I'm a friend of Sarah Connor.
I was told that she's here.
Could I see her, please?
No.
Can't see her.
She's making a statement.
I'll be back.
Since its release, James Cameron's The Terminator
has gone on to become a quintessential 1980s sci-fi
horror movie.
And yet, despite the first two films in that franchise being
what most consider classics, every other Terminator sequel
has fallen flat on its face.
Terminator is a perfect example of a franchise overstaying
its welcome dramatically.
The Terminator series should have probably stopped
after the first two installments,
and yet, much like the unkillable T-800,
just kept going and going and going.
Released in 1984, The Terminator is the film
that catapulted James Cameron and Schwarzenegger
into superstardom.
It was the perfect vehicle for the young former bodybuilder
and the fresh director to show what they could do.
Cameron was fresh off of being fired halfway
through directing the sequel to Roger Corman's film Piranha
when he got the idea for Terminator
from a nightmare he had.
He dreamed of an unstoppable metal skeleton
tracking him down, attempting to kill him.
After developing this idea further and crafting a story
around this imagery, he pitched the idea
of a time traveling robot assassin to his girlfriend Gale
Anne Hurd, who had been working as an assistant
around Hollywood at the time.
She thought it would be perfect to use as a calling
card for the two of them.
Cameron wrote a treatment, optioned
it to Hurd with the condition that if she
got it set up somewhere, he would direct the project.
Finding funding wasn't particularly easy.
But she was able to find backing,
and the pair started producing what was essentially
a low budget indie horror genre exploitation film.
It follows the exploits of a waitress played
by Linda Hamilton who falls in love with a soldier sent back
from the future to protect her from a mechanized killing
machine.
Stark lighting, atmospheric chase sequences,
and jaw dropping stop motion visual effects pushed the film
from being a run of the mill low budget
feature into what could be described as a cult classic.
The film was so successful that it gained Cameron access
to bigger studio productions.
He wrote and directed a sequel to Ridley Scott's
seminal sci-fi classic Alien, which would be released in '86.
From there, Cameron would develop The Abyss, and then T2.
Terminator: Judgment Day is what is referred to as a departure
sequel.
It takes the central concept or conceit of the original film
and turns it on its head to create
something altogether different.
While T2 does have time travel, and of course it
features a homicidal robot or two,
the film is purely an action movie,
recasting Arnold Schwarzenegger's
villainous T-800 as a heroic bodyguard of the future savior
of humanity.
T2 has gone on to become even more popular and acclaimed
than its predecessor.
And after this, it's where the creation of a franchise
comes in and then immediately starts to fall apart.
T2 really wrapped up all of the plotlines,
the unanswered questions that the universe had to offer.
Due to the fact that these films are time travel stories,
they have a cyclical nature.
The ends and beginnings of the film
talk to each other in a way that the traditional films do not.
And T2 closed those circles for the most part.
The film ends with all the plot points
that lead to the dark future having been surgically removed
from the existing timeline.
It leaves the central thematic question of
is fate real open to interpretation,
but the movie has removed all narrative potential
for more story with these characters pretty concisely.
At this juncture in the franchise,
Terminator 2 set up a perfect unknowable certainty.
It's a film that revolves around man's fatalistic relationship
with predetermination.
The fact that time is the ultimate enemy
and that in some schools of thought,
it's a flat circle where everything that's happened
has already happened and free will is an artificial concept.
A construct we create to feel better
about our lives and ourselves.
So in turn, making a sequel to this particular movie
in some ways violates that very idea.
It provides a concrete answer.
Either free will exists and Sarah and John
did stop the robot apocalypse, or it doesn't, and fate
is in control, which means all of these movies
are pointless because it doesn't particularly
matter how hard you try to fight the future,
it always comes, it always wins.
Leaving T2 where it ends is the perfect and logical conclusion,
both for the film itself, but also for the overall franchise.
And yet, there's more.
Due to the fact that T2 made $520 million, which adjusted
for inflation, is close to a billion dollars, by the way,
it was only a matter of time until someone
tried to continue that story for the best reason ever.
Money.
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
was release 12 years later, 2003,
to poor critical reception but over $400 million
at the box office.
Film took a definitive stance.
It said fate exists, free will is a myth.
It picked up with an older John Connor, a new T-800,
and another evil more advanced Terminator sent back
from the future to kill him.
And with no Cameron involvement, you
get what is essentially a by the book early 2000s studio film.
None of the charm, energy, or creative thematic vision
that T2 exemplified.
It creates the worst question in all of art.
Why does this exist?
Terminator Salvation released in 2009
and was an attempt to pivot the franchise's core idea away
from time travel, instead opting to chronicle
John Connor's future war against the machines.
In theory, this could have been a great direction
to take the franchise.
But in execution, it was anything but.
Glossy VFX, a muddled script, and no real reason
for existing other than an exec in a high rise saying something
to the effect of, we have Terminator,
might as well make something, right?
So the studios answered again with Terminator Genesis,
released in 2015, it aimed at rebooting the franchise
by having characters we know played by younger actors
reenact scenes from the previous movies.
It also had one of the worst marketing campaigns
in modern history, giving away the big second act
twist that basically sets up the success
of the movie in both the trailer and the film's poster.
So that went well.
Due to the complicated rights arrangement,
which we won't really get into here,
Terminator Dark Fate saw the rights
to the Terminator franchise falling into the hands of James
Cameron again.
Unfortunately, Cameron as a producer
and Cameron as a director are very different beast.
And so this film feels more like a retread
than Genesis, which was just a film that's
high concept amounted to, hey, remember that one shot?
Terminator isn't a franchise of adaptation.
Each attempt at Terminator after T2
was an attempt at revolution, not evolution.
And that's an issue.
To use an example of what evolution looks like,
the Fast and the Furious franchise fits perfectly.
The films started out as a small time crime story about two men
on opposite sides of the law.
It was very personal.
And then eventually, as that got old,
these films reinvented themselves
as heist films, and then as large ensemble cast pseudo
superhero movies, literally giving Vin Diesel
a tragic superhero origin in the beginning of Fast and Furious.
Another good example is the original Planet
of the Apes film franchise.
They hit that [INAUDIBLE] repeatedly,
but then they made new advancements.
They fully reinvented themselves.
They literally blew up planet Earth
at the end of Beneath the Planet of the Apes,
and they still made three more films, a TV show,
and an animated show in the original film universe.
Each has a political theme or lesson they're tackling.
And they construct a new and exciting story
around that theme each time out.
They're not making six movies about the Charlton Heston
character, which is ostensibly what Terminator ended up doing.
Now it is easy to say that the Terminator franchise serves
as a prime example of the world we live in today.
Nostalgia reigning supreme, intellectual property
being more valuable than movie stars or a good story,
and everything being repackaged at will.
And it's also quite easy to say that if you're
going to reboot something or revive something or continue
it, you should take risks and try something new.
But Terminator is an interesting case of a franchise
literally not understanding what it's about.
If you as an artist, if you as a writer,
want to continue something that you at one point
felt done with, take a step back first
and make sure you remember and understand
why you created it in the first place.
So that way you don't end up creating something
that stands in argument with the very thing
you set out to do in the first place.
Terminator is a series in some ways about the cyclical nature
of time.
And yet what time did to Terminator
is actually bury it alive.
Well guys, that's it for today's episode of Nerdstalgic.
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