The beginning of the end

Rating: 5/10 (18 February 2020)

Re-watching this film in 2020 after all the sequels and re-quels makes so much more sense since it gives you a clear picture of when and where it all started. I'm talking about the parasitism of the Terminator franchise.
Obviously, every film after the first one is the same exact film, yet if Terminator 2 was a superior big-budget refined version of the first one, every other film after it was just a lesser version of T2 (except for Salvation, which was a slightly different take but still bad).
Interestingly enough, when I watched Genisys in the theatre I thought that this idea of re-shooting the classic ones frame-by-frame is just a sign of creative bankruptcy that the franchise has come to.
Then Dark Fate came out, and it was exactly the same film as T2 scene-by-scene with different backdrops and CGI. There was little to no original content in that. I have a detailed review of the Dark Fate as well.
And now, after re-watching Rise of the Machines, the picture is finally clear in my mind. The franchise was never supposed to live past T2, the story was over, and this film shows it.
Rise of the Machines is a cheesy badly written rehash of T2 with horrible CGI that was never good and doesn't hold up in 2020.
There are some redeeming factors like the insane car chase with actual physical stunts which looks great even in 2020, and the ending was surprisingly good for a horribly written story like this.
And of course, Arnie was great to look at, even though his character is a comically large dumb robot, which is what our beloved Terminator has become after this film in all the sequels that feature real Arnie, both Genisys, and Dark Fate made him a joke as well.
There should have never been a T2 sequel. We stopped Judgement Day but found ourselves in a Garbage Day.