Cameron with Linda Hamilton on the set of The Terminator in 1984. *

Photo: MGM * I first remember being aware of geopolitics during the Cuban missile crisis. When I was 7 or 8, I found a pamphlet for fallout shelters on the coffee table in my family's house in Ontario, and I remember thinking, "What's this about?" I had the sudden sensation that my coddled existence was a facade. Something dark and terrifying lurked behind it.

I've been fascinated ever since by our human propensity for dancing on the edge of the apocalypse. So when I wrote the first Terminator outline around 1982, I was just working out my childhood stuff. It was also born out of the science fiction movies and literature I grew up with. For the most part, they were warnings—about technology, about science, about the military and the government. You couldn't escape those themes or the fear of nuclear holocaust.

Illustration: John Ritter### T4: Please Don't Suck

Full disclosure: We're on the fence about Terminator Salvation* —the trailers look great, but McG as director? Really? Herewith, a few reasons to be hopeful ... and to be afraid, very afraid.*

Cast

Pro Christian Bale is a rare breed: an A-list actor with total nerd cred. The Dark Knight. The Prestige. Equilibrium. Gun kata, baby!

Con Bale almost totally terminated T4's distracting director of photography.

Script

Pro Screen-writer Jonathan Nolan (Christopher's brother) of The Dark Knight, The Prestige, and Memento fame pitched in on the script.

Con So did TV scribe Shawn Ryan of Nash Bridges and My Two Dads.

F/X

Pro Industrial Light & Magic, the f/x house behind the butt-kicking bots in Transformers.

Con ILM also did Poseidon and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift—even the best CG can't save a bad movie.

Director

Pro In Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, Joseph "McG" McGinty Nichol showed a facility with lively musical numbers featuring Cameron Diaz's rear end.

Con Wait, T4 doesn't have that?

Photos: (left to right): Getty; Transformer: Paramount/Everett

The idea of a hit man from the future trying to change past events was certainly not new. What I thought was cutting-edge was deciding to not have the Terminator be a guy in a robot suit. That's how it was typically done. But a flesh-covered endoskeleton? That was new. So for me it was all about how we could develop stop-motion animation and puppetry to create a true robotic endoskeleton. The team at visual-effects house Stan Winston Studio jumped into it and made it work.

Casting Arnold Schwarzenegger as our Terminator, on the other hand, shouldn't have worked. The guy is supposed to be an infiltration unit, and there's no way you wouldn't spot a Terminator in a crowd instantly if they all looked like Arnold. It made no sense whatsoever. But the beauty of movies is that they don't have to be logical. They just have to have plausibility. If there's a visceral, cinematic thing happening that the audience likes, they don't care if it goes against what's likely.

I don't think anything resembling The Terminator is really going to happen. There certainly aren't going to be genocidal wars waged by machines a few generations from now. The stories function more on a symbolic level, and that's why people key into them. They're about us fighting our own tendency toward dehumanization. When a cop has no compassion, when a shrink has no empathy, they've become machines in human form. Technology is changing the whole fabric of social interaction. We're absorbing our machines in a symbiotic way, evolving to become one with our own devices, and that's going to continue indefinitely.

I kind of turned my back on the Terminator world when there was early talk about a third film. I'd evolved beyond it. I don't regret that, but I have to live with the consequence, which is that I keep seeing it resurrected. I'm not involved in Terminator Salvation. I've never read the script. I'm sure I'll be paying 10 bucks to see it like everybody else.

Meanwhile, the original film was recently selected for preservation by the National Film Registry. So there's a good possibility that when the machines actually do take over someday, The Terminator will still be in existence. And the machines can have a good electronic laugh about that.

– As told to Wired writer Steve Daly.

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