spell check is my friend that was supposed to be germane.
Dude!! You’re not even comparing the same kind of movies. You mind as well ask “who’s better? James Bond vs New Coke?”.
James Bond is the standard by which all non-reality based spy movies are judged. The movies themselves will never win an Acadamy reward, however they have persisted for decades because they feed into the core of every mans desire - a job where you travel the world with an unlimited expense acount, banging hot chicks indescriminently, cool weapons and gadgets, and a license to kill anyone who looks at you cockeyed!
Every bad guy always try’s to turn Bond with their “what reward do you get for all your loyalty to Queen and Country?” speech. Oh you mean OTHER than the custom Austin Martin, the clothes, the expense account, the exotic travel and the hot girls? Yeah…when you put it like that, being your chrome jump-suited lacky at your volcano lair sounds like a good career move.
Steven Segal basically got his start in the “righteous vengence to set right some trouble in the old neighborhood” business. There were of course, the classics like Above the Law, Hard to Kill and Marked for Death. Under Seige, unlike its ridiculous sequal was awesome. In fact, it was so good, that for the entire semester, my fraternity was afraid to fire our cook less he come and kill us all Navy SEAL style. Since then, he has made a variety of largely forgetable movies, including his militant environmental trifeca - On Deadly Ground, Fire Down Below and The Patriot.
Exit Wounds was pretty awesome though.
Now lets talk Matrix vs SkyNet. Neither are particularly realistic. Both systems surviving a nuclear war? I don’t think so. In the Animatrix, they said that the machines were not affected by the heat and radiation from the humans nuclear weapons. Uh…how about that heat, blast and EMP (which we know for a fact that Matrix machines aren’t shielded against) from a nuclear blast would fuck that shit up big time? Sure the whole human power source thing us absurd but so is the need for machines to pretend to look human. But who cares. Neither movie was meant to be a diseration on the future of AI.
Matrix certainly gives us more insite into the AI’s thought processes where as Skynet is basically just a robot factory.
Terminator was an awesome movie. Great sci-fi angle, a plot that keeps you constantly on the edge of your seat, great action, and a look and feel to it that was really compelling. The only limitation was in the stilted-looking special effects.
T-2 was a rare thing - a sequel almost as good as the original. It managed to keep the same feel as the first movie, but adding some new twists: the terminator now being the good guy, a sadder-but-tougher Sarah Connor, state-of-the-art special effects (for the time), and the time-paradox of the remnants of the original terminator being used to develop Skynet.
T-3 was a pile of puke. Absolutely nothing original. It was virtually a carbon copy of T-2. It really pissed me off, because I was excited when it came out, to see what new twist they would put on the series. The logical next move in the series would be to delve into the future Earth, and really develop the plotline of the battle between man and machine. But they took the easy way out and just went with the exact same formula as the other 2 movies. Pretty sad. Couple that with wooden acting and cliches galore, and it was a flop.
I liked The Matrix. It was definitely a different kind of movie. I thought it was a little more mystical and not as much cold sci-fi as Terminator. The second Matrix was pretty poor, IMO. No new ideas - it was almost like they took only the weakest parts of the first movie and stretched them out into another whole movie. It was the same problem as T-3. It’s that old flawed thinking that if something works, keep doing it over and over ad infinitum. People liked the fight scenes, so let’s have as many as we can and stretch them out forever. People like things that are original. Once you’ve done it, it’s not original anymore.
Oh, I forgot Steven Seagal. My mom said if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. So that’s all I have to say. 