Arnold Schwarzenegger Returns as the TERMINATOR
By Geno McGahee
The stories are true: Arnold Schwarzenegger will return in “TERMINATOR 5,” obviously not the official title as the cyborg that once wanted to kill John Connor but then was reprogrammed in the sequel: TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY to protect the young and very annoying John Connor from another terminator that was made of liquid metal. I love JUDGMENT DAY. I went to go see that flick three times when it was released. That and ROBOCOP. Those were fantastic movies, and now I see they are making a 5th…but my excitement is ebbing…near gone….gone.
In 1984, the original TERMINATOR was released and it was your typical mosnter movie, with an unstoppable force facing off against humanity, but it was a smart monster movie with a time travel twist, and I love time travel movies. Well, BACK TO THE FUTURE III was garbage, but anything that has to do with cyborgs coming back in time to kill things has to be good. Why couldn’t they send them with pants though?
It was dark, gritty, scary at times, and fun throughout, and in 1991, a huge budgeted sequel would be released. By this time, Arnold was the man. He was a huge star, acting in several films of several genres, carefully and strategically picking his scripts and he did a great job building himself into a big time attraction, and TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY was a smash with special effects that are still impressive today.
This is where it gets messy. In 2003, TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES was released and it was, in one word, horrible. Sure, we had a naked female terminator and that’s always fun, but it just didn’t have the same feel of the series and, by this time, Arnold was a faded star. The script was poor, the story was mediocre, and the response wasn’t good. The series died with the third entry.
But like all Hollywood franchises, they want to bring it back and see if they can recapture the magic or at least make a boatload of money. So, we got TERMINATOR SALVATION (2009), and they employed superstar, Christian Bale as the new John Connor, and it really made RISE OF THE MACHINES not look so bad. By the way, on a personal note, I recently saw that my second film RISE OF THE SCARECROWS was voted the #3 worst “Rise” movie of all time behind RISE OF THE MACHINES and GI JOE: THE RISE OF THE COBRA. Take that Terminator and GI Joe!
Now we have Mr. Terminator back again without a script or studio, but that will come into place…this movie will happen and let’s hope they learn from #3 and #4 and make something good this time around. Hell, bring back the liquid metal guy….he was good! Make the cyborg a sexual harasser…mix real life and fiction…there’s a ton of great things you can do, but in the end, I ask you, bring the naked cyborgs back with pants on.