I went with Terminator 2: Judgement Day here. Part of the reason I did so was for nostalgic reasons. I'm not generally a big nostalgia guy but I was only 11 years old when this movie came out and it was one of my favorites growing up. It's probably the best acting Schwarzenneger has done in his career and made a killer cyborg from the future with no emotions seem likable. At the time, the special effects were cutting edge and innovative. It was the use of CGI long before CGI became truly advanced and popular. The action sequences were great and it's a sequel that I thought was every bit as good as the first and better in some ways. It wasn't your typical Arnold action flick that we'd gotten used to during the 80s in which he just showed up and whipped the bad guys while being almost superhuman. They did have that aspect with T2, but I thought the character had some depth. An artificial life form struggling to understand humanity and what it means to be human is a novel concept that, in that day, wasn't something that'd been run into the ground as it's gone onto be in today's movies.
The Dark Knight was different, both in good and bad ways, for me. Going the route of portraying Batman and his world in something of a more realistic way, as they'd done in the Batman Begins movie, gave things a fresh feel. However, in my opinion, the movie drew most of its strength from Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker. Without him, the movie wouldn't have had any pop. Part of the downside is that Nolan's Batman characters, to me, never have that larger than life feel that I think you do kind of need in a comic book based movie. I never really saw Bruce Wayne as this brooding, somewhat tortured and obsessed character. To be honest, I'd rather watch the various animated portrayals of Batman with Kevin Conroy as the voice of the character. To me, Christian Bale simply wasn't a cool Batman. Part of that had to do with the laughable way he did his voice while wearing the suit, what I felt was a lackluster performance as Bruce Wayne, and just writing for the character that I just thought was flat. I didn't think the action was all that good, this is really part of the downside to going with a much more realistic route, and the best parts of the movie were, frankly, when Ledger was on the screen.
