How To Make A Good Terminator Movie

The Terminator Franchise is in danger of termination.  Prior to the release of this summer's Terminator: Genisys there were big plans for a trilogy of new Terminator movies featuring a new cast and a rebooted story but after dismal US box office performance (but impressive foreign grosses) the studio is now re-evaluating it's plans.  After two beloved movies, a good but too-quickly cancelled TV show, and three unsatisfying sequels, where is there to even go with Terminator as a franchise?

The only way to go is back.  The best of all the Terminators was the original 1984 movie, a wonderfully stripped down low-budget flick that straddled Sci-Fi and Action.  With the success of Terminator 2, the franchise was irrevocably moved into action/blockbuster territory much to its detriment.  The subsequent movies have been trying to ape the T2 formula ever since and have all failed miserably at it resulting in overly long, bloated, action movies.

The way to save Terminator is to go back to its roots with a small to mid-budget movie that gets at what made the first movie so successful: horror.  Despite the gun play  and Sci-Fi plot, the original Terminator was a movie that tapped into a very universal and primal fear: being stalked by an unstoppable pursuer, the idea that something is out there and it is looking for you.
This idea is the heart of what made the original movie so great and while it was explored in the Sarah Connor Chronicles TV show, it has been largely abandoned by the movies in favor of noisy action, convoluted plots, and burdensome mythology.  The only hope for the series is to let all of that stuff go and go back to basics with another simple, lean and mean Terminator movie, something in the spirit of Mad Max Fury Road,  another back-to-basics entry from a left-for-dead franchise.

What would this movie look like?  For one, it leaves behind the things that have holding the franchise back: no Sarah or John Connor, no Arnold, and no time-travel shenanigans.  This new Terminator should be laser focused on the experience of surviving an unstoppable killing machine.  It probably should be set in the present, although the idea of a gritty Terminator set in the Old West or the Middle Ages could be interesting side stories, too.  Since so many Game of Thrones actors have been in Terminator projects, it would only be fair to bring Terminator to a GOT-type setting.

But for the sake of our mission to make a roots Terminator movie, lets set it in the present.  There is a Terminator and a target.  Following the formula of the series the Terminator makes and attempt to kill the target but fails.  The target escapes into the city or country and the rest of the movie exists with this fear that the thing is out there and going to find you.  This is a point in the story that the later movies gloss over in favor of detours into "mythology" but it is interesting area for storytelling. 

One of the things the new Terminator movie has to do is to make the Terminator scary again.  He's not cool, he's not your buddy who understands "why you cry."  He's a terrifying Other.  The best recent example of a character rehab like this is not actually with a movie but a video game.  The recent Alien Isolation game took Giger's Alien which had been exploited and watered down over the years and brought it back to its scary roots delivering an experience that was in the spirit of the first Alien movie.  We need to do that with a Terminator. 

Our number one rule in this endeavor:  No good Terminators.  The idea of reprogrammed "good" Terminators was just a way to keep Arnold involved in the franchise.  This idea muddles the Man against Machine theme that is central to the franchise.  I know people love T2 and it is not a bad movie but I can't help feeling that it jumped the shark a bit with the way that it treated the Terminator.

We need to see some new scary behaviors from our Terminator that we haven't seen before.  What if after the Terminator fails to find its quarry it allows itself to be arrested and sent to jail in order to draw it's target back.  I'd like to see the police involved in the story where they are not just getting in the way.  Perhaps one of the protagonists can be a police detective and the story is largely from his or her point of view.  Maybe we don't get all of the context that we get from Kyle Reese in the first movie and the Terminator and his targets activities are treated like crimes until the Terminator's true nature is revealed.  Maybe the Terminator and its quarry are put in the same facility and the film is partially a prison movie and the last act has the protagonist evading the Terminator in a high security detention facility.  The point is, let's see some things we haven't seen before and maybe explore some fun sub-genres in the movie.

These are just a few examples of new and interesting things you can do with the series on a low budget and in keeping with the spirit of the first and best Terminator movie.  What they shouldn't make is another big bloated movie that rehashes the same action movie elements as T2.  More than another blockbuster, if this series is ever going to be credible again, it needs to deliver a really good movie. Most importantly, this is a series that needs to re-engage its fans and generate excitement for another movie.

Patrick Garone
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Monster Movie of the Week: Liquid Metal Edition: Terminator 2: Judgment Day

While the original Terminator was a sleeper hit that found its audience on home video and cable, its first sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, was a summer movie juggernaut that catapulted director James Cameron to the level of moguls like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. The movie's huge success gave Cameron the clout to undertake massive productions like Titanic and Avatar.



By the time T2 went into production, Arnold Schwarzenegger had become an unlikely superstar and was making plenty of his own action vehicles. In retrospect, he hardly needed to make a sequel to a movie in which he was a glorified stuntman but his role in Terminator 2 was expanded and in the sequel he played a cyborg that had been reprogrammed and sent back in time to defend a preteen John Connor from another more advanced Terminator model. It was a more heroic role and more in keeping with his new status as the biggest movie star in the world. T2 ended up being one of his most popular movies and represented the height of his action career.



But most importantly, Terminator 2 features groundbreaking digital effects that allowed Cameron to pull off mind bending sequences that simply would not have been possible before. The movie is an important milestone in the history of filmmaking and visual effects. The effects in T2 represent a maturation of technology that had been around throughout the 1980's but which Cameron had nurtured until they were ready for his eye-popping liquid metal T-1000.



Cameron's previous movie, The Abyss, had featured a similar but much less ambitious effect in its shimmering, shape-shifting aliens that appeared to be made entirely out of water. Terminator 2 creates a character that is not only made entirely of a liquid metal but also successfully melds it into the performance of a human actor, Robert Patrick. It was a successful first attempt at a CGI creature that not only paved the way for both the photo-realistic dinosaurs of Jurassic Park and the hybrid CGI/human performances in such movies as Lord of the Rings and Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

Shiny deadly people!

While the Terminator 2 is a historically important movie for its many technical achievements and it is one of the greatest action movies of the 1990's, it does have a few flaws that keep it from greatness.



One of the strengths of the original Terminator was that despite the hard logic of the time-travel paradox at the heart of its plot, Terminator was a simple story of fear and pursuit. It was like the elemental nightmare about being pursued by some relentless enemy. It was a lean and mean action movie. By contrast, T2 is overly elaborate and, at 137 minutes, it is at least a half-hour too long.



Many of us can remember a time when a movie being over two hours long was an unusual thing, reserved for "serious" movies. James Cameron has done more to usher in the era of bloated 2hr+ behemoths than anyone else. Aliens (though one of my favorite films) also clocked in at 137 and is (arguably) a little bit too long. 1989's The Abyss plods along at 138 minutes. Cameron was a superstar director by the time his spy movie True Lies was released in 1994, at that one clocks in at 141 minutes. By 1998, Cameron released the famously lengthy Titanic, which was two VHS tapes and 194 minutes long, the effect of which is like being forced to sit in a movie theater and watch a miniseries. Cameron spent the next ten years developing new technologies that would allow him make long movies and came up with Avatar, which, shamefully, is not even three hours long.



James Cameron's need to cram his entire intact cinematic vision into overly-long, sprawling movies is the sign of a director who has way too much power and too few people telling him "no." This is a too-common problem in today's movie industry. Too many directors are treated like auteurs which gives us long and meandering Star Wars prequels (with twenty minute pod race sequences), a two and a half hour Transformers movie, and a King Kong movie that was over three hours long. I would love to go back to the era when a good solid action film is an hour and a half long, like Terminator. Brevity is a terrific quality in an action movie.







One of the most notable things going between 1984's The Terminator to 1991's Terminator 2 is the strange shift in tone. While the original movie had a few tender moments, it was a dark and fatalistic 1980's action movie. T2, on the other hand, ventures into almost touchy-feely 1990's territory, with its subplot about a grating and adolescent John Connor befriending the Terminator sent back to protect him. It also features many light-hearted "comic" moments in an attempt to keep it in line with the softer direction that Schwarzenegger had taken with his career by this point. While the original Terminator was stone-faced, silent, and deadly, this new Terminator smiles, cracks jokes, struts around to "Bad to the Bone" and complains that he he needs "a vacation." When Schwarzenegger spouts the infamously awful line, "Now I know why you cry," I kinda wished his younger, eyebrow-less self would have shown up to shoot him in the face with his laser-sighted pistol. The movie is rated R but feels much more like a hard PG-13. I'd wager the R has more to do with the liberal use of the word "fuck" than the actual violence. Terminator 2 only works as well as it does because the T-1000 is lethal enough to make up for the Schwarzenegger's new cuddlier Terminator.

Terminator's right eye is being grossly unprofessional and looking straight into the camera.

THE MONSTERS/EFFECTS



So, apparently they only make a few models of Terminator and a lot of them look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. This one goes up against the T-1000 and gets beat up pretty bad so there are some nice damage effects later in the movie, although there are some wonky metal applications to fleshy parts of the body and Terminator's robot eye suspiciously stops moving as soon as it is revealed.



If endoskeletons are your thing, there is a cool sequence early in the movie that shows a whole squad of them marching into battle. I'm glad we get to see these bad boys in action cause I always liked their demonic robot/skeleton appearance.



The real star is the awesome liquid metal T-1000, a mind-bending creation of James Cameron and probably the most unique and interesting robot in the history of Science Fiction. Let's face it, there is not a lot of novelty or originality in the film industry, but the T-1000 actually presented audiences with something that they had likely never seen or even imagined before: a beautiful quicksilver being that could assume almost any form and for whom the normal rules of combat do not apply. The T-1000 was certainly not going to be stopped by being crushed in a press, that's for sure. It had to be frozen, melted, blown up and pushed into a vat of molten steel in order to be destroyed.



T-1000 has his own brand of liquid metal martial arts and adds an unpredictable element to the usual tired action movie fight sequences. In hand-to-hand combat, he does cool and surprising stuff like when he is slammed face-first into a wall, his back morphs into his front or when punched in the face, his head suddenly changes into his hands. When shot, T-1000 actually shows the ballistic damage on his body, most often in the form of shining metallic craters but when he takes higher caliber damage, his body blows apart in weird and surreal ways that are almost reminiscent of the shape shifting alien from The Thing.



Finally, the T-1000 is a smarter and more ruthless Terminator than any other. He's also a bit of a bastard, such as when he tortures Sarah Connor to get her to call out to her son. Or when after Connor fails to shoot him off a ledge and into a vat of molten steel he responds with a chilling finger wag. This Terminator, fortunately, will never know why we cry.








MOST MEMORABLE SEQUENCE



When the T-1000 is finally dispatched, the liquid metal robot flails around in the molten steel, reverting back to the forms it had taken over the course of the movie and then finally into a variety of surreal quasi-human screaming forms before he becomes a just a screaming face that folds out of itself and then just a mask that dissolves in the steel. It may be a little The Mind's Eye but it is still pretty cool.



HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY


T2 is widely available in both DVD and BluRay in many different editions. Most of which feature a longer director's cut of the movie that actually restores a few interesting scenes. There is an interesting scene in which John and Sarah actually access the Terminator's chip and switch it to "read" mode allowing him more independent thought and the ability to learn, presumably about feelings and crying. There are also a couple of scenes featuring the T-1000 in which we see him glitching after having been frozen in the liquid nitrogen and reconstituted. We see him flickering and inadvertently mimicking colors and textures around him.



One downside to seeing the movies on home video and a big TV is that you notice the shockingly awful stunt doubling, such as the apparently 40-year-old man doubling for John Connor and the not-quite-Schwarzenegger Terminator double.





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Patrick Garone

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Author of City of the Gods: The Return of Quetzalcoatl