The ‘Terminator’ movie Arnold Schwarzenegger can’t stand: “Doesn’t make any sense”
When James Cameron wrote and directed The Terminator back in 1984, making a global superstar of an Austrian bodybuilder named Arnold Schwarzenegger and creating a forever-imitated playground catchphrase in “I’ll be back”, he ended up predicting rather a lot of worrying things. Chief among them was the idea that artificial intelligence could become so powerful that it eventually took global power over from humans and tried to eradicate them, a scenario that we as a race took in no way seriously and are now currently sensibly walking headfirst into.
But one thing Cameron didn’t predict was that the Terminator franchise would go on to spawn six different films, a web series (the web wasn’t in use back then, to be fair to him), a TV series and a theme park ride. In each of the five decades since Schwarzenegger’s terrifying cyborg destroyed a police station single-handedly and cut out his own eye, attempts have been made to recapture the magic of the original, with wildly varying success.
Ironically, Cameron got it right at the first time of asking with 1991’s jaw-dropping sequel T2: Judgement Day, the movie that flipped things entirely by having Arnold’s robot become the good guy up against the transmogrifying horror that was Robert Patrick’s ‘T-1000’. That film is rightly lauded as one of the finest pieces of action and sci-fi ever made, with special effects that nobody had ever seen at the time, a Guns ’N Roses soundtrack and a salary paid to Schwarzenegger in the form of a Gulfstream jet. Although it was also the most expensive to make in history, it made five times as much at the box office, bringing in more than half a billion dollars.
After that, however, things started to go downhill. The first attempt at revisiting the world of The Terminator on the big screen came with 2003’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which brought Schwarzenegger back again, this time up against Kristanna Loken’s deadly blonde female cyborg. Although it did well at the box office, audiences weren’t too impressed with it, and James Cameron had no involvement.
Next up was 2009’s Terminator Salvation, notable for being the only Terminator film in which Schwarzenegger plays no part, and for being the movie set on which Christian Bale had his infamous, and hilarious, meltdown at an unfortunate member of the crew. The film is only really remembered fondly by fairly die-hard fans of the franchise, and not at all fondly by Arnold, who said “I would say the worst (of the movies) was probably the number four, because that was done during the time I was governor (of California) and I was not in it.
“How do you do a Terminator movie without me being in a Terminator movie, right? Doesn’t make any sense.”
Perhaps that was why he was brought back at the age of 67 to star in 2015’s Terminator Genisys, the terribly-spelled fifth instalment of the franchise and one that was described by critics as “confusing”. The making of the movie was summed up by Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke who starred in the film when she said “No-one had a good time.”
It wasn’t enough to stop the Terminator juggernaut however, and Schwarzenegger duly signed up for 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate, the first film since T2 to involve writing and producing by James Cameron and marking the return of Linda Hamilton from the original two movies. The film, while bringing in some $250million was seen as a box office bomb due to the fortune spent on production and marketing – enough to bring plans for any future Terminator projects to an end.
It has been all-quiet on the killer cyborg front ever since, although last year Cameron revealed the potential of doing more movies, saying: “I have no doubt that subsequent Terminator films will not only be possible, but they’ll kick ass,” adding, “It’s more than a plan. That’s what we’re doing. That’s all I’ll say for right now.”
