The Terminator kicked T2’s ass (so long as you overlook special effects which are not the fault of the original movie)
I like A New Hope the best of all the Star Wars Movies. Return of the Jedi would have been the best if they had gone with wookies and not ewoks. Stupid merchandising decision. Ruined the film.
Rush Hour was superior to Rush Hour 2.
I like both the Die Hard movies equally and deny that Die Hard 3 (that was the one with Samuel L Jackson?) is a part of the Die Hard line.
I like the Scream movies discussion on the various movie rules for sequels and trilogies.
In general sequels are not superior to the original.
I’ve always thought that one of the reasons that sequels are usually not as good as the original is that sequels tend to get made when the original is a good movie.
So, for example, Die Hard 2 was (IMO) a slightly-better-than-average action movie, but it is considered ‘bad’ because it is compared to Die Hard, which is a very good action movie.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was much better than Star Trek: The Motion Picture. (The latter was almost the same as the TOS episode “The Changeling”.)
The whole series of 9 (soon to be 10) Star Trek movies vary up and down the scale. The fourth TNG movie (tenth of all of them) – at one time called Star Trek: Nemesis – sounds like it’ll be better than ST:Insurrection, but not ST:First Contact.
I don’t know if it’s fair to compare Terminator and T2. T1 had a $6.4 million budget (so says IMDB), whereas T2 had $100 million. Apples and oranges, if you ask me.
I thought Star Trek 2 was better than 1. And I found Lethal Weapon 4 more enjoyable than the original… although I admit that was due to the bad guy*
*Or was Jet Li the bad guy?
As stated before (thanks lenin… and I promise that is the last time I’ll thank Lenin or any other Soviet ;)):
Empire was the best SW flick, much better than ANH.
And Indy III was the best Indiana Jones flick.
I also have to say that Patriot Games was better than Hunt for Red October (maybe that is because they made the smart decision to trade in Alec Baldwin for a shiny Harrison Ford… who makes a better Jack Ryan anyway). Clear & Present Danger wasn’t that bad either (though Sum of All Fears looks like it might just suck… especially since they are going back to the young black haired actor type… instead of Baldwin it is Affleck… ugh).
I would think that more people prefer The Road Warrior to Mad Max (and I’ll just ignore Thunder Dome).
The Exorcist III is easily better than II, and perhaps just a step below the original, although there are those who claim it to be the best of the three.
Hellraiser II has a lot more neat stuff than I, but I don’t think it’s as good. At best an equal. Everything after that was crap, however.
Dawn of the Dead, while very much a different film than Night of the Living Dead, outdoes the original in many, many ways. Personally I like the first better, but I might be in the minority here.
And Ghandi II: The Quickening easily kicks the first film’s celuloid backside.
To me, the most notably better sequel was City Slickers II: Curly’s Gold.
They were both funny, but II was hysterical.
Empire was better than Star Wars, Terminator was better than T2, and Alien & Aliens are so different that it’s difficult to compare them. But they were both superb. Airplane 2 was better than Airplane!, but only becuase it had Captain Kirk.
Army of Darkness was better than Evil Dead, even if you count ED2, Highlander 2 isn’t even fit to wipe blood off the sword of Highlander (don’t even TALK about the series!), and Event Horizon SUCKED (I know that has nothing to do with the thread, but I can’t participate in a discussion about the relative merits of movies without emphasizing how horrible the twist was in that movie. I almost didn’t see the Matrix just because Larry Fishburne is in it).
To be honest, T2 is to me the perfect ideal of what a sequel shoud be. It develops the characters further, far enough into the future that we’re curious about how things have gone, and it takes us in a totally unexpected direction (WHAT?! The Terminator is the GOOD GUY???) and does it well.
Oh, and I second the vote for Bride of Frankenstein. I saw it for the first time about a month ago, and I was almost in tears watching that movie. It’s one of the finest stories ever committed to film, and it was handled brilliantly.
Star Trek II was immensely better than the first. Too bad it’s been downhill since.
Return of the Killer Tomatoes was a modern classic in the true Bergman school, a small but significant improvement over the mere film noir triumph that was Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.
I think that GF2 with the background material of GF1 is the better of the two really top notch films. Both would make my top 100 list, and be high on it.
As for sequels not mentioned that are better: Bill and Ted’s Totally Bogus Journey was better than the Excellent Adventure. It had something for everyone. DUDE!
While I don’t think that The Two Jakes was better than Chinatown, I do think that it is a wonderful film and terribly underrated. It never goes away.
