Judgment Day: Rating the Terminators
The Terminator film series began 31 years ago. In that time, a franchise has amassed itself. Like any franchise, some of the movies are fantastic, and some aren’t. So even though you can go to any ol' shmo and ask about what order the Terminator films should be rated from best to worst, you came here. So you can see what order *I* think the movies should be rated in. So here they are. Best in the franchise to... least best.
Also, the most brutal of the movies.
I’m sure I’m upsetting people by putting this movie first. 99 percent of all living organisms prefer Terminator 2 over its predecessor. But I have always preferred this one over the sequel. I could probably do an entire article just on why I like this movie more than Judgment Day, but the long and short of it comes down to just a few points. I’ve always been a story guy. While special effects are important, they aren’t the MOST important. So even though the effects in Terminator 1 aren’t as good or cool looking as Terminator 2, and, visually speaking, this movie does not stand the test of time like Terminator 2, the story is still far superior to any of the other films. I do believe you can still have a great movie if you have no special effects and a good story. But you CANNOT have a good film with really awesome special effects and a terrible story. James Cameron has a reputation of putting effects and action before story, but at least when he made Terminator, that wasn’t the case. He understood that he could make a really awesome movie with little to work with. And that is as good a segue into my next point as I’m ever going to get. 
Arnold: The Horror Villain
Something I love about this movie that’s missing from all of the sequels is the way it plays around with genre. It’s a sci-fi movie in that it has time traveling assassin robots. But it’s much more of a horror film. Cameron must have been paying a lot of attention to Ridley Scott when Alien came out just a few years earlier. Terminator and Alien are both horror movies, specifically slasher movies, disguised as science fiction movies. The later movies abandoned this approach, most likely because, when the audience is already familiar with the monster and knows what it is, it’d be a lot harder to scare them with a spooky slasher flick again. But I love that this movie doesn’t feel constrained to just operate within the boundaries of what you would expect a science fiction movie to do. It’s something I don’t feel like enough movies do these days, to be perfectly honest. Story over effects and playing around with the genre are specific reasons I enjoy this movie, but overall, I think it’s just its placement in the overall franchise. This movie has the liberty of getting to do whatever it wants to do. It doesn’t have to worry about what came before like all of the sequels. This movie has the luxury of being able to lay down the mythology without having to be slavishly devoted to it. All the elements that became fundamental staples of the franchise like Skynet and John Connor, these are just background elements that exist only to explain parts of the story. For better or worse, the later films in the franchise didn’t feel as fresh as this one, because they’re not laying down new mythology, but playing with old mythology. And for that, I can’t help but give props to this one, which did it all without assistance from previous films. 
As I said, I could probably write an entire article on why I don’t like Terminator 2 as much as everyone else. A lot of my points are really just echoes of my praise of Terminator 1, but still, they can be said again. James Cameron is an effects over story guy, so in a way, he’s the Bizarro me. And this movie, the Bizarro Terminator 1, is all effects, and very little story. What little story there is, it’s all just a copy and paste job of the first movie. A terminator travels back in time to prevent the resistance movement of the future from gaining any traction, and simultaneously, a protector from the future comes to stop the assassin. Yes, the movie obviously makes some changes to the story: Instead of a human protecting the Connor clan, this time, it’s a machine! What a twist! This time, instead of the helpless target being a young waitress who has probably never held a gun before, now it’s a 12ish year old kid who knows what his future holds, but circumstances (and his cockish attitude) have prevented him from fully preparing for what is to come. (And his acting isn’t that great, if we’re being brutally honest. I’ve only ever seen this kid in that one Aerosmith music video, and this movie, and some of his line deliveries in this film are…questionable. But hey, he was young, and I’m almost certain Cameron chose him because he can do the whole “sad face when mommy is yelling at me” thing and evoke audience sympathy, so he did great in that regard.) Cameron is still pretty genius to have made this work, considering he really doesn’t change all that much from the basic skeleton of the first movie. It's really the effects where this movie shines. Even as a story guy, I can say the special effects of this movie that’s almost a quarter of a century old, they still look good today. Terminator Genisys has a Liquid Terminator in it, and it does not look any better than the one in Terminator 2. That’s how fantastic the effects look in this movie. But, like I said, that’s really the only thing that puts this movie so high on my list. Well, that and the other movies being leagues worse than this one. 
Placing this one was hard, because I think it’s about neck and neck with Terminator 3. But for a few reasons, I’m putting it ahead of that one. Much like Terminator 2 and 3, this movie borrows a lot of plot from the first movie. There’s an evil computer mind from the future that sends minions back in time for an objective, and the not-evil humans send people back in time for their own objectives and counter objectives. But unlike 2 and 3, this movie gets past all of that about 20 or 30 minutes into the movie, and then it’s an entirely different ballgame. Heck, it’s an entirely different sport. This movie isn’t perfect, but that it tries to take the franchise in a different direction without just resorting to regurgitating the plot of a 30 year old movie, means a lot to me. 
But with 1984!
I think whether you love or hate this movie depends on what you are judging it for. If you are looking at it as just a film, you are probably not going to like it very much, because, as one reviewer said, it really is just a 2 hour attempt to reshuffle the timeline in an attempt to tell some other kind of story in an adjusted timeline, in a sequel. So as a film, by itself, it fails. But if you are just watching it and comparing it to the rest of the Terminator movies, which is what I was doing, it works quite a bit better than half of the existing movies, which was my only expectation, going in. If I’m comparing this to how much theft the second and third movies got away with, this movie does just the right amount of innovating while also using enough elements from previous films to forge a new path. Admittedly, the success or failure of this new path won’t be very clear until we see Terminator 6: The Undiscovered Country. But for now, I’m fine with placing this movie halfway up the ladder. 
By this point, it’s hard for me to talk about why a movie ranks where it ranks without just repeating what I’ve already said about other movies. Which is exactly what this movie did. This movie has the exact same skeleton as the previous one. Skynet is still a looming threat, Arnold is still a protector, John Connor is still a whiny-face. Just like its predecessor, it also changes a few minor details, and this results in some fun ideas, but it’s not enough to say that this is really a worthy installment of the franchise. I like the idea of a machine specifically designed to kill other machines, but then, why is THAT machine sent back in time to eliminate other key members of the resistance? Other than “we need something different for our bad guy that we haven’t done yet.” And I REALLY like the idea that John Connor isn’t the only person in the resistance who is important. Sure, he can be the top banana, but there would be others who are pretty important as well. But this movie kinda wastes that idea by not doing much with it other than just throwing it out there, and it comes way too late in the overall timeline. 
Telling us 3 minutes before Judgment Day that there are other important people in the Resistance is no Bueno. There should have been some kind of Terminator 2.5 where John receives intel from the future about other members of the Resistance, and then he can meet them BEFORE the rise of the machines, and begin setting up a network that can more easily save humanity and the timeline. That could have even been this movie and I wouldn’t have cried, to be honest. 
On paper, this movie sounded really awesome. We’ve only seen and heard glimpses of the dark blighted future that Kyle Reese came from, but now we’ll get an entire movie devoted to it. YES! For the first time in this film’s franchise, we’re not copying and pasting plots and changing a few minor things. ORIGINALITY! YES! And while the choice of showing how John Connor and Kyle Reese first met seems a little puzzling to focus an entire movie on, it could have worked, if done right. Remember Kyle Reese’s speech about how he’d die for John Connor? What if, when they first meet, he’s some punk kid who’d sooner eat a baby for sustenance than die for anyone, but over the course of the movie, he goes from being a belligerent malcontent to having a respect for John, and joining the resistance movement at the end. Not to toot my own horn, but that sounds like it could have been a really wicked awesome movie. So what went wrong? Number one, the movie spends waaaay too much time focusing on some dude we don’t know or care about. We find out he is a prototypical machine designed by Skynet (before the rise of the machines, at that) to gain John Connor’s trust so he can lead him into a trap. Others have pointed out how much this plot rests on numerous conveniences to even work, so let’s skip that. WE DON’T CARE ABOUT THE DUDE FROM AVATAR. Either show us a movie about Kyle Reese slowly coming to respect John Connor, or show us a movie where John Connor starts off as a soldier and ends up being the leader of the resistance movement (remember, just because him and Katherine Brewster were in the bunker at the end of 3 doesn’t mean he’s automatically in charge of the humans who survived. He’d have to rise in the ranks, and this movie COULD have been that). 
Either one of these would have worked fine, and could have given the Terminator Franchise a shot in the arm, since it was doomed to eventually move forward into the war against the machines at the rate it was going, and like I said, this would have been the first really original plot since 1984. But making the character we don’t care about the protagonist, having a plot that rests entirely on contrivances in order to work, plus weird inconsistencies with the timeline (we’re told in the first movie that the Terminators with real human skin are a pretty new innovation, yet Skynet made a pretty flawless one back in 2003, I guess. Or how everyone in the Resistance and Skynet all seem to think John Connor is important, even though he hasn’t done anything yet. It made sense in the previous movies that people from the future thought he was important, since they were from the future. But these people know things they shouldn’t yet know) makes this the worst Terminator film of all time. So that’s my list. I know people will disagree, but that’s the beauty about discourse and stuff. If my list made you think, then that’s awesome! And if you hate me because of the order I put these, then that’s less awesome. Would love to hear your own rankings and your thoughts on mine! In the meantime, stay Trashy, muties! ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ReuBen DeBord has written a few things on the internet. On the wunderkind of a website, the Essential Webcomics Showcase, he has written a few pieces you may have heard of, such as "50 Reasons why I hate Smallville", and his ongoing series called “If It’s Broken, they won’t fix it.” If you don’t feel like waiting 5 months for him to put something on that website, then you can go to his Youtube page, where he tries to put up content a couple of times a week, and has even managed to squeeze out content once a day, for a while there. This is where you can see him review movies, comics and things that are just kinda related to this corner of pop culture.
Outside of his writing, there are rumors that ReuBen is a surviving clone of some kind. Either from the Clone Wars, or an unknown from Peter Parker’s past. Either way, he’s pretty crazy. It’s a good thing he focuses 95 percent of his energy on writing stuff for the internet. 
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