The movie Arnold Schwarzenegger admits “sucked”
Quite often, movie stars will become forever tied to certain characters they have played, and while Arnold Schwarzenegger has admired Conan the Barbarian and Major Alan ‘Dutch’ Schaefer, it’s hard not to imagine him as the hulking titular cyborg assassin character in James Cameron’s The Terminator movies.
The first movie, perhaps the best of the franchise from a philosophical perspective, arrived in 1984 and established Arnie as one of the biggest and best action heroes of the decade. This was cemented even further when the Austrian actor made good on his promise to “be back” when he returned for the 1991 sequel Judgment Day.
However, as many film franchises often do, The Terminator followed in the footsteps of Alien and was drawn out for far too long. The result was a series of poor movies that never should have been made in the first place, and one of them was of particular disapproval of Arnie, although he was thankful not to have actually starred it in that time around.
When appearing on Good Morning America, Schwarzenegger admitted that 2009’s Terminator: Salvation “sucked”. The fourth instalment of the science fiction franchise and the sequel to 2003’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines serves as something of a soft reboot and is the only movie of the series not to star Arnie.
Rather, the likes of Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Anton Yelchin, Moon Bloodgood and Helena Bonham Carter all feature in a departure from the Terminator films as they had come to be known because Salvation takes place in 2018, focusing on the war between Skynet’s machines and the remnants of humanity.
Bale portrays John Connor, but he could not save the film from critical disaster, even though there was a $371.4 million worldwide box office. Schwarzenegger was not the only actor to criticise Salvation either, as even Bale admitted that he harboured serious regrets about ever agreeing to feature in it.
On the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Bale said, “I thought that the franchise…I went, ‘Nah, there’s no story there.’ I’d seen the first one and enjoyed that back in England; I’d been to the movies and seen the second one. And it’s a great thorn in my side because I wish we could have reinvigorated [the franchise]. And unfortunately, during production, you could tell that wasn’t happening. It’s a great shame.”
Bale had also famously lost his cool when shooting a scene for the film and took out his frustration on a crew member, responding to the incident, “Do you remember that scene with Linda Hamilton where she’s really going nuts in Terminator 2? We said, we’ve got to channel that at some point in the film, and that was the scene in which we were channelling it. Great lesson for me: no matter how much you lose yourself in a scene, you do not allow yourself to behave that way. I’ve got enormous regrets about it”.
