This "Bad Judgement" being the continuation of the Terminator universe after Terminator 2. You see, the key to a good sequel is to continue the story of the previous movie, not rehash it. T2 did this. It had the new addition of the John Connor character as a regular, and the interesting twist of Schwarzennager protecting what he used to want to destroy. As if this weren't enough, the movie then went on to explain how the events of Terminator 1 had created the machine uprising which the series was based off. Kudos to the writers for using time travel uber-cooly, as it was meant to be used.
T3 however, was a piece of crap. I mean, who thought that redoing the exact same plot of T2 was a good idea? Despite what Hollywood may think, the incorporation of a hot female Terminator is not enough to make us think that that turd of a movie was actually good, though she was appreciated. And of course the worst part of T3 was that they ended up negating the entire message and achievement of T2. It wasn't bad enough to make a terrible sequel to a great movie, no, they also had to go back and ruin part of what made that great movie great.
And they still haven't given up. Now we have two new Terminator projects- the tv series (which appears to take place between T2 and [cringe]T3) and a fourth movie in the works. I'm watching the series right now, and thus far I'm pretty disappointed. First off, Sarah Connor is completely not her badass T2 self. She appears to ahve reverted to her sissy T1 days. Unrealistic and dissapointing. Then we'ev got Summer Glau (River from Firefly/Serenity) as the new protecting Terminator. River was always my least favorite Firefly character, but I blamed Whedon more for that than I did Glau. Whedon obviously had a great ability to flesh out the other characters in the show, but copped out by hoping that making River 'that crazy girl' would be character enough. And the sad thing is, most people thought it was, taking her ambiguous character for a deep and complex one, when in many ways she was a flat (and often annoying) character. But despite this, I had hope that Glau may actually be a good actress, and while I haven't been proven wrong, I sure haven't been proven right yet either. Among the other roles I've seen her in since Serenity were a similar crazy girl in a SciFi Original movie (career low point?), and now a Terminator? Can she play a human and show human emotions? The world may never know if she keeps being typecast as mysterious, crazy, and inhuman. And by the way, it's really weird to see her with so much makeup on. I prefer her without it. And one more complaint- How can all this crap happen between T2 and T3 and not get mentioned in T3 at all?
As far as this fourth movie goes, I'm not really sure what to think. What with it being T4, I assume it takes place after T3, and that sounds even more terrible. I mean, T3 was already excessive, and all a sequel could do would be to spell out what was already explained in the previous movies. It's be like BSG Razor; stuff we were told in stories doesn't need to be spelled out for us again, though Razor did have a good ending. The world (by which i mean Terminator fans) seem to be psyched about Christian Bale possibly starring in the movie, but that doesn't say anything about the plot. It'll likely just turn into one big action sequence with shreds of a plot here and there, and unlike in Mario (damnit!), that's not what I like to see in movies.
For the record, I'm not actually that big of a Terminator fan, but to me this milking of a franchise is a representation of how Hollywood kills decent stories (See "The X-Files" and arguably "SG-1", though I don't think so). Really I just don't want to do my homework and figured I'd blog about what I was watching on tv. If my music slut tendencies are any indicator, I'll be drooling over this show in a week.
-OSK
Waitwaitwait...The last supper? And Six is Jesus? And Baltar is Mary Magdalene?
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