A few months ago, while trawling YouTube for Terminator videos (a frequent activity of mine), I stumbled across a series of videos titled, “What Happened to the Terminator Franchise?”

“I’ve been asking myself that for years,” I muttered to myself as I clicked play. “I hope this guy knows what he’s talking about.”

And boy did he:

Over the course of five videos, Calum O’Donnell (“LittleJimmy835” on YouTube) chronicled the rise and fall of my most beloved sci-fi franchise with his intelligent, funny commentary, the type of thing that we love here at Overthinking It. I knew I needed to get in touch with him for some serious talk. Thankfully, around that time, the recent surge of Terminator sequel news (“reboot” confirmed for 2015, with two more movies to follow) gave us, possibly the two biggest Terminator nerds on YouTube, the occasion to join forces and speculate wildly on the unknown future of Terminator.

This is what we came up with.

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Lee

About this Terminator “reboot” that’s been announced. We have no idea what that means, but “reboot” is the word that Hollywood wants to use to get people to forget about the (disappointing) recent history of a franchise. They also want to remind fans of other successful recent reboots: Batman and Star Trek, chief among them.

Let’s start with the basic question: are you at all optimistic about this new Terminator? Or is there something about this franchise that, unlike Batman or Star Trek, leaves little room for a new storyteller to reinvent the franchise? I tend to lean towards the latter, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment.

I know you were more forgiving of Terminator Salvation’s faults than I was. So maybe you have more of an “endoskeleton half full” mindset when it comes to this franchise?

O’Donnell

Hey now! Don’t say anything you can’t take back mate! Just because I said Terminator Salvation wasn’t as bad as everyone else says, doesn’t mean I think it was a great movie. I just felt that Salvation, in spite of its flaws, was closer to the original two films than its predecessor Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was. I guess it’s like comparing being punched in the stomach to being kicked in the groin. Neither are particularly good, but I know which one I’d prefer!

Lee

How about “neither”? Is that an option?

O’Donnell

No, You must choose. There is no fate but what Hollywood makes for you. Anyway, I don’t really know what Hollywood even means by “reboot” anymore. Hollywood is using the term “reboot” to describe just about anything nowadays, regardless of whether they’re outright restarting a series continuity, or just taking the established canon in a different direction. I’m afraid that the term has become so overused that it’s now just a Hollywood marketing buzzword robbed of all meaning.

I’m really not sure how to feel about the continuation of this franchise. The ending of Terminator Salvation didn’t really leave much to go on as far as continuing the story, but on the other hand, outright restarting the series storyline runs the risk of simply going over what we’ve already seen before. So I guess the question is, how do you think they’ll go about rebooting it? Will they simply ignore the previous films and restart the continuity? Will they make a sequel to Terminator Salvation? Will they pull a Star Trek and use the time travel to create and “in universe” plot device for re-jigging the series continuity?

I find it interesting that Annapurna Pictures has acquired the rights to produce this new flick. For those who don’t know, they’re the guys whose most recent production of note was Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. So my guess is that the next Terminator is going to be about an alcoholic T-800 who becomes a Scientologist.

Lee

O’Donnell

Don’t look at me like that; it could happen.

Lee

Actually, I like the idea of the founder of Scientology being a Terminator. It goes a long way towards explaining the e-meters.

Anyway, about continuity: I had assumed they would restart the continuity, but I hadn’t considered a Star Trek-like in-universe plot reset. The time travel nature of Terminator certainly lends itself to that. Just like how Old Spock met Young Spock, they could have an Old Sarah Connor travel back in time to meet a Young Sarah Connor, to warn her about how the future turned out differently than what the T-800 foretold. It would probably be nonsense, but it would at least create a plausible reason to bring Linda Hamilton back to the franchise. Note that the only two good Terminator movies are the ones with her in them. Coincidence? I think not.

But the real question is this: Terminator stories, or at least as they’ve been imagined thus far, suffer from the same constraints that a lot of other time travel-centric sci-fi stories do: it’s a prisoner of its own mythology. Take the typical superhero movie franchise, like Spider-Man or Iron Man. It’s not so difficult to keep telling new stories with these heroes; you just throw a new super-villain at them and give them new obstacles to overcome. It’s not so simple with Terminator. You can’t keep throwing bad guys back in time to kill John Connor; it just gets silly (Terminator 3). You can’t keep throwing bad guys at John Connor to kill in the future, either (Terminator Salvation); it presupposes too much the existence of that future and never gets us back to the present, which is what everyone is actually fighting over in Terminator stories.

So where is there new territory to tread with these stories?

O’Donnell

Yeah, you can only send so many Terminators back in time to kill John Connor before it starts to get ridiculous. You’ll notice that in the first Terminator, they tried to establish during the interrogation scene at the police station that, for whatever reason, Kyle and the Terminator were the only ones who had the chance to travel back in time, therefore establishing a nice closed loop timeline. Of course they abandoned this with the sequels, and therefore opened the door to all kinds of paradoxical questions: Why doesn’t Skynet send a more than one Terminator back at once? Why doesn’t Skynet send a Terminator back to when Sarah was born? Why can’t Skynet tell if their previous assassination mission fails before it happens? Why did my brain hurt so much from thinking about that last question?

Heck, even Terminator 2, otherwise known as “The Good Sequel” suffered a little from this problem. The only thing that saved T2 from this mess was that movie kicked so much arse in every other area that it made you overlook these plot gripes.

So that pretty much nixes the angle of “Let’s send another Terminator back in time to kill John!” And even if you could make it work, it’s just retreading old ground anyway. The area I always wanted to see explored was a prequel film that showed the origins of the robot uprising; how Skynet was invented, how the war started, and the birth of the human resistance. All the previous Terminator films ever showed us was glimpses of the machine war. Even Terminator Salvation limited itself to post main-conflict skirmish fighting. So stop pussyfooting around and show us the actual war already!

Lee

All fine and good. This would probably be the safe thing to do. And it has a decent chance of producing a good movie. But part of me craves a totally brand new take on Terminator, one that stakes out new territory, not just for the franchise, but for sci-fi writ large. Like T1 and T2. Is this too much to ask for? Probably, but consider how much has happened since Terminator gave us the current reigning benchmark vision for the Robot Apocalypse: huge advances in machine learning. The rise of the surveillance state. 3D printing. Human organs grown in petri dishes. Wouldn’t this make for an incredible new starting point for the Terminator/Skynet story? One that is far more relevant to our day and age than the original Cold War, Pentagon/DoD-heavy birth of SkyNet?

O’Donnell

The whole idea of technology advancing faster than we can understand it is an old maxim of science fiction, but it’s probably more relevant today than ever. Look at your smart phone; it’s a miniature supercomputer right in your pocket. Not so ago that would have been the communicator from Star Trek: pure science fiction. Your XBOX is about a zillion times more powerful than the computers NASA used to send the astronauts to the Moon. That’s Moore’s Law in full effect.

Everything we do today is through the internet; our work, our entertainment, even bloody refrigerators and vacuum cleaners have connections these days. Everything we do is mercilessly catalogued online through social media. Big companies like Google and Facebook are demanding more and more of our personal information for us to use their services, and we’re either completely unaware of it, or we reluctantly go along with it due to our utter dependence on their technology.

We have all of this technology, and yet most of us don’t even have the flimsiest idea of how it works. And as the technology is advancing faster and faster, we are finding ourselves more and more dependent on it, to the point where all of a sudden we think we can’t live our lives without it. Heck, now I can’t even take a dump without bringing my iPad in with me so I have something to read.

I find it funny how people online always joke about their “Zombie Survival Plan,” how they would survive in the event of a zombie apocalypse. Yet I’m willing to bet most of these people would end up shooting themselves if their Internet went down for more than 48 hours. Hell I’m guilty of it too; the other day my Internet connection shit itself while I was studying for an exam, and I went into a complete panic. “How on Earth am I meant to study for my next exam? Read a textbook like some kind of primitive animal?!”

And I haven’t even got into all of the military’s recent investments in robotics. We all know of the use of attack drones and UAV’s, but were you aware that they’re actually investing into powered exoskeletons, automated gun turrets and walking robots? Combine those three together you’ve just about got a Terminator.

So to get back to the point, yes, I think thematically a Terminator movie is still very relevant to today’s world, because the robots already are talking over!

Lee

Maybe that’s the problem: the gap between Skynet’s science fiction future and the present is much more narrow now than it was in 1984. One of the many things that makes The Terminator such a compelling movie is the way that future technology infiltrates and corrupts the present. The most advanced piece of technology that Sarah Connor owns is a Walkman; Kyle Reese, a pump-action shotgun. The gap between that and a Terminator is huge. The gap between drones and exo-skeleton prototypes, not so huge. Why bother having a time travel element in the story, then, if the distance traveled is not so great?

Can you have a compelling Terminator universe without any time travel at all?

O’Donnell

Well, our current advances in technology do make this kind of story more relevant today than ever. Sarah was never really ever at risk of her Walkman rising up against her, but when you look at today’s military drones, it makes you wonder where’s this technology going to be in even just 10 years?

So perhaps a Terminator movie doesn’t need to be set in the distant future at all. Maybe you could have it set in the the near future as the robots begin their takeover. It’d be like Rise of the Planet of the Apes, except it would be the Rise of the Machines.

Lee

They already used that title.

O’Donnell

They did? Shit… Let me work on that one…

But here we run into a problem. Isn’t time travel an integral part of the franchise? I mean, what if someone were to propose a sequel to Back to the Future without the Delorian? Or a sequel to Hot Tub Time Machine without a… uh… Hot Tub Time Machine? Is a Terminator really even a Terminator movie without time travel? And besides, getting rid of time travel would also pretty much nix our idea of Linda Hamilton back “Old Spock” style.

So how would you go about this? Do we need time travel? Do we need to bring back Sarah? Or are we better of starting completely afresh?

Lee

I think it needs time travel to still be Terminator. Recent movies like Looper and Primer have shown that it’s still possible to give fresh takes on time travel. And I’ve yet to see a good Terminator story absent Sarah Connor, so I’d strongly advocate for her to be in it, front and center.

And I know that just brings me closer to advocating a straight up remake of the first Terminator movie, which would be safe and predictable, not to mention the absolute wrong thing to do and totally antithetical to the message of T1 and T2. Those movies were, at their core, meditations on fate versus free will. How sad would it be that a groundbreaking sci-fi movie is so successful that it fates itself to just be repeated in a lesser way?

Here’s another solution: send a robot back in time to kill James Cameron, so we don’t have to be face the future awfulness of Terminator 5.

O’Donnell

Looks like you can’t fight fate after all. Well, you get the robot and and I’ll set up the time displacement field and we’ll… Wait a second… If we send a robot back in time to kill James Cameron, then he’ll never make Terminator. If Terminator never gets made we’d never have this conversation, so we’d never send a robot back in time. So then James Cameron would be alive, and he would make The Terminator, but then we’d send a robot back and…

Great Scott! We’ve created a time paradox, the results of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space time continuum, and destroy the entire universe! If we don’t stop this now we could…

OH GOD IT’S HAPPENING!