Terminator Salvation vs. Alien: Resurrection

Whimper

on 8/25/2011

Great matchup. It's especially telling that these films are so hard to judge on their own merits, and instead must be weighed against their invariably superior predecessors. You'd have to be especially kind to omit discussion of each film's worst elements. Salvation has the typecast blowhard Michael Ironside hollering tired "You will obey orders, soldier!" type lines, the hammy and miscast Helena Bonham Carter doing a poor SHODAN impression, along with the mute little girl whose Spidey-sense alerts her to the presence of three-storey tall death machines that everyone else somehow can't see. Resurrection's faulty biology aside (cloning a parasite from the host's DNA?), the design and implementation of its albino hum-alien hybrid was bad enough to make me overlook the film's few strengths. Salvation has some great special effects, some excellent action sequences, and despite the lack of a time-travelling Schwartzenegger it still manages to feel like a Terminator movie. Resurrection has some good alien gross-outs, a few tense and thrilling scenes, and a solid cast of misfit B-listers. In the end, I have to not only ask, "Which of these films is better?" but ask which of them deserves even further sequels. Alien Resurrection is fairly mediocre, but resurrected something that should have been left dead with Alien3- a beautiful film, especially the extended cut. Terminator Salvation is fairly mediocre, but at least tried to do something new to carry the franchise past it's awful third instalment. In the end, A:R is only slightly better, but it is unnecessary and unwarranted. T:S is slightly worse, but very useful for distracting us from Terminator 3, which even Ahnold couldn't save.

ToryK

on 8/25/2011

You know what? I don't mind Resurrection. It doesn't live up to the Scott or Cameron movies and it definitely doesn't build upon them the way I might want it to, but I enjoy it as mindless entertainment starring both my favorite action heroine and my favorite evil space creatures. I don't know. I am very rarely one of those guys who lets sequels ruin their predecessors. Same goes for Salvation. In a perfect world, the war with the machines wouldn't have been shown onscreen in anything other than a "what could have been" movie. I don't like that T3 and Salvation ruin T2's "no fate but what we make" idea, but that's what happened and I can live with it. As is, Salvation was actually pretty fun. As Whimper said, it has some awesome action scenes, so it beats Resurrection in the "mindless fun" category. And so it wins the whole battle, as far as I'm concerned.