ScreenAge Wasteland is proud to present our community’s ranking of the Terminator movies.
Ten people (whether it was staff, commenters, or social media followers) took part in sending us their personal rankings of the six Terminator movies. We then assigned them points (top spot got 6, last spot got 1) and tallied the scores. In the event that someone hadn’t seen a movie, a multiplier was added to bump that film’s score up to what it would have been if all ten people had seen it.
So come with me if you to see where each Terminator movie landed on our list. And feel free to agree or disagree with where a film ranked in the comments below!
6. Terminator Genisys (2015) | 16 points
- Terminator GeniSucksys: it doesn’t exist. It never existed. – Tarek
- A truly awful movie. – LiquidSoap
- An absurdly convoluted, instantly forgettable entry with a laughable title, dreadful special effects, and woeful miscasting. It’s the first to follow through on the misguided obsession with trying to shock us by killing off John. But the twists and timeline fuckery just evaporate all stakes. Complete nonsense from start to finish, Genisys makes so little impression it’s hard to even get worked up about how bad it is. – The Computer Wore Menace Shoes
- This… this was the first Terminator movie I actively disliked. I WANTED to like it so bad – I mean, Doctor Who (Matt Smith) and Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) were in it! It just seemed so dumb and dumbed down, with hardly anything epic or even interesting. There was nothing really new, and it felt like a waste of time. – Bob Cram
- I didn’t watch this until a year or two ago, so my expectations were pretty low by that point. While I don’t appreciate how it messed with the continuity of the other films, Arnold was great as usual. Also, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Jai Courtney is a terrible actor unless he’s playing a villain. – Marmaduke Karlston
5. Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) | 18 points
- A clumsy cash-grab attempt using nostalgia as a lubricant. – Tarek
- It’s not good, but it isn’t awful either. Very forgettable and everything is meaningless. The new Terminator wasn’t cool either. – LiquidSoap
- The most recent Terminator carries on the offensive tradition of killing off John, this time to replace him with a new savior. The trouble is that once we know saviors are replaceable, no savior can ever matter again, so the franchise stakes vanish, never to return. It doesn’t help that our new lead is spectacularly unconvincing in a flash-forward of her taking charge. All of Dark Fate‘s fresh twists on the formula have already been done in other sequels: Female protector (Sarah Connor Chronicles), half-human cyborg (Salvation), an old man Terminator (Genisys) who killed John (T3), shape-shifting Terminator with endoskeleton (T3) and particle-style VFX (Genisys). The one thing Dark Fate gets right is that the franchise is not about Future Wars and Time Travel, it’s about being hunted by an unstoppable killing machine in the present, but it lards up the chase with too many protectors. At least we got to see Linda Hamilton again. – The Computer Wore Menace Shoes
- This movie was so bad that a future, cybernetic version of me went back to my past and prevented me from ever having seen it in the first place. – Bob Cram
4. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) | 28 points
- Entertaining for what it is. It is obviously not a James Cameron movie, but it’s never boring or disrespectful to its audience. Some hate it, and I get that, but I consider it as a decent sequel. At least it tried to explore the thematic from a fresh point of view. Plus we had Claire Danes, so what’s not to like? – Tarek
- If T1 reflects apocalyptic Cold War paranoia and T2 reflects ’90s optimism, T3 is the post-9/11 realization that bad things will continue to happen, and we can’t always stop them. T2 had already flirted with camp moments (“Bad to the Bone”) but T3, faced with diminishing returns from trotting out the same old tropes, leans even harder into self-parody with uneven results (“Talk to the hand,” etc.). This installment introduces awkward retcons including Kate Brewster, John Connor’s age in T2, Terminator’s combustible battery cells, Terminator’s inhuman weight (in previous entries he didn’t seem to be much heavier than a human of the same size, but here he has the physics of a wrecking ball), and is the first to flirt with the hot-take third rail of killing John, an inexplicably persistent idea that would doom every future installment. Despite this, Nick Stahl’s portrayal of a John Connor whose life has been ruined by the burden of his possible future responsibility rings true, and his reluctant acceptance of leadership as the Judgment Day proves inevitable strikes the right haunting note. We don’t need a T3, but as a non-canon what-if, this does a passable job. – The Computer Wore Menace Shoes
- This was a serviceable, if unimpressive entry in the series. It didn’t do anything wrong, but it also didn’t tread any new ground and all I really remember from it is that the bad guy Terminator was a bad girl Terminator and that the new John Connor was somehow even less memorable than Edward Furlong. – Bob Cram
3. Terminator Salvation (2009) | 35 points
- Even Christian Bale couldn’t save this mess. I waited 25 years to finally see John Connor fighting cyborgs in the future, and all we get is a Diary of a Wimpy Kid in a submarine. A shame. – Tarek
- The only other noteworthy Terminator movie. It’s an interesting exploration of the Terminator future that we never get to see and some of the action is great. Unfairly maligned in my opinion. – LiquidSoap
- Everyone has always wanted Terminator to just go ahead and make a movie about the Future War, and Salvation came the closest to doing just that — and then went and changed up the whole aesthetic for no reason so we wouldn’t get what we wanted. To be fair, a movie about John Connor being a perfect, messianic leader is a daunting task — how do you make him live up to his prophesied reputation without making him boring? How do you portray such an inspiring military genius convincingly? Maybe you can’t, but from here on all the movies punt on that in favor of the hot take “What if he died?!” Salvation originally ended with John dying and being replaced by a cyborg with his face, but thankfully chickened out and went with a weird reshoot ending where the cyborg donates his heart to save John. However, while this saves the movie from being egregiously bad, it’s still no good. The entire plot hinges on Skynet knowing Reese will sire John, but if it knows that, all it has to do to win is NOT invent time travel — a gaping plot hole that unravels the whole franchise. And in a comically telling casting detail, an older Kate Brewster is recast as a younger actress! – The Computer Wore Menace Shoes
- If I’m honest, I don’t really remember much about either this movie or Rise of the Machines, but I DO remember that I liked this new guy, Sam Worthington, and he seemed destined for something more than he got. (I even remember thinking he could hold his own against Christian Bale, who, let’s face it, wasn’t at his best here.) At least they tried moving the action into the future, which was something I always wanted to see. Be careful what you wish for. – Bob Cram
2. The Terminator (1984) | 53 points
- A low-budget movie that does everything better than many 300 million blockbusters. A masterclass in storytelling and filmmaking. – Tarek
- A great sci-fi thriller with some adorably low-budget effects. – LiquidSoap
- Terminator establishes the series template in its leanest and most merciless form: What would you do if pursued by an unstoppable killing machine from the future? It’s perfect as a bleak, relentless nightmare with a ray of hope for humanity, but acceptance that a future of suffering cannot be averted. – The Computer Wore Menace Shoes
- It might not be the slickest or the most impressive or the most expensive, but it’s one of the few movies I ever wore out a video tape re-watching. A fantastic idea, executed just about as well as $6.5 million could get you. It made James Cameron a director and cemented Arnold as the action star of his day. (I didn’t even have to write out his last name, did I?) It was awesome and cool and full of that energy and innovation that budgetary restrictions seem to bring out in the best directors. – Bob Cram
- Everyone always talks about how great Arnold is in this movie, but Michael Biehn is the true MVP of the first Terminator. He’s damn good as Kyle Reese. – Marmaduke Karlston
1. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) | 54 points
- A great sequel with a bigger budget and a bigger ambition. And, yet, it can’t surpass the original one in my book. This is the The Empire Strikes Back of the Terminator franchise. – Tarek
- I don’t even need to explain why this is #1. – LiquidSoap
- T2 is a somewhat kiddified take on the concept, suggesting that maybe we can have a happy ending without the suffering after all, a notion that now seems like a quaint relic of our post-Cold War illusions of the “End of History.” Despite that, the movie delivers, iterating and escalating the concepts of the first movie with expert storytelling and iconic action and special-effects benchmarks that the series would never match. – The Computer Wore Menace Shoes
- Who, in 1984, would have guessed that Linda Hamilton would be a better haunted badass than Michael Biehn in the first Terminator? Not this guy. A spectacle that managed to surpass the original in everything except innovation and gritty realism even if it never felt necessary. Awesome, yes, but in the end we’re back to the status quo. Man, I wish they’d just stopped here. – Bob Cram
One point is what separated the Top 2. It’s clear that James Cameron’s Terminator movies are the ones that the fans love the most, while the newer entries seem to have the opposite reaction.
Thank you to everyone who participated in SAW’s fourteenth community ranking!
Do you agree with our ranking? How does your ranking of the Terminator films look? Share your thoughts in the comments!