but felt a bit childish in other areas and it’s not as accomplished as BES.

Terminator 1 worked because it was a horror/thriller movie about a relentless robot chasing people; Terminator 2 worked because of its cutting edge special effects (it looked like that in 1991! insane!) and exciting action scenes. Terminator 3 and beyond started to focus so heavily on the time travel and paradoxes but that was never the funnest or most interesting part of the franchise. Sarah Connor Chronicles (the short-lived Fox TV series from the late 2000s) also had a similar focus on time travel, but I give it a pass because Lena Headey AND Shirley Manson were in it lol.

Terminator Zero, at about the midway part of the season, reveals that its main plot is about turning all of the different timelines of all the movies into canon. Actually now that I write that, it sounds cool, and it probably sounded cool on paper to Mattson Tomlin (the writer), but I think in execution it was lacking.