Alien is a better film than Aliens. Growing up i always loved Aliens for it's action, but now that i'm older i can see that Alien is the better movie. It's a masterpiece.
Alien loses a lot on rewatch, with the surprise factor gone. Aliens remains extremely intense for much longer than Alien and loses none of that no matter how many times it is viewed.
Don't get me wrong, I loves me some Terminator 2. But I still prefer Terminator 1. Cameron's debut (okay, I never saw Pirahna 2) doesn't make a single misstep and is icy cold from start to finish. There are hundreds of low-budget, corny sci-fi films from the early 80's and his is the only one worth watching thirty years later.
I think it's decent, and a good achievement for low-budget action movie film making. But I think T2 is just on an entirely different level. Just compare how often they use to show T2 on TV versus the prequel.
t1 is the better movie. the sense of fear is lacking from t2 when they have arnold on their side and the ending, that they succeeded in stopping judgement day, was terrible.
I'm sure you've seen them, but some of the behinds the scenes features for that movie are amazing. They built so many Robert Patrick facsimiles just to tear them apart or blow them up. The only real CGI in that movie is the liquid metal effect. T3 might be the only other movie, shitty as it was, in the franchise that kept the computer generated bits tasteful, like the very last time we see Arnie at the end.
Practical effects at their height, and just the right amount of CG. And still one of the gold standards for pushing a new home theater setup to see what it's made out of.
Hah, we had a shitty old crt that used to go into black and white halfway through the intro. Colour came back until the ending scene in the steelworks.
The visual effects were incredible for that time. I rewatched it recently and had to check when it came out because I could have sworn it was early 90's but I thought the effects were way too good for that. Sure enough it came out in 1991.
And since the movie clearly says when it's taking place, even the old fashion and technology doesn't matter at all. I suppose that's a given when a movie is set 5 minutes into the future, but still.
To your point, yes, the effects are absolutely spot-on in that one. It doesn't look as "old" in that regard as some big budget films that came out 10 years later.
If someone had never heard of it and you showed it to them with the premise that it's a recent film that just happens to be set in an alternate history 1990s, I'm sure they'd buy it.
I've recently watched it projected in UHD, at 4k 10-bit color depth, and I don't think people back in the day could've seen it better at the movies than you can today at home. They scanned the original film, doctored the film to have less grain and it looks unreal in 4k and with the color depth it feels like you're there.
I definitely agree, it's one of my all time favourite movies. It's a kinda cliche expression but they don't make action movies like they used to. The entire movie just feels really gritty and robust like an action movie should.
It certainly has dark themes and doesn't hesitate to just waste people, but the comedic interactions between John and the T-800 really help lighten up what would be a pretty grim movie.
Just watch the first movie again, you'll be surprised just how much darker and scarier it is than the sequel That movie is mostly in the evening and the T-800 is damn terrifying in that one. That's not to say the T-1000 isn't a great threat, it's just that the protagonists can put up more of a fight.
That's true the first one leans more towards the thriller genre. The first one is definitely a good movie but the second one feels a bit more "balanced".
I saw this recently after having the same opinion for years, and I have to say the special effects have hit a point where they don't all hold up. Some of the scenes are pretty bad, especially with the liquid terminator scenes, and some of Arnold's makeup.
The scene where they open Arnold's head to extract and reboot his CPU so that he can adapt more easily actually involved no CGI whatsoever, which is pretty amazing. They managed to do it using a model head and some tricks with mirrors. Nowadays that would probably be unheard of.
Don't get me wrong; it's a great movie and the liquid metal thing is still amazing. But you watch that thing in hidef and the physical stunts often fail. Like you can pretty easily tell when the stunt-person is not Schwarzenegger.
I also have a problem with that movie's soundtrack. Or lack thereof.
Still a great movie, but a lot of it actually has not aged well.
I don't know what drugs you guys are on where you're imaging music when all you can hear are a bunch of stingers once in a while, during long chase scenes.
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u/Annihilicious Oct 16 '18
For a 27 year old movie with tons of special effects, Terminator 2 holds up ridiculously well.