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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