Movies Destroyed by Sequels

[slic]

Three pointless movies.

I heartily disagree!  While I agree that the first of the three was the best, the second one was quite good, and had the nice twist where the "heartless evil" robot became good.  The inital scene with Sarah meeting the T-Arnold was excellent.

The series had been based on the idea of non-determinism, that the future is not pre-determined, is mutable and changeable, and it is yours to choose.

Perhaps you read/heard something from the writers and/or directors about what they felt the idea was, but if you are basing this on your personal interpretation, I'm sorry but you couldn't be more wrong.
The whole premise (even in the first one) was that the future was immutable.  It ends with Sarah Conner going off to the desert to await the "Final End".  The idea of "...being able to pick your own father..." - absoultely not - if John Conner had sent any one else but the guy his Mom told him about then he wouldn't exist.  Sarah's attempts to destroy Skynet before it came to life failed - they were destined to fail.

The only counterpoint in the moive plot against my idea is the comment that "they delayed the birth of Skynet", that the date told to Sarah was wrong -  but that could be explained away by an off screen act where John tells his future-Dad to tell Sarah the wrong date because that was what Jonh had always been told.

The lack of choice extends to the Terminator character - the robot had no free will whatsoever.  There are examples of reluctant heroes- - here's the pre-programmed hero.  No choice it makes is outside the bounds of it's programming.  It's not being heroic, it's being "controlled".  It doesn't take the bullets or face the "villian" out of a sense of what is right or wrong.  Even the bit at the end of T3 where John is yelling at the virused T-Arnold - that wasn't choice, that was a command.

This movie actually has strong resonance to my belief/understanding of Freewill/Predestination.
John Conner still has to make day to day choices and very often has no idea what the outcome will be - even though other people, future people, already know how his life ends.

[ClintMemo]

On the Terminator:
I liked the first one, but I liked the second one more.  I saw the third one, and it wasn't as good.
However, I have to agree with Michael about them ruining the first two. 
First off, one of the themes in #2 was "There is no fate but what you make" meaning that the future was NOT written in stone. 
Secondly, there was an alternate ending that was filmed and shown on TV in the US that had Sarah Conner as an old woman in a park with, IIRC, grand kids thinking about all the horrible things that never happened because she succeeded.  Skynet never existed and no one else would ever know what she had done.  It was shown on TV several years before they started on T3.

[Leon Kensington]

Terminator Franchise-

T1- Overall good
T2- Rambo with Robots
T3- Mindless Fun

T-Series:  I give it 3 eps. before Fox cancells it, unless it is complete crap.  Then it gets 5 seasons.

[jrderego]

Duh-duh Duh-duh Duh-duh...

No one has mentioned that death spiral of Jaws?

Jaws was unbelievably good, tense, funny, the characters were all great fun to watch and easy to identify with, the writing was crips and the effects were excellent and most of them hold up pretty well even now.

Jaws 2 was sort of okay, but without Richard Dreyfus and Robert Shaw it was missing the chemistry that made the first film so good. Also, the epic tension wasn't there as it was in the first.

Jaws 3D er... wow. Gimmicy and stupid, AND the template for virtually every direect to video/DVD shark movie made since. On the plus side it had Malcolm McDowell in it, on the minus side it had everyone else in it.

Jaws: The Revenge is possibly the worst shark movie ever made (and I've reviewed several of them shot in Bulgaria on a budget of about $500,000). Mario Van Peebles, and Michael Caine faxing in performances, a mechanical shark made largely of gray canvas. A roaring shark killed by impalement on a bowsprit.

I am one of the few who dug T3. I actually liked the way the film ended and that did a lot for the stuff that came before it. I liked how they kept the T-1's mission murky until the end.

[eytanz]

I only saw Jaws, never any of its sequels, so I can't comment on that.

As for Terminator, I'm in the camp that believes it doesn't belong in this thread. I do agree, however, with Clintmemo that the three sequels did not share a time-travel philosophy.

Terminator 1 made you think that the future was changable - Skynet thought it could get rid of John Conner by sending the terminator and killin his mother - but really it was a closed loop, as this led directly to John Conner's birth.

Terminator 2 changed this - it retconned Terminator 1 so that now Skynet created itself by sending the first Terminator - while it appears that this cements the time loop, it actually gave the Conners a way out. Destroy the chip, undo the loop. Future is changable.

Temrinator 3 has a third philosophy - this is not about closed time loops now, it's about destiny. You can prevent Skynet from arising one way, but it will arise another way. You can change how you get there, but not the direction.

No entry in this series ruined it, but each of them revised the world rather than just expand it.

[jrderego]

I only saw Jaws, never any of its sequels, so I can't comment on that.

You really owe it to yourself to see Jaws: The Revenge. Get a bunch of witty friends together, some pizza, beer, whatever, and laugh yourself into convulsions.

[Listener]

How about Harry Potter?

My first exposure to HP was the first film, which cut out so little from the book (IMO) that, outside of there being less Quidditch than in the book, I thought it was probably the most complete of any of the movies.

The second was pretty close too.  The third?  Not too many cuts, but enough.

I very much disliked a great deal of the fourth film once I'd digested it.  Visually very pleasing, with the best soundtrack of all of them (sorry, but despite John Williams's stellar work on the first one, I think Patrick Doyle's edged it JUST slightly).  But it had soooooooo many cuts, and so much stuff was smashed together, that I was seriously worried about the fifth film.  The fifth one redeemed itself a little, but there was still a lot of stuff cut that would've made the film so much better and only about 15 minutes longer.

And has anyone else noticed that the farther we go into the movies, the less Quidditch there's been?  By the next film, it won't even have ever existed!

[DKT]

There wasn't any quidditch in the OotP movie!  I did hear the director say it would probably be back in Halfblood Prince, though.

But overall, I'm not sure I agree.  Do you think maybe you feel this way because you hadn't read the first book before you saw the first movie?  I do agree that although some of the movies are pretty well made, they don't hold a candle to the books.

Sorcerer's Stone was as good as the book, and therefore my least favorite of the series.  I thought Chamber of Secrets was a lot of fun.  I really liked Prisoner of Azkaban (although there were a few cuts that really annoyed me -- specifically, why not say exactly who had created the Marauder's Map).  Goblet of Fire was good but at the same time did some things that made me go, huh?  I thought Order of the Phoenix did a lot of things right and didn't have any of the "huh" moments.  Still, I'm more forgiving with the last two because those books were so thick and I know the filmmakers have to cut stuff in order to make a good movie. 

OTOH, I really wish someone had the foresight (as they did with LOTR) to do extended cuts of the films, especially GoF and OotP.  And if they cut too much from the last book, I'll be seriously annoyed. 

[BlairHippo]

Two things I love about T1:

1)  It is, by far, the finest acting of Arnold's career.  Yeah, yeah, bar so low you could trip over it, but think about it; when he was on the screen in Terminator, I really felt like I was seeing the character (a relentless killer robot from the future) and not Ah-nold.  Name another Ah-nold movie where that's true.  (Okay, the first Conan.  Maybe.)

2)  We see the beloved Polaroid Reese has of Sarah.  He describes it to her, tells her how much time he spent looking at it, wondering what she was thinking about when it was taken.  At the end of the movie, of course, we see moment when the picture was taken....

... and she was thinking of him.

Took me several viewings to make that connection, but I got chills when I finally did.

[Russell Nash]

T1 had the benefit of being a low budget film.  Films with massive budgets are shoved into the public consciousness even if they don't deserve it (Armageddon).  If T1 had been a piece of junk, it would only be remembered as "that movie the 7 time Mr. Universe was in".

Low budget movies have to have something special to make it into the public consciousness. 

[Listener]

There wasn't any quidditch in the OotP movie!  I did hear the director say it would probably be back in Halfblood Prince, though.

But overall, I'm not sure I agree.  Do you think maybe you feel this way because you hadn't read the first book before you saw the first movie?  I do agree that although some of the movies are pretty well made, they don't hold a candle to the books.

I would have to say yes and no.  I think that, as someone who was resistant to the very idea of Harry Potter, had there not been a first film I never would have bothered to read the books.  I wouldn't say the movie was better than the book, but it was truly excellent.

[Alasdair5000]

I only saw Jaws, never any of its sequels, so I can't comment on that.

You really owe it to yourself to see Jaws: The Revenge. Get a bunch of witty friends together, some pizza, beer, whatever, and laugh yourself into convulsions.

   Michael Caine was once asked how he felt about being in Jaws:  The Revenge.  He responded with:

I've never seen it.  I have, however, seen the house it bought and that's lovely.

[DKT]

I only saw Jaws, never any of its sequels, so I can't comment on that.

You really owe it to yourself to see Jaws: The Revenge. Get a bunch of witty friends together, some pizza, beer, whatever, and laugh yourself into convulsions.

   Michael Caine was once asked how he felt about being in Jaws:  The Revenge.  He responded with:

I've never seen it.  I have, however, seen the house it bought and that's lovely.

That's hilarious.

On the Terminator movies...I will admit that I like all three of them, but I think the original is the best.  The second had the most going visually for it (and excellent pacing).  I thought the third film could have been stronger, but the ending was fantastic. 

What bugs me about the Terminator sequels, though, is why an AI like Skynet decided it would be a good idea to send back 3 terminators at different points in time to kill Sarah and John Connor?  Why didn't they just send three terminators back in time to kill Sarah?  I just can't imagine Skynet thinking...Terminator T-800 back to 1984...check.  Terminator T-1000 back to 1991...check.  Sexy Terminator back to 2003...check.  I also have a hard time imagining John Connor (and his wife) doing something similiar, although I think somewhere in a director's cut or script of T2, he did send Kyle Reese back and then found the T-800 and sent him back as well.

[eytanz]

What bugs me about the Terminator sequels, though, is why an AI like Skynet decided it would be a good idea to send back 3 terminators at different points in time to kill Sarah and John Connor?  Why didn't they just send three terminators back in time to kill Sarah?  I just can't imagine Skynet thinking...Terminator T-800 back to 1984...check.  Terminator T-1000 back to 1991...check.  Sexy Terminator back to 2003...check.  I also have a hard time imagining John Connor (and his wife) doing something similiar, although I think somewhere in a director's cut or script of T2, he did send Kyle Reese back and then found the T-800 and sent him back as well.

I think it was also supposed to be the case that skynet didn't send all three terminators at once, but that it was developing more and more advances terminators and sending them back every time it hit a milestone.

Of course, that doesn't explain why did it send them, not only to different timepoints, but to these timepoints? Why not send the T-1000, for instance, *earlier* than the first terminator movie, and have it catch the totally unsupsecting Sarah Conner before she was warned by Reese? Why not kill her as a child?

(one possible explanation is that the time travelling can only work a fixed amount of time - say, that the time portal can only take you exactly 27 years back or something. Of course, if this was the case, it was never explained. Plus, why is skynet working on better robots but not on better time-travel tech?).

[slic]

This is always the problem with introducing time travel into a story -it's the classic paradox - if Skynet succeeded in killing Sarah Connor, it would never know to kill Sarah Conner (and send a T-1 to do it) because John Conner would never exist, but then John Conner would exist so .....

Short of the parrallel time line theory that indicates an infinite number of divergent timelines - you can't change the past.  Skynet knows that the T-1 didn't kill Sarah because history tells him so - so why did it bother...stupid computer

Also when T-2 came out, I read somewhere that the logic of the movies was in fact that Skynet sent the T-1000 back first to kill John, but the T-1 proved suprising effective and resiliant, so it sent a T-1 back even further to take out Sarah.  But again this is just dumb...

As for the meanings of the movies - I don't remember T-2 all that well, just Arnie submerging himself in the molten metal near the end, so I can only go off my feelings.  As for the extra ending - that was in the novelization of T-2 as well when it came out, and I just thought it was dopey...

[Russell Nash]

Just saw Die Hard 4.  This was just bad bad bad.  The first one was really a great flick.  My willing since of disbelief was set low and didn't really need to be pushed up.  I had my setting all the way up for the new one and it was cracked by about 15 minutes in. 

[wintermute]

The Matrix.

I thought the third was a bit disappointing, but I really liked the second one.  I'm sure I'm in the minority on that.

The problem is that Reloaded and Revolutions are the same movie, split in half.

Reloaded spends the entire movie introducing odd, mysterious characters and setting up beautiful little questions, and then in Revolutions none of it gets any resolution, and all the questions Reloaded ask are just ignored without comment.

So the first half of the movie is pretty good, but then it just collapses under its own weight in the second half. Conclusion: The movie sucks.

[wintermute]

It wasn't me that mentioned Batman and Superman, but just for the record:
Batman: Excellent - Jack Nicholson as the Joker was fabulous.
Batman Returns:  Liked Michelle Pfieffer as Catwoman, hated Danny Devito as the Penguin
Batman Forever: Barely remember this, only remember not liking it very much and being ticked that they took a really interesting villain (Twoface) and turning him into a farce.  Seems like this was just another Jim Carey movie
Batman and Robin: Godawful! How can a director take that much screen talent and make such a bad movie?
Batman Begins: LOVED IT!  Best movie of the group.  I Can't wait for more.

Dark Knight, with Heath Ledger as a very dark Joker, coming to cinemas soon!

Chris Nolan is possibly the greatest director of his generation.

[stePH]

Pretty much any superhero movie gets worse with each sequel - mostly because they over do it trying to "top" the previous one.  (haven't seen FF2 - this may be the exception).

One exception is X2 - X-Men United which definitely surpassed its predecessor.  (The third, not so great, but watcheable.)

What's "FF2"?

Just saw Die Hard 4.  This was just bad bad bad.  The first one was really a great flick.  My willing since of disbelief was set low and didn't really need to be pushed up.  I had my setting all the way up for the new one and it was cracked by about 15 minutes in. 

I didn't think much of the second (Die Harder) but loved the third one with Samuel Jackson and Jeremy Irons.  Haven't seen the most recent yet.  And the original is still in my list of top 5 Christmas movies 

[wintermute]

Pretty much any superhero movie gets worse with each sequel - mostly because they over do it trying to "top" the previous one.  (haven't seen FF2 - this may be the exception).

One exception is X2 - X-Men United which definitely surpassed its predecessor.  (The third, not so great, but watcheable.)

What's "FF2"?

Fantastic Four 2. If it's better than the first one, it's only because the bar was so, so low.

[stePH]

Pretty much any superhero movie gets worse with each sequel - mostly because they over do it trying to "top" the previous one.  (haven't seen FF2 - this may be the exception).

One exception is X2 - X-Men United which definitely surpassed its predecessor.  (The third, not so great, but watcheable.)

What's "FF2"?

Fantastic Four 2. If it's better than the first one, it's only because the bar was so, so low.

Ah.  Haven't seen either.  What I've heard about them doesn't encourage me to do so.

[stePH]

Oh, and they're not SF so maybe not quite relevant to this forum, but They Call Me Mister Tibbs was a pathetic sequel to In the Heat of the Night (I never watched the TV show that came afterward so can't pass judgment on that.)

[Russell Nash]

I have a massive advantage when it comes to comic book movies.  I never read comic books.  I'm not offended by any changes made to the stories.  I can just take them as stories.

Oh, and they're not SF so maybe not quite relevant to this forum, but They Call Me Mister Tibbs was a pathetic sequel to In the Heat of the Night (I never watched the TV show that came afterward so can't pass judgment on that.)

This threads is for any type of film.  The first example given was Rocky.

[Darwinist]

Cannonball Run  .  Caddyshack.  Bring it On  .

[stePH]

Cannonball Run  .  Caddyshack.  Bring it On  .

Were the first films any good to begin with?  (OK, I'll give you Caddyshack, maybe.)