October 8, 2003
12:53 PM
12:53 PM
Always look on the bright side of life.
My most heartfelt condolences to the Californians, but the way I see it, at the very least this means a short reprieve from Terminator 4 and more crap like Eraser, The Sixth Day, End of Days, Batman and Robin... Good Lord, when was the last non-awful Ahhnuld movie? Was there one?
Arnold works when a director understands exactly what he is, and doesn't try to make him anything more.
Arnold cannot carry a movie. There's got to be some substance there. To that end, the only decent Arnold movies I can think of are the first Conan (thanks to John Milius), The Terminator, Terminator 2 (although they messed with a lot that they'd established in the first pic -- don't get me started), and True Lies.
I'd always thought Predator was passable, but on rewatching it a couple of months back, I've recanted that. And I've still got a soft spot for Commando, just because it's so ridiculous as to be funny.
OK, I'll give you "True Lies." Most of the rest... Ugh. I've never been a big Terminator fan. T3, for example, was so obviously an overblown direct-to-video release. T2 was pretty good, but I never thought it was the be-all-and-end-all that the rabid fans made it out to be.
Never had any urge to see T3, though I'll probably catch it on video. It just seemed like they'd mucked with the idea so much by this point that another sequel didn't make any sense. Hey, let's send another Terminator back through time...
I was a big fan of the original Terminator -- I'm a sucker for time-travel stories, expecially ones that manage to remain internally consistent (unlike, say, TimeCop, which I still saw). T2 worked because Cameron waited until he had something new to do with it, rather than rushing into a sequel (probably why he hasn't pushed for True Lies 2 that hard). Oh, it's got consistency problems when compared with the original (some of which work better once you realize the first film was supposed to take place in 1983, not 1984), but it works internally.
And Conan the Barbarian works because Milius treated the medium right. Dark, gritty, bloody, violent, and a sense of awe and mystery surrounding the elements of magic. All of which were completely thrown out the window for the ill-advised sequel, Conan the Destroyer.