Welcome back to my series on the Terminator franchise, how it got derailed and how to get it bac on path. As I mentioned in part one it is my view that there are two vitally important steps to bringing Terminator back, making it profitable again and legitimizing it as a true franchise. Not that it isn’t already a franchise, any movie that has a sequel or spin off is technically a franchise but many people don’t believe Terminator can support new ventures.
To me that position is laughable. Time travel and rogue AI are two areas of science fiction that have near limitless potential for stories, you just have to find the right angles to stand out from the crowd. Let’s take a look at film that started the franchise and should be the heart of any future installment: The Terminator (1984).
The Terminator (1984) – The Heart of the Franchise
In the original pre-release footage at the ending of The Terminator the camera reveals the factory in which the final showdown took place was owned by Cyberdyne systems. At some point, Cameron decided to remove that and hold back from the big reveal, something likely motivated by the potential to use it in a sequel and it’s a real shame because while this is all still implied it is something that raises up the original movie to the pinnacle of science fiction concepts. It creates a perfect time loop, somewhat similar to the one in Robert Heinlein’s “All you zombies”.
In Heinlein’s story (Spoilers for that btw) it is revealed that the time travelling protagonist of the story was also his own mother, father and recruiter. Effectively the character created himself/herself (They change gender mid story, hence being both of his own parents and romancing themselves). It’s all a very conceptual view of time travel, but importantly it maintains cause and effect… just in an infinite loop. That is the kind of thing you expect from Heinlein, but perhaps not from James Cameron and it’s entirely possible he didn’t really understand the significance of these story elements.
The Deep View
In The Terminator, both Skynet and John Connor are much like Heinlein’s protagonist. Both effectively created themselves out of nothing and form part of an eternal loop. That’s the thing about this story, it’s not about what it appears on the surface. The Terminator wasn’t really sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor and Kyle Reece wasn’t sent back in time to stop it. Both were sent back in time to conceive the entities that would then send them back in time for that very mission. The events that lead to that outcome are in some ways irrelevant (Though obviously entertaining to watch).
But what about Cyberdyne and Sarah Connor? Well the truth is while both are exceptional they are not unique, it could have been a number of companies and a number of potential mothers. They are merely the catalyst that grounds the time loop into a perceived linear reality. More important than who they are is what they represent. Sarah represents humanity, free will, emotion and family. Cyberdyne represents science, corporations, occupation and most significantly inevitability (Such as the inevitability of “The Singularity”, where AI’s reach the point they can create their own next generation). These become the very moral foundation for the war between Skynet and John Connor.
Good Vs Evil?
Many people have taken note that John Connor’s initials are the same as Jesus Christ and Skynet’s is the same as Satan. Of course John’s initials are also the same as James Cameron’s and since the idea of The Terminator supposedly came from one of his fever induced nightmares, it could just as well be a reference to himself. But regardless it is clear that John and Skynet are symbolic of ideas in direct opposition. This is of fundamental importance to the story, regardless of the whether the two physically manifest. Whether those forces are good and evil, order and chaos, progress and conservation or knowledge and emotion isn’t as important as the the fact the battle is eternal.
It’s worth noting however that other than good vs evil, these conflicts aren’t ones where you’d necessarily say one side must win. They instead need to maintain a balance. This is where I am not particularly keen on the Satan Vs Jesus Christ analogy, because that changes the story into one asking for a conclusion where the good guys ultimately win. That’s not necessarily where The Terminator should go. The thing with science fiction and part of what makes it a great genre is you get to ask the big questions.
The Horror Angle.
So, you have the deeper science fiction but you also have some great horror aspects such as humans fighting against their inevitable death. The unstoppable killing machine that is the Terminator relentlessly, but quite slowly pursuing the heroes can be seen as a fight of a mortal against their own mortality or humanity against their extinction. Time comes for everyone. But it’s not just mortality it’s also about redundancy. The machines on the surface appear superior to the humans and are replacing them. Again it’s a very natural fear and so perfect for the horror aspect of the movie.
Of course the final layer of the movie is the fun stuff. Killer robot from the future travels back in time. That’s the kind of pitch that is hard to resist and regardless of everything else promise to at least be a fun B-Movie. Throw in a very strong cast including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn and a small appearance from Lance Henriksen and James Cameron’s attention to detail and you know you are on to a winner.
Terminator 2 – The Ultimate Action Movie
This brings us to the sequel and we have a significant change of gears here. Instead of focusing on the horror and science fiction elements, Cameron went full tilt on the action and special effects and it paid off huge. This is a movie that could very well be the greatest action movie of all time and so it’s understandable why all too often it becomes the focus when looking at the Terminator franchise. I covered the momentum going into the movie in part one of this series, so here I want to focus on the the story itself.
Along with the action, Terminator 2 had fantastic character development and some truly moving character moments. This for me is what makes the difference between a good and a bad action movie. True not everyone can pull off cool special effects and stunts, but even when done well that all means nothing unless it really reaches the viewer on an emotional level. They have to be with the characters as they watch the edge of the seat action. It’s probably more for this reason rather than the stunts and effects that the movie is still regarded as the pinnacle of the action genre.
The Uphill Struggle
Trying to top that in the modern day is an expensive game with a very high risk of failure. But that’s just talking about stunts and effects, the emotional/character aspects are problematic too because Terminator 2 provided closure to most of the characters story arcs. It provided an emotionally satisfying ending and so you are already in a difficult situation to get the audience to invest emotionally in a continuation in the same style.
It’s all an uphill struggle and probably the only director that could pull it off is James Cameron himself and only if he is really on his game and doesn’t decide to do something silly like remove all the guns from the story. But even if he came back and directed the movie itself and it worked, where would you go next? Would every installment need an on form James Cameron to not lose the studio hundreds of millions of dollars? More importantly, should they even really be trying to go in that direction?
The Ending That Isn’t.
For all it’s positives, Terminator 2 has some very serious problems. Most of which come the switch in focus and the way that the film both firmly established that it was a perfect time loop and then breaks that loop by the end of the movie. This is easy to ignore when swept up in the huge emotional character moments and edge of the seat action, but it has huge implications and the big question becomes, how does time travel really work in this universe?
How Does Time Travel Work?
While everyone recognises that the first two Terminator movies are both great movies in their own right it’s often overlooked how they don’t really fit together and a big part of that is in the change of how time travel works. Terminator 2 is the problem here because there is no way to resolve how time travel works in that movie that actually means they succeeded in defeating Skynet, at least not without making a large number of assumptions, many of which would be painfully convenient. Neither of the films truly explained how time travel was expected to work in that universe so we need to look at the possible ways it could and how they would impact the franchise.
Timeloops
The original movie as I have mentioned is a perfect time loop. Events in the future cause the events in the past that then causes those events in the future. This is a type of time travel where all events maintain cause and effect despite attempts to change things. All You Zombies”, as mentioned above is another example of this. The movie “Predestination” (2014) is based on this story.
The TV series “Futurama” is another example of this. Fry, goes back in time, accidentally kills his own grandfather and then impregnates his grandmother, later finding out he is his own grandfather. But this situation also allowed him to have a unique brain that rendered him immune to the powers of some would be galactic conquerors. Since this condition already existed (and is the whole reason he ended up in the future) his whole story thus becomes a time loop.
So That’s How It Works in The Terminator Franchise?
So this is how time travel appeared to work in The Terminator. The sequels seems to suggest that isn’t how it worked however, since they appeared to have broken the time loop at least on the T800/Skynet side. It is still possible though that some of the information gained from the T800 chip could have been backed up somewhere and Cyberdyne were still able to proceed. That would mean Judgement Day would still happen and the loop would be preserved. Alternatively, maybe Skynet was never a direct part of the time loop and was never truly developed from the remains of the T800. In that case Judgement Day would still happen and Kyle Reece would still end up sent back in time.
Alternative Timelines
One of the most common types of time travel in fiction. Alternate Timelines deal with the potential impacts of travellers by breaking timelines off into alternate parallel dimensions. In Back to the Future 2, this is how it works. If applied to The Terminator it does leave an important question: Why would Skynet attempt to create an alternative timeline that won’t impact it’s present?
There is a possible answer for that however. Perhaps Skynet actually sent a compressed version of it’s own code back in the T800. Then the Skynet created from the T800’s remains would be the actual, original Skynet. Which would mean it could try once again. This time with a leg up technologically and perhaps in a reality where there is no John Connor.
The Problem With Parallels
Aside from Skynet’s motivation, there is a big problem with alternative timelines. Prior to the T800 going back in time, Skynet must have had a clear, inevitable path to it’s own creation. Preventing the use of the T800 technology wouldn’t have prevented the creation of Skyne. At best have just delayed it due to Cyberdyne wasting time on examining the advanced technology. This was the path that both Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles followed. John and Sarah spent a lot of time attempting to find that orgin in the TV. During the show they also discovered that Skynet wasn’t the only powerful AI in play. Terminator 3 meanwhile basically just said “Nah, Judgement Day is happening anyway”.
Self Correcting Timelines
As a midway point between timeloops and alternative timelines is the idea that when you try and change history, time automatically corrects itself. For example, if you went back in time and killed Hitler, his parents may end up adopting a child and calling it Adolf and that adopted child would then do everything Hitler did. If the timelines worked like this then the original John Connor wouldn’t have been Kyle Reece’s son, but when the events of The Terminator was put in motion and Sarah didn’t meet John’s original father time corrected by having Kyle take up that role, with the child still called “John”. This set up makes key events more important than things like genetic. So it doesn’t really matter where Skynet came from or who fathered John as long as Judgement Day happens and Skynet and John can have their conflict.
How Would A Self Correcting Timeline Work In Terminator?
If the Terminator world worked like this it would mean Skynet either didn’t understand time travel or was hoping not to change it’s present but provide it with some kind of weapon to change it’s future after the point the T800 was sent back. This actually fits in a way since the T1000 could be seen as that weapon. However, if that is the case it becomes a bigger question as to why it would send the T1000 back in time. There probably could be some justification but it’s probably getting a bit too unlikely at this stage. The important thing though is that Skynet would still happen after T2 because the timeline would correct.
Actually Changing Stuff
In the Star Trek universe (At least up until the end of the run of TNG movies) and in most classic science fiction TV/Movies time travel basically works as intended and causal paradoxes are largely ignored. So if you went back in time and killed Hitler as a baby, you would indeed prevent his rule but in doing so also removed your reason to go back in time. These days this is viewed as a paradox that wouldn’t be possible, but for classic Trek it wasn’t a problem at all.
There would however be a window of time for people to repair the timeline. For example the entire Federation disappeared in the City on the Edge of Forever when the timeline was changed, but the crew on the ground close to the place where the change happened maintained their memory of it and were able to go back in time and fix things.
Similarly in “First Contact” the entire planet Earth ended up being assimilated, but the Enterprise was somehow able to avoid the impact and were able to go back in time and fix the problem. Honestly those two events contradict each other as in the first instance the Enterprise vanished and in the second it did not. The truth is with time travel in Star Trek, the people that are able to remember the world before the change are effectively, whomever is important to the plot to do so.
Could Terminator Throw The Rules Out The Window?
You could have a version of this were only the person that creates the change remembers it and becomes like an interloper into reality, but that wouldn’t fit with The Terminator, because the moment the T800 went back in time the future would have changed and Kyle Reese wouldn’t have been able to follow. Honestly this is a messy way to deal with time travel, but it can work providing you make your own rules clear for it at the start.
In the case of Terminator 2, you’d still have the problem that if you don’t have a fixed time loop, there must be an alternative way for Skynet to be created and you still open yourself up to Judgement day. What does change however is there is no reason for the date to stay fixed and more importantly there is no guarantee that John’s resistance would always defeat Skynet. Indeed by attempting to prevent it, they could have changed things so Skynet wins. This kind of time travel really is anything goes and you never know if you’ll make things better or worse.
So what does that all mean?
The reason for going over all these versions of time travel is simply this: There isn’t a single version that means Terminator 2 should be the logical end of the story. Not one. The only reason people think it is or should be is because of how it works from a character perspective. In that regard it was a very satisfying end. But when you think about it, you realise it was ultimately not the victory it appeared.
However, that doesn’t mean the story of T2 was pointless. A Skynet born from it’s own future technology is going to have a significant advantage (Perhaps as demonstrated with the T1000), they prevented that. They also learned a number of important lessons that showed why John Connor could be the future leader of humanity. Perhaps most importantly though, they learned that a machine could learn the value of humanity. This means that long term there may even be a path to coexistence.
I’ll Be Back!
The important thing though is simply to recognise that there are more stories to tell with this franchise. In the next part instead of looking at the third to sixth movies and where they messed things up I’m going to get a bit creative instead and give you my idea for how the franchise could be revived. It’s not even particularly out of left field and to be clear you could go as wild as you like with it, but in my view before you get crazy you need to re-ground the whole thing. See you in part 3!
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