One of my favorite Sci-Fi/Action franchises is the Terminator series. From the movies, to the comics, to the various games… From the day I first saw Terminator 2 back in the early 90’s, I was hooked. Terminator 4 – in my opinion – is better than Terminator 2. After seeing the story play out through the first 3 films, and having a massive mental backlog of all the comic book plots in my head, the chance to see the actual future war of man vs machine was absolute nerd porn for me. Don’t get me wrong here, I absolutely loved the first 2 films, but I needed something new – especially after the absolute cluster!@#$ that was Terminator 3, Rise of the Machines.
Back when I saw it, I thought it was good – but not great – addition to the lexicon. My biggest complaint? It was too tongue in cheek. It’s like they took the idea of the final lead up to Judgement day, made a movie, but came to the stark realization that while the fans would be entertained – it was missing something. Unfortunately, that ‘something’ equated to a lot of un-necessary tongue in cheek humor, extra dialogue, and machines with emotion. Now I get it, they’re supposed to be able to learn from humans so they may act more like them… Just the same, a lot of the dialogue from both the protagonist and antagonist was complete crap. So much of the movie came off like a directors cut, footage that should have been shelved along with that absolutely absurd “Candy” cut where Swarzenegger plays a soldier with a ridiculous southern accent, and another actor provide the voice – for what would eventually be the T-800 portrayed by Arnold over the course of 3 films. They took a serious action/sci-fi player and decided to turn it into an episode of Firefly.
(Note: Love firefly, but if you take the formula of Serenity and apply it to a bunch of killer machines – you get Terminator 3, it just doesn’t work).
So I sat down, ripped the film to a file, and opened up Freemake Video Converter. In total, I cut about 5 minutes of footage from the film. What comes from it though, is a giant leap towards what Terminator 3 could have been. Gone is the slapstick bullshit, the emotional reactions of machines, the inane dialog… Start to finish, it’s a Terminator movie… not the spoof of a Terminator movie that we all endured.
My problem now is – how do I go about sharing this? I figure I’ll cut some short clips and try to put them on YouTube to show the differences, but ideally I’d like to be able to make it available to fans without getting sued… Anyone have a suggestion? 🙂
