I was thinking recently about the Terminator movies. The first one was groundbreaking. The second one, amazingly, was even better. The third one was a steaming pile. And I'll grant you, not having James Cameron on board was a big part of that. Whomever decided that there should be a female Terminator even more advanced than the T-1000 in the second movie should lose their job.
I got to thinking - could I have done any better? I don't know. But I did do some thinking about it. Imagine if the plot of Terminator 3 had been more like this...
Opening credits. On a steamy city street at night, a naked obese man appears in a ball of light. As the credits continue to show on the screen, we see the man break into a store for clothing. In the next shot, it's daytime, and the now well-dressed man is selling jewelry, and then purchasing electronics supplies. He then rents office space in the city. In the office space, as the last few credits show on screen, we see his midsection turn silvery and melt away - he is a T-1000. He extracts from his body a large array of neural net processors and begins soldering it together with the parts he's purchased. Then he connects the power, and connects a cable to the clearly labeled T3 internet connection. Get it? T3?
Anyway, this is the fledgeling Skynet. Throughout the movie, the machines establish a financial base, and start numerous automated factories around the world, financed by money stolen online by Skynet. When you're a futuristic supercomputer, hacking into banks and transferring funds invisibly isn't too hard.
I figure that Sarah and John Connor run around, mostly in South America, achieving minor victories, and in the end manage to destroy one of the factories. Perhaps they even rally a small contingent of followers. But in the end, Skynet gains control of the government's computers and launches nukes against Russia, and the Russian counterattack comes in not long after. The war has begun.
So is it better? I don't know. But it's got no stupid female terminator, it's got the nonhumanoid robots I've been wanting to see, and it's got no Arnold.
I like your idea, if he is out fighting the machines before most people realize the war is going on, he can build a small army. When everything goes down, people will need to listen to him in order to survive.
I remember as the movie ended, I wished that James Cameron and the Wachioski Brothers (or however you spell it) had gotten together years ago and came up with a whole series that combined the Matrix with Terminator, could have been awesome...