Oh Terminator...once one of the most acclaimed and loved action franchises of all time, in the past several years it has been met with unqualified failure and disdain. After a promising return with "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" put the franchises future in a good place, the series suffered through a
cancelled TV series (which was good it should be noted),
a failed reboot, and a
fourth sequel that couldn't resuscitate the franchise. There is now talk of rebooting the series a second time. Personally, I feel the issue is that the franchise should have never gotten to this point in the first place. It's one thing to make more movies if there is more story to tell. The problem here is that the series reached the peak when James Cameron directed "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," which is about as perfect of a movie as you can get (despite some of the major plot holes you can find when all is said and done).
It was a revolutionary film with state-of-the-art special effects, a complicated story, wonderful acting (yes, even from Arnie), and some major twists that have been repeated so many times since that it's hard to remember that this was the first time some of them were done. What the movie also did was conclude the story on such a satisfying and final conclusion, that to continue would be difficult at best and redundant at worst. The movies have more or less been these very things since, and studios have been struggling to figure out how to make the franchise work (AKA: profitable) again. Turning to James Cameron for help on how to make the franchise respected again, he offered up a short term solution:
re-release the most loved installment of the franchise in theaters this year in a new 3D version. I am not the biggest fan of older movies being upconverted into 3D.
If a movie was shot in 2D I feel it should be viewed in 3D. The reason I created this blog was not to encourage more movies to be in 3D for the sake of being 3D, but to give consumers a chance to preserve the movies in the format they were originally made in. This release is important for a few reasons though. First of all, James Cameron loves 3D. One of the reasons it is taking so long to get "Avatar 2" is that he is biding his time, hoping that glasses free 3D will soon be available (he might have to settle for HFR 3D in the meantime). More to the point, he has admitted that if he could make his older films in 3D at the time, he would have. This leads into the second point: the 3D upconversion of "Titanic" was actually very good. You could almost mistake it for natural 3D if it weren't for a few very obvious scenes.
Part of the reason for this is when we take that first bit of knowledge into account, Cameron may have been shooting his films as if he were making 3D movies from the beginning. All he lacked was a way to project them in that format. So when he goes back to upconvert this stuff, visually the movies are lending themselves to look good even with the limits of the process. The final reason this could be a good thing is that I think people are forgetting how good 3D can be. Cameron knows this and it worries him because his future success is banking on people staying interested in the format. A 3D re-release for 'Terminator 2' would be good because it would be exclusive to the format, it would remind people why they liked the format, and it would begin the process of reconditioning people to 3D in time for the upcoming 'Avatar' movies.
It should be noted one of the initial exciting things about 3D was that studios could re-release older movies in 3D in theaters, they would be difficult to pirate, and it would be an excuse for people leave the house and pay to see them again. This is why we started getting 3D re-releases for "Top Gun," "The Lion King," and "Jurassic Park." That started to come to an end, but "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" may bring this back. The only question that remains is whether or not a 2D version will be made available to the public. I'm mixed on this because while I would prefer to see the movie in 2D in theaters, the whole point of the experiment is moot if you give people a chance to opt out of it. I will update you more on the story as it develops, but if you take one thing away from this it should be the excitement that one of the best action films ever made is being re-released in theaters. Hopefully IMAX will also get a hold of it while they are at it.
