Its almost ridiculous how many (un)talented people were awarded the opportunity honor of working on the Terminator! They were handpicked and nothing less than honored to work on a sequel to the greatest movie ever made and tell beautiful stories set in the world created by James Cameron!

Today everyone are slobbing at even the mention of Christopher Nolan and his (inter)stellar work on Batman trilogy. Have you noticed how everything now days is a trilogy or a franchise? There was only one trilogy!
Only thing that saved Nolan’s Batman was the phenomenal performance by Heath Ledger as The Joker in the second movie. Before that it was just a “real Batman” movie, and the best thing about it was that it didn’t have any comic book style, it was all true to life. No, thanks. I like superhero™ movies to be a healthy mix of fantasy and reality. If you need an example, take a look at what Jon Favreau has done with The Avengers.

Superhero or action movies today lack that something, that X factor, that “lets kick some ass” factor, the emotional grandeur and scale. After T2, there were little to none good SciFi action movies, let alone based on super heroes™ until Bryan Singer came along and created two beautiful X-Men movies.
We can only speak high praise about how story was great and how effects were unobstructive to the story, how awesome Rebecca Romijn Stamos looked as Mystique. To overlook other characters would be an insult not to point out, but each and single one of them were absolutely perfect. The best thing of all it was different, it was bold and it was fresh. If you look at the second film in the series, have you ever noticed how many sets and plots are crammed into one movie and you wont feel confused or bored for 1 second of it. Hats off to Bryan Singer.

List of TrekNexus favorite directors:

1. James Cameron
2. Bryan Singer
3. Robert Zemeckis
4. Stanley Kubrick
5. Kevin Smith

List of TrekNexus least favorite directors:

1. Jar Jar Abrams
2. George Lucas
3. Michael Bay
4. Kevin Smith
5. Christopher Nolan

So, what the hell happened after Terminator 2? Well… A lot of things. In Hollywood and generally in life, you need to know when you overstayed your welcome and when is the time to leave. James Cameron did exactly that, he came on the world stage and dominated it ever since, but he knew when he performed his best work and just dropped the mic and walked away to something else. One thing that is truly fascinating is that Cameron is not a typical director, he is an explorer/director. Do you know what’s great about him? The man stole and recut the movie so it would turn out how he intended it to be. He is a rebel and an adventurer.

That’s what was missing from the future Terminator projects, either them being on tv or big silver screen. Some of them were fans, but not the type of person that would raise the bar further, as was the case with Jonathan Mostow. Then they did an ultimate disservice to the fans, they couldn’t get Linda Hamilton and Edward Furlong who was perfect in every way for John Connor.

Do you know why those movies failed, because they were made on the concept of “lets-make-money”, which was and remained their first goal. It wasn’t about the fans, it wasn’t about making the next movie better it was about the managers and the bottom line – how much money will it make. They thought Arnold would have the strength to pull it off on his own, but that doesn’t work like that. There were stories that the cast tried, that Arnie even financed one of the scenes from his own pocket but it didn’t help overall. James was smart to distance himself from any of the project and he gave an awesome advice to Arnold to take as much money as he could for the sequel.