I really enjoy the last Rambo because it struck the perfect balance of being a cynical vet disillusioned by life meets giant action movie. The way the film ends is a perfect cap to the franchise so the rumors of a Rambo V would ruin Rambo IVs ending entirely.
Jaws 2 & Rocky 2 were certainly steps down from the originals, but it was 3 in both franchises that really drove them over a cliff.
The second was a letdown, but it did juuust enough to make me want to see a third.
I was wrong.
Alien. A perfect, stand alone film that needed no improvement or additions.
The Hangover sequels retroactively made the original movie suck.
Another vote for Matrix, but I’d also like to toss in Pirates of the Caribbean. The first one was a surprisingly fun movie, the rest were unnecessary.
I can’t think of any film diminished by its sequels. The original still exists and its quality is unchanged. It may be dated, but sequels don’t cause anything in the original to change: no new scenes, no new dialog, no new characters. The original is exactly what it was to begin with.
This is what I was thinking of. Rocky II, III, IV, V, VI and Creed did not make Rocky I terrible. No one says collectively the “Rocky movies suck”. Similarly, the original Jaws or Jurassic Park are still considered classics in spite of their plethora of mediocre sequels.
Police Academy is a movie that was made sucky by a ton of sucky sequels. The original was actually a funny 80s comedy. But now the Police Academy films are synonymous with “sucky franchise”.
I waited fifteen years for a sequel to Zoolander. I got Zoolander 2.
Okay, looking at it that way, I think there are movies that are diminished by their sequels. Movies like The Matrix, Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars, and Charlie’s Angels were all like eating a slice of pizza; it’s greasy and messy but it tastes great and you enjoy it.
But the sequel comes along and it’s like eating an entire pizza. It’s the same greasiness and messiness from the first movie but a much larger amount of it. And this time it’s too much; you end up feeling sick. And then even if you go back to that first slice, you still feel queasy. Once you’ve overdosed on Neo or Jack Sparrow or George Lucas or McG you can’t enjoy a normal amount anymore.
I wouldn’t exactly call First Blood diminished, but having seen all three movies (excepting that comeback one which, judging by the reviews, I’m honestly not sure I’d like), it takes a very weird tonal shift in First Blood Part 2 and and even more drastic one in 3.
First Blood was about a Vietnam vet bitter that after faithfully serving his country at great risk to his life, he’s been scorned by his own people and learned that “supporting the troops” does not extend to anything that would materially improve their lives. And even then he doesn’t wish harm on anyone. He injures several of the pursuing police but not severely, the one fatality was completely accidental, and he literally doesn’t fire a single bullet until his final act of rage where he shoots up an unoccupied block. In the end he realizes that he made his point and quietly accepts imprisonment because there’s nothing left to fight for.
And then in FBP2 he goes into super Solid Snake mode, invisibly cutting down one foe after another before they knew what hit them, getting betrayed by his CO for no clear reason and captured, escaping, and rescuing the POWs that were there all along and kept alive in captivity by the Vietnamese government over a decade after they freaking won the Vietnam War (:rolleyes:), rescuing them all, then warning the CO that there still many POWs waiting to be rescued (quintuple :rolleyes:) and he’d damn well better find them. The violence isn’t over-the-top…the bodycount isn’t all that high until Rambo takes over the helicopter…but it’s still far more about an actual mission with actual bloodshed than anything we saw in the first movie. Had FBP2 continued in the same vein, it wouldn’t have this catharsis or any pretensions that there ever was anyone waiting to be rescued. Trautman gives Rambo a chance to exorcise his inner demons once and for all along with an offer of clemency if he finds evidence of surviving POWs, Rambo goes in, he begins his search quietly while avoiding fighting (a very good idea when there’s no war going on, dammit), he hits on something, he gets denied for some reason, he has to go Solid Snake and avoid confrontations as much as possible, using force only when necessary and always invisibly and the minimum required, and he finally locates the camp…and it really is empty, just like everyone said. He brings the photos back, finally accepts that his fight is over, and quietly returns to prison to serve out the rest of his sentence.
Then there’s 3, which goes completely over the top, although it takes a while to get there. Again, Rambo doesn’t really do anything outside of a superbly-fit and -trained warrior’s capabilities (he defeats the Soviet Army with the help of the Afghan army, which, given that there’s a reason Afghanistan is called “The Graveyard of Empires”, is entirely feasible), but not only is this an actual ongoing war, but it’s the big-scale kind with tanks and helicopters and thousands of troops blasting away on open ground. (I should not that even then the majority of the focus is on his individual fights, in particular stealth-killing the helicopter with the exploding arrow, the cat-and-mouse duel against Kourov, and of course the game of chicken against the enemy general.) This, more than anything, is how the name “Rambo” got equated with big blasting guns and tanks and explosions, when that’s pretty much the complete opposite of the way he normally operates. Going by the first movie, it would’ve made far more sense for him to fail his mission. Yeah, he gets some of the supposed bad guys, and yeah, he escapes with his life, but Trautman’s days are done. And then Rambo finally has to realize that for all his abilities, his personal missions accomplished nothing, and he just has to accept that life isn’t fair and at some point you just have to put the past behind and get on with your life.
So…yeah.
Oh, and I’m not sure if this counts, but every damn thing Willie did in Temple of Doom pretty much killed all interest I had in any and all Indiana Jones works set before Raiders of the Lost Ark.
There is an alternate reality where The Usual Suspects II exists, making the whole Keyser Söze thing a joke.
I can think of one example–the Star Wars prequel trilogy changed Return of the Jedi. (Vader ghost changed, celebrations on various planets shown. Also, give me Yub Nub or give me death.)
Terminator.
even though I LOVED Terminator 2, and it was a great flick, the original by itself had a purity of vision and beauty of execution that elevated it to a high rank in SF films. Chief among these was the way the Terminator – in the best tradition of literary SF* – was simply a killing machine that, as Reece says in a pivotal speech, can’t be reasoned with and wouldn’t stop until Sarah Connor was dead.
And then, of course, in the sequel, the second edition of the Arnold Terminator CAN be reasoned with, can make jokes, and practically gets emotional at the end. It’s fun filmmaking, and his giving the “thumbs up” as her goes down into the molten metal can bring a tear to your eye, but its not the image the first film projected so cleanly and wonderfully**
the less said about the subsequent sequels, the better.
- like Kate Wilhelm’s The Killer Thing, or Philip K. Dick’s Second Variety (which, it’s been argued, was an influence on the first film.
** I know that they have a scene – cut from the released version, but fortunately preserved in the Director’s Cut – where they show them reprogramming the T2, but it still doesn’t account for the overall change. The original Terminator, like Robby in Forbidden Planet, was a real robot, and the dark humor came when his reactions – like Robby’s – could be interpreted as resembling human reactions, even though they were the results of logical machine reactions to stimuli and their programming. In the second movie, the T2 was acting more like as metal person – like R2D2 and C3PO do – than a Real Robot.
Alien 3 gave a big fat middle finger to Aliens, right in the first couple of minutes.
I disagree about Aliens, of course. I’ve long said on this Board that it’s my favorite of the Alien films, and that I think the original film far too derivative of Jerome Bixby’s It! The Terror from Beyond Space and not completely edited and formed. Heresy to Ridley Scot fans, I know, but I also know I’m not the only one to think this. But I agree that the subsequent sequels diminish the first two, with Alien3 being one of those pictures that makes me want to stick my fingers in my ears, yell “LaLaLa!” and convinced myself it doesn’t exist.
A few others:
Did we really need
**City Slickers 2
The Fly II** – the sequel to the Cronenberg film The Fly
or for that matter
The Return of the Fly – the sequel to the original movie The Fly. Or its second sequel The Curse of the Fly
In the Heat of the Night was an absolute classic. It is not helped by the existence of They Call me MISTER Tibbs or The Organization
I see that galen made the same point about Alien3 while I was posting. Good to see I’m not the only one.
Yep - my first thought.
This one may be a reach, but I’ll nominate Friday the 13th.
The original was a decent horror movie with a good plot twist.
The sequels are all just regurgitated cliche’s.
Another vote Highlander. The sequel(s) directly contradicts the original and completely ruins its premise which is why we deny the existence of any sequel. Neither the Director’s Cut nor the 2004 Special edition changes this.
Be warned, there is also a remake in the works.
Rocky 3 should have been in 3D too!
I’d disagree, the first sequel was excellent, some would argue better than the original. At the time, they weren’t cliche. They didn’t get really bad until part 4 on…
Godfather 3 - So bad that it makes you forget the first 2 films are actually good. I’ve only ever walked out of one film, and this was it.
Although, I did drive out on Streets of Fire (1984)!
For new movies/books, I’d nominate The Maze Runner, the premise, wonder, and intrigue of the 1st installment are kind of lost in the second 2 parts. It turns into another protagonists vs. evil corporation vs. zombie plague …meh.
The Empire Strikes Back set up all sorts of wonderful opportunities that never came to be (and in fact got trashed) by The Return of The Jedi.
There’s no point in watching Empire since there’s nothing as good to complete it.
The next prequels went on to do even more damage.