: a robot-assassin horror movie.

So, for me, T3 was the perfect further distillation of this development, but then took a hard turn into its "inevitable Skynet" ending. It hit a good mix for me, better than the seriousness of T2 playing into a kind of fluff ending, as I saw it.
 
JCHandsom

JCHandsom

Avenger
Nov 3, 2017
4,218
T3 blows: Terminatrix was bad in concept and even worse in execution, the humor crosses the line into self-parody, John was a clear, definite step-down in terms of being a protagonist compared to Sarah, and undoing T2's iconic ending in favor of backpedaling to "Judgment Day is inevitable" is the opposite of a meaningful or interesting development to the franchise.

The action is nice, making it the least bad sequel in the Terminator franchise until Dark Fate came along and was actually a good movie in its own right.
 
breakdancing duck

breakdancing duck

Member
Dec 16, 2017
1,999
Dark Fates last act action sequence starting with the plane completely destroys the movie as a T2 sequel. The action had consequences in those movies.
 
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cj_iwakura

cj_iwakura

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
10,195
Coral Springs, FL
nnavidson said:
Dark Fates last act action sequence starting with the plane completely destroys the movie as a T2 sequel. The action had consequences in those movies.
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Yeah, I hated that sequence. It tried to be Fast and the Furious out of nowhere, nothing felt grounded.

I loved the fights and the highway, but that was it. The Border Patrol part was vicious, the Rev9 being dogpiled and not even slowing down.
 
Cerium

Cerium

The Former
Member
Oct 23, 2017
1,741
cj_iwakura said:
How so? It had lots of callbacks to T2, arguably more than Dark Fate. It felt like a natural evolution of T2, especially with the future war segments. I think I liked it even more than the last time I watched it.
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The tone. Everything in T3 verges on self-parody, and the callbacks compound that problem.
 
KtotheRoc

KtotheRoc

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 27, 2017
56,661
Dark Fate. If the first Terminator is a 90 and T2 is a 99, Dark Fate is around a 75, which is still miles ahead of every other Terminator movie they made. (Purely my opinion.)
 
AuthenticM

AuthenticM

Son Altesse SƩrƩnissime
The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
30,081
The tone and style of Dark Fate is closer to what Terminator is, but I thought 3 had way better action scenes. It's been a while since I have seen it, so I might have to rewatch it to better form an opinion on the question. But right now, I'd say T3 is better.
 
ThereAreFourNaan

ThereAreFourNaan

Member
Nov 8, 2017
13,110
JCHandsom said:
T3 blows: Terminatrix was bad in concept and even worse in execution, the humor crosses the line into self-parody, John was a clear, definite step-down in terms of being a protagonist compared to Sarah, and undoing T2's iconic ending in favor of backpedaling to "Judgment Day is inevitable" is the opposite of a meaningful or interesting development to the franchise.

The action is nice, making it the least bad sequel in the Terminator franchise until Dark Fate came along and was actually a good movie in its own right.
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Dark Fate also makes Judgement Day inevitable just with a slightly later timeline than T3, which itself already had a timeline pushed back from T2 and changed the exact circumstances of Skynet. So it's shitting on T2 in exactly the same way, really. Whether it's Skynet or Legion, if the circumstances are the same, with the exact same outcome of AI computer causes nuclear armageddon then wages war on the survivors including infiltration cyborgs which travel back in time... then who cares if the name changed?

You will get no argument from me that the characters are relatively poor in T3. I just don't think Dark Fate is nearly free of these problems either.I found Dark Fate to have a lot of clumsy dialogue (even if it wasn't all shit puns or whatever) and weird characterization. For instance, I think they did Sarah Connor dirty. The standout parts for me on that front was when she just starts randomly assuming that this new person notSkynet is trying to kill must be "important because of her womb" and that "you will give birth to A MAN who will be the only hope of stopping them". Like that really doesn't feel like assumptions Sarah Connor, who was herself an average woman turned into a stone cold badass, would blithly make or phrase in that way. It's very clearly the script trying to set up expectations to knock them down later with the (not actually) surprising reveal, but it doesn't feel authentic to her character. There's sort of general weirdness all over too, like Sarah and the Mackenzienator being right up in each other's grill constantly, or the entire plotline about the T-800 feeling a bit off-kilter, or the future scenes feeling just... odd? In a way that I can't put my finger on.

I'll rewatch T3 soon to confirm whether my recollections of it are correct, but Dark Fate really disappointed me overall. Better than Genisys ain't a high bar. Even the Terminator feels like a slight iteration of the T-X concept.
 
giancarlo123x

giancarlo123x

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
25,385
I liked the dark fate opening as much as the ending in 3. I cant compute the opening being a negative.
 

Deleted member 1476

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
10,449
Neither, T1 is still the only decent movie in the whole series. People saying "T3 took it too far" must've forgot that T2 started that trend.

Dark Fate was garbage like the one named after the Hyundai car.
 
imbarkus

imbarkus

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,645
cj_iwakura said:
It flies in the face of everything we know about Sarah. She'd never let her guard down, and she sure as hell wouldn't sit there and watch while a Terminator just blew John away, then let it walk off into the sunset. It was pointless to say the least.
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If she stopped Judgement Day, then how is there still a T-800 around to do what he did? Like, as soon as SkyNet is averted, shouldn't all the T-800's cease to exist?

Time travel. The past is the future, the future is the past... it all gives me a headache.
 
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