8/7/2007 - Terminator Versus Robocop

More than 15 years later, I can still say that Terminator 2 is my favorite movie. I thought my taste in movies would be more "sophisticated" by now, and in many ways, it is. But whenever I watch T2, I'm taken back to that first late-night showing when my cousins and I were so jazzed up after becoming enamored with the original Terminator only a few months earlier. We saw the trailers, and we thought, "Wow, is Arnie going to be a bad-ass villain again?" It turns out the trailers were purposely misleading and Arnold Schwarzenegger did not play a bad Terminator, but he was still bad-ass.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day might not be a masterpiece in acting or drama, but it (in conjunction with the first one) is simply a masterstroke in sci-fi action storytelling. For its time, the special effects were a breakthrough, and all the special effects in todays movies show only evolutionary progress from T2. When I first saw the T-1000 turn from a liquid-metal humanoid into the police officer disguise, I nearly crapped my pants. Stories dealing time travel are always tricky (in terms of all the paradoxes that can take place), but the movie never strays too much into the scientific/philosophical arena. It's just two and a half hours of Arnie in the greatest role of his career, kicking butt and saying cool catchphrases.

The first Robocop movie was another favorite of mine. I first enjoyed it for the cool futuristic concept of a robotic policeman and its great action, but now I see it for what it was intended to be: a satirical take on society with plenty of black humor. If you think about it, Robocop is kind of the opposite of a Terminator. A T-800 model Terminator is living tissue over metal endoskeleton, while Robocop has a high-tech metal shell protecting his organics. Everybody always wonders who would win in a fight between Robocop and the Terminator. There have been graphic novels by Dark Horse comics on the subject. But this video, I think, is the best showcase of what would really happen...