welcome back! if you missed part 1, as a reminder we’re here because i had to watch terminator 2 for my childhood movies list so i figured that was a good excuse to watch all of those including the two most recent ones which i hadn’t seen yet. and i remembered there being a robocop vs. terminator video game, turns out it was based on a comic book, kinda sad we never got a movie about that! but yeah, figured we might as well do all the robocop movies too given that tenuous, barely-there connection.
look, it works for alien and predator, leave me alone.
robocop: alpha commando (tv series 1998)
i watched the three-part pilot and then just sorta skimmed for episodes that sounded fun, and they mostly were. this was a lot more harmless fun and less overt copaganda than the other cartoon. it has basically nothing to do with the movies and other shows. so all you really have to contend with is the usual awful writing and loud dumbness of your average kids cartoon that doesn’t even slightly respect its audience. oh, and some rather cartoonish racism against a nonexistent country in the pilot.
(but the pilot also had an femdommy lady who captured robocop and said stuff like “once your defenses are broken down your delicious powers will be reprogrammed to serve me” and “stop fighting your reprogramming” and “how dare you touch my robocop” and planted a post-hypnotic suggestion in him, so who can say if it’s bad or good.)
i can’t really complain about this too much considering it gave us plots like “an evil arcade owner kidnaps and brainwashes kids” and “terrorists take over a moon colony and threaten the earth.” and the bondage situation was acceptable.
superman vs. the terminator: death to the future (comic 1999-2000)
writer: alan grant
artists: steve pugh & mike perkins
you look at the title and think “huh, how’s that supposed to work” and then you finish reading it and think “huh, how was that supposed to work.” you probably figure cyborg is gonna be involved and lex is gonna hear about skynet and think “hey that sounds dope, lemme get in on that” and yep exactly those things happen. (though, the latter is just foreshadowed on the last page which again you could’ve probably guessed as soon as it wasn’t part of the main plot.)
these two worlds just kinda don’t go together at all and trying to pretend they do results in this really weird, sterile nothingness. and this period of time wasn’t exactly a nadir for either one of these franchises on their own, so seeing them combined into something so thoroughly unimpressive was kind of sad. c-rank
robocop: prime directives (miniseries 2001)
this could have been okay if it weren’t 8 hours long. and even then i probably prefer it to the first two robocop movies but that isn’t saying much.
whenever this has Something To Say, it’s bad (actual example: “cops not being able to shoot people would be Bad, Actually”). and it’s just so unnecessarily long and repetitive.
the bones of the story (the backstory, the creation of robocable, robocop vs. robocable, robocable’s redemption) would make a pretty great two or maybe even three-episode miniseries but stretching it to four just resulted in way too much filler and repeating every plot point two or three times until you get bored of keeping up with who’s on whose side.
robocable himself is pretty dang cool. though i think it’s pretty funny that his black armor is a dead ringer for robocop’s in the 2014 reboot. it’s black so you know he’s eeeeevil! also he has the only power that’s cooler than robocop’s power of gun: two gun!
there’s a supercut in here that would make a pretty good movie or miniseries, maybe. but in its current form it’s just much too bloated for me to not get bored by it, and i’m the kind of idiot who likes 3 to 4-hour long movies as long as they are actually interesting. d-rank
terminator 3: rise of the machines (movie 2003)
if you’re going to bother watching this i would highly (heh) recommend doing it the way we did: getting drunk or high and having people to snark at it with.
like… it’s not a complete chore to watch, but it’s just kind of… nothing? like, if skynet sent a terminator back in time to stop this movie from being made it would change literally nothing. so being extra primed to enjoy the unintentionally hilarious moments really, really helps.
my favorite moment of this movie is when the bad terminator crashes a helicopter in a tunnel to get to john and kate, but before she can attack them the good terminator crashes another helicopter into hers in a virtually identical shot. as it happened, time seemed to slow down as i realized i knew the perfect thing to say: “because the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a helicopter is a good guy with a helicopter.”
seriously, being lit enough to take this kind of joy in a movie’s badness is way, way better than just being bored or disappointed (if you haven’t seen it before) for an hour and forty-five minutes. c-rank
painkiller jane vs. terminator: time to kill (comic 2007)
writer: jimmy palmiotti
artist: nigel raynor
this is way better than superman vs. the terminator. i can only imagine how much i would’ve liked it if i actually knew anything about painkiller jane. but even without knowing anything about one of the two franchises in this crossover, i loved it. and it was even kinda gay!! plus i was kinda gay for that terminator and her punk rock look, especially when more and more of her metal skeleton started getting revealed, holy shit she was badass. b-rank
terminator: the sarah connor chronicles (tv series 2008-09)
yeah this is pretty easily the best post-t2 terminator content, and it’s super bingeable. (source: i just watched the whole show in a matter of days.) i’m not saying it’s on t2’s level, there isn’t anything on this entire list that is, but it’s still the only really worthy successor. and it was kind of a pleasant shock to actually watch a good, engaging tv show after the procession of robocop shows earlier in this review that uniformly put me to sleep.
it really doesn’t hurt that it stars lena headey and thomas dekker. the latter name probably isn’t as familiar to most, but he played claire’s best friend in the first season of heroes and was blatantly supposed to be gay but they eventually chickened out at the last minute. i had a huge crush on him because this was around the same time i was coming to terms with my own sexual orientation, i think he was my livejournal avatar for a minute, and one of my first gay boy crushes, so yeah. maybe that’s the common thread that determines whether i’m going to like terminator media or not, whether or not there was an age-appropriate john conner for me to crush on.
i kinda wish that at the time i had followed him by switching over to watching the sarah connor chronicles to crush on him in an actually good show instead of watching the next two awful seasons of heroes, but oh well.
it’s kinda wild that lena headey didn’t dye her hair or wear a wig or anything? and kinda ironic considering she ended up doing so for her most famous role a few years later. still, i super buy her version of sarah and dekker’s version of john, and that’s probably one of the biggest reasons this series is the only truly great post-t2 terminator content.
oh one thing that does need to be said is there is one episode with a trans woman, and it’s not… i mean, it’s definitely transphobic by today’s standards, but it was probably about the best we got on mainstream tv around 2008? but it was… yeah, it was very, very 2008. so, just be aware of… that.
terminator: salvation (movie 2009)
my memory of this from the only other time i saw it (in theaters in 2009) was that it was… fine? and pretty unmemorable. revisiting it, i found it… fine? and immediately forgot almost everything about it.
like. i think it’s pretty damn easy to make a movie set in the war-torn future suggested by the terminator and t2. it’s not a bad idea on the face of it. but this is so a product of its time. monochromatic. (okay, fine: dichromatic. it’s got brown and gray!) morose. lots of yelling and indistinct dialogue. everyone hates everyone and everything and themselves. christian bale is there for some reason.
this didn’t put me to sleep, but that’s about the best i can say for it? that, and there was just enough good shit in here that they were able to make a pretty great trailer out of it, but you can honestly skip the movie and just watch the trailer and get most of what’s worth seeing. like that pretty awesome shot of the helicopter landing on a terminator skull and john stepping over it. that was genuinely pretty cool.
oh, and i liked john’s radio broadcasts. and how he either started or ended all of them with “if you’re listening to this, you are the resistance.” i don’t super love the way the resistance is characterized for the bulk of the movie, but that part squares more with what i’m looking for.
honestly, if they wanted to make christopher nolan’s version of terminator i really feel like they should’ve just gone out and gotten christopher nolan. i still don’t think i would’ve loved it, but it might’ve at least been more memorable. c-rank
terminator/robocop: kill human (comic book 2011)
this isn’t amazing or anything, but it is definitely better than frank miller’s robocop vs. the terminator. if nothing else it has the ahnold t-800 squaring off against robocop, which has to be what everyone has in mind when they hear “robocop vs. terminator.”
i’m not trying to argue this is a masterpiece or anything, it’s honestly pretty mediocre. the characterization of sarah and john is fairly weak and having robocop win at one point thanks to a ceo ex machina is eyeroll worthy. i’m just saying it’s noticeably better than its more well-known predecessor. c-rank
robocop (movie 2014)
yeah this was exactly as mediocre as i remembered but even boringer. i checked out halfway through.
i have two (2) nice things to say about this. i think how sterile the rest of this movie was actually made the (much tamer) body horror more uncomfortable? like, i kind of had to look away from the screen for all of it? i fully realize that the stuff in the original was much gnarlier, but this nevertheless got to me more, and that’s the only explanation i can come up for as to why.
the other thing is those samuel l. jackson segments were better and more well-intentioned satire than anything in the original movies. so, there’s that at least?
this is still boring as fuck, though. and not anti-cop enough. d-rank
terminator: genisys (movie 2015)
i’ve been hearing since this came out that the first half of it was actually kind of great and the second half is a heaping trashfire, but i didn’t realize how literal y’all were being! it’s literally at the one hour mark of this two-hour movie that this nosedives from “hey this is actually pretty good so far?” to “this is SO stupid, what the fuck, what the FUCK how is this SO stupid???”
i mean, it’s probably better than terminator 3 or salvation because at least half of it is good and the half that isn’t is bad in a hilarious way that’s fun to yell at.
i mean, i didn’t even have to be high to enjoy this one. c-rank
mortal kombat 11 (video game 2019)
okay this isn’t a “review,” per se, since i just watched gameplay footage on youtube, but yeah. the terminator (the arnold t-800 one) and robocop are both dlc characters for mk11, and they have some special dialog in their intro scenes when they fight each other. it’s honestly more satisfying to watch this than it is to read the comics.
terminator: dark fate (movie 2019)
so, follow me on this for a second. when it came out terminator 3: rise of the machines was the best terminator movie since t2 simply by virtue of being the only terminator movie since t2. then came terminator salvation which was the best terminator movie since t2 thanks to not being terminator 3: rise of the machines. you could probably have a pretty good argument about whether the uniform blandness of terminator salvation is better than terminator genisys being half pretty good and half a heaping trashfire, but i’m going to come down on the side that genisys is better because at least half of it is genuinely good.
terminator: dark fate is the first actually good start-to-finish terminator movie since t2, easily the best post-t2 terminator movie… and it continued the pattern! so if they keep making these things and they keep getting incrementally better, eventually they’ll be as good as t2, right?
in all seriousness, the best way forward for the series would be to pick up on what was established here and just keep going instead of reboot after reboot after reboot, but given that all signs point towards no sequels given dark fate’s disappointing box office performance, if there is a next terminator movie it’ll probably just be yet another reboot.
given that, i kind of hope they just don’t make another one. they had something here, they really did, but just… enough with the endless reboots already. b-rank
transformers vs. the terminator (comic book, 2020)
writers: john barber & david mariotte
artist: alex milne
at least we get to end on a good note!
this is pretty easily the best of the various “terminator vs. [x]” comics on this list. i admittedly don’t know a ton about transformers aside from what was in the movies, and i’ve seen a handful of episodes of the various tv shows, but i thought these two worlds meshed together surprisingly well! everyone seemed in character (and the biggest characters you’d expect to see from both franchises made appearances), and they actually told a new and interesting story. the idea that skynet and humans would end up on the same side in the face of another threat is something that just never occurred to me.
i really think this is about as good as any of these silly crossovers possibly could be. it’s nice to see one of these finally actually deliver. a-rank
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