No Fate But What We Make – Part Three
“You don’t know what it’s like to try and kill one of these things…”
No Fate But What We Make – A Terminator Retrospective
The Terminator Franchise is the only sci-fi/action series to get into the 21st Century with its dignity intact. Terminator Salvation may have its detractors, but it’s no Alien vs. Predator, a film that managed to kill two proud franchises in one foul swoop.
There’s certainly enough fuel for articles discussing the resurrection of the Alien and Predator franchises (Your plot for the next Alien vs. Predator film: a Predator vessel crashes onto an Alien planet and the two races fight for 90 minutes!) or their possible replacement (the logical replacement for the Alien Franchise? Halo), but with Terminator Salvation having garnered mixed reviews, it’s time to look back over the Terminator franchise; its hits and misses and its big discussion points.
I’ve been a huge Terminator fan since I was old enough to watch the films, and can talk about it for hours on end. Given that, I’ve broken this retrospective down into three parts, with part one covering the original film, the second part covering the sequel and some brief notes on the spin-offs over the following years, and this final part covering the third film and the recently cancelled TV series.
franchises: you don't know what its like to kill one of these things
Part Three – “You don’t know what it’s like to try and kill one of these things…”
Just as a warning, there are some spoilers in here for Terminator Salvation and “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” if you’re worried about that sort of thing.
Terminator 2 had the cultural impact to turn the series into a franchise, and a lot of other media turned up after the film’s release. There were more comics; with some rather weird crossovers, honestly. Everything from Aliens, Predators, RoboCop and Superman. These have got their fans, and while some of them were good, trying to hammer some of these things together feels contrived, so we’ll move along.
There were also toys; ever see the cool playset where you could put plasticine “flesh” on a T-800 endoskeleton? More games came along too; some good, some bad
Some novels came along too, which is where the universe was fleshed out the most. The most important contribution (I think) was three novels by S.M. Stirling, showing John and Sarah still on the run after the “incident” at Cyberdyne. These novels introduced the concept of the soldier that was used as a template for the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101’s physical appearance and voice, the concept of female Terminators and human/machine hybrid “infiltrators”. All of these concepts would be used to varying degrees of success in future instalments of the franchise.
Somewhat sadly, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was the first Terminator film I was old enough to see at the cinema! My most enduring memory of this film is watching it drunk after the end of exams with a couple of likeminded mates. We had to stop the film halfway through because we couldn’t watch it anymore without having worked out the time travel mechanics of the Terminator Universe. We delayed finishing watching the film for three hours whilst we worked out various diagrams and scenarios using butcher’s paper and markers. The other roommates of the household would pop in occasionally to marvel at our drunken lunacy, but we eventually cobbled together a working time travel model and resumed watching the film. Unfortunately, the charts were lost at some point afterwards, and the later TV series proved our model wrong, but it was a fun way to spend an afternoon!
alloy over robot... isn't that a step backwards in tech?
It’s a widely maligned film, and I believe somewhat unfairly. The film certainly has its faults, and I don’t shy away from that. The big problem most people seem to have with it is that it’s not Terminator 2.
James Cameron pretty much closed the door for future instalments of Terminator with his ending to Terminator 2. A sequel seemed superfluous at best, a money-grubbing exercise at worst. So when a sequel was announced without Cameron at the helm, naturally people got angry.
To be fair, I’d argue that even James Cameron himself could not have topped Terminator 2 with a sequel he wrote and directed. Everything just seemed to fall into place for that film. I’m willing to be proven wrong by Avatar, but until then I have my doubts that he could still do it.
With that in mind, Jonathan Mostow and his team made a critical decision; they couldn’t beat Terminator 2, so they’d just set out to make the best damn action film set in the Terminator Universe that they could, and I’d argue they succeeded.
The biggest sin thematically that Terminator 3 is accused of is letting Judgement Day still happen, this time on July 25, 2004, and flying in the face of Terminator 2 and more importantly the credo “No Fate But What We Make”.
come with me if you want a career...
Outside of suggesting that some events are unavoidable (whole other discussion piece there), I’d say that having Judgment Day happen and John Connor no longer believing in the message does tie into Terminator 2. A young John Connor watches two kids playing with toy guns and remarks, “We aren’t going to make it, are we? People, I mean”. Humanity as a whole made its Fate; we continued to develop deadlier war machines, and continued research into Artificial Intelligences.
We made our Fate.
Getting on to the actual movie itself, this was Arnie’s acting swansong before he became The Governator, and I think he left his career on a high. He plays the Terminator a little differently in this one; it’s a bit more disdainful of humanity, a bit harsher towards John Connor. Arnie also plays it as having a sense of pride; it’s annoyed that it’s an obsolete model, and takes great pride in having bested the superior Terminator by the film’s end. It is however, still the Cadillac of Terminators; managing to overcome massive damage and corruption to it’s programming to complete its mission.
Kristanna Loken has a really tough act to follow after Robert Patrick and for me she’s the weakest link in the film. She is physically menacing and imposing, handling the physical demands of the role with aplomb, and I like the idea of the T-X having secondary targets. John Connor couldn’t do it all alone, so with him in hiding, gunning down the other known members of the Resistance Leadership makes perfect sense. But where the T-1000 was creepy, the T-X is grotesque. It seems to take pleasure from its actions, and the blood analysis really was just the wrong way to go about it. The element of desire was wrong too; compare “Say, that’s a nice bike” with “I like your car.” Desire is irrelevant for machines, after all!
The absence of Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor is keenly felt, and Clare Danes Kate Brewster seems like a poor substitute in comparison. However, she is an important contribution to the Terminator Mythos, being John Connor’s future wife and the daughter of the current creator of Skynet. As a stand alone character, she is interesting and fits into the universe well, but it would have been fascinating to have seen her share screen time with Sarah Connor. Further, the fact that the character was kept on in Salvation speaks volumes of her impact.
ugly and metal. great combination...
Nick Stahl’s take on John Connor is an interesting one, and one of a couple of logical conclusions for the character; after the death of his mother John could have become a crazed shut-in, dwelling in some underground bunker with a terrifying (to the FBI) stockpile of weaponry and a group of loyal followers, however he’s decided to remove himself from the game entirely. However, the “domestic terrorist” scenario is looked at later on in the TV series. Given John’s compassionate nature, this decision makes a lot of sense; he can’t cause any more collateral damage or incidental fatalities this way.
Some have characterised this interpretation as “weak”. Again I’d argue this point; John Connor has always been spoken of as a leader, not a fighter. His power is that he organised and inspired the remnants of humanity to fight back against the machines. Here, John is trying to shrug off that mantle (which seems to be a standard part of the Hero’s Journey, denying responsibilities and destiny before accepting them) before finally stepping up.
As to what I cannot defend; some of the plot elements seem contrived and contribute little if nothing over all (future Connor being dead, and the T-850 having been the actual assassin), and much of the humour fell flat and felt tacked-on. And Hell, Nick Stahl or the writers really messed up the “Come with me if you want to live” moment! Some see the ending as a downer; though I think it’s fucking ballsy to end a film with 3 billion deaths. It’s a good, solid action film; the realism of the action was in direct contrast to the usual overuse of CGI in other films of that year, and the CGI shown was used to maximum effect (the damage to the T-850 specifically). It was well shot and well acted, with its main problem being that it was a pale shadow of its predecessor.
And at the end of the day, James Cameron himself liked it. What more can you ask for?
It’s at this point I can finally discuss a meta-concept that can’t be discussed within the universe by the characters (though Salvation has a crack at it, unsuccessfully).
In this film, John Connor finds himself in a US Government bunker with access to a communications network keeping him in contact with other elements of the US Government and military (which I assume remained true for Salvation, it following on from this one). Skynet is software rather than hardware, having no central core to destroy, and the Terminator is an advanced production model utilising an advanced endoskeleton with mimetic polyalloy “skin”.
Contrast this with the previous films, and what do you notice?
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