From ELECTRONIC KILLER to INTERIOR DECORATOR. All Schwarzenegger’s TERMINATORS

Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1984 erected for himself a Terminator statue more durable than made of bronze, although he actually has one made of bronze, too, and even sometimes sleeps under it. Arnold’s interpretation of the character of the sinister cyborg, or rather, his paradoxical lack of it, that is, in total, his mere presence in front of the camera, after all, the Austrian Oak, like an oak, spoke little and his facial expressions were non-existent, elevated the multiple Mr. Olimpia to the heights of film fame, where he remained for nearly three decades. Seemingly it was a one-off role, as the “electronic killer” (this is how the title was originally translated in poland) in the finale was stripped of Schwarzenegger’s face and then bowed to the pressure of the hydraulic press, winking at Sarah Connor with a red eye.

TERMINATOR CULT

And all in all, it was a good thing that the filmmakers for the last thirty found ways, silly more or less, to show the further fate of the Terminator laying eggs of gold for the producers. What matter that it was a different copy of the cyborg in each installment, the T-800, as a hero of the mass imagination of viewers around the world, was for the audience always the same, good (though not bad in the one) acquaintance, whom one wanted to watch on screen for as long as possible and once again. Significantly, when we look at all the Terminator parts as a whole, with the beginning in part one and the end in part six, it is easy to see that this three-decade-long extraordinary journey of the hero, resembles the fate of the tin woodcutter from The Wizard of Oz, who searched for his heart, remembering that he was happiest when he could love.

After all, no matter how you look at it, the Terminator started out in the guise of a young soulless assassin from the future, and ended up as a conscience-owning, conscience-removing, fancy-drinking keeper of the household, with his family by his side and his hair sprinkled with gray. A stretch? Like hell, but otherwise also naive. It’s a good thing, at least, that the cyborg trying to redeem himself didn’t start drinking, although there were rumored plans in the first Cameron installments of the franchise to require the T-800 to consume token amounts of food in order for his human skin to regenerate. There were even plans for a scene in which the Terminator would eat a candy bar, complete with wrapper. With the sixth installment of the franchise, Schwarzenegger said goodbye to the role of T-800 model 101 for good, and to audiences, after all, the financial flop of Dark Fate does not herald another sequel, and Arnold himself, after all, uttered a telling line in one of the scenes: I’m NOT coming back. And since literally moments ago Netflix announced the creation of an animation set in the Terminator universe, the handle on the Terminator cinematic franchise seems to have fallen for good.

However, I look back on these last Terminator rises of Schwarzenegger with a certain note of understanding, a sense of nostalgia and a sincere tear of emotion in my eye. For Arnold, so humanly speaking, deserved to be able to still savor and entertain himself with his iconic performance today, as a man who is, after all, justly old (he was carrying 72 springs on his neck on the set of Six). Outside of the movies, he did so, for example, in his famous pranks, where he walked the streets of L.A. in T-800 makeup, or pretended to be a wax figure of the T-800 and scared visitors with a sudden movement, and there was no end to the laughs and photos.

We, on the other hand, as viewers, especially those raised on Terminators, should watch Schwarzenegger’s on-screen farewell with a big wink, trying to have a good time at the scenes in which the already aged Arnold quite skillfully throws enemy cyborgs across the screen. So aside from the embarrassing moments of recent installments (ah that sour romance between Jai Courtney and Emilia Clarke and Arnold’s shoddy matchmaking between them) and the warming of the T-800’s image to boiling point, I personally still enjoy watching Arnold. It’s cool that we can still see him on screen in action cinema, let’s enjoy it instead of vilely hating Dark Fate and Genisys! Ok, I’ve wiped away a tear of emotion, and now to the work, we go to trace the fate of our steel lumberjack. Well, and to cheer Dark Fate and Genisys.

TERMINATOR / 1984

It’s probably an unpopular opinion, but for me the first part of The Terminator will forever remain better than the sequel. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that it was one of the first films I watched on VHS and my first screen encounter with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and this must have left an imprint on my memory and the area of the brain responsible for sentiment. In addition, I watched Cameron’s film with German dubbing at the time, which made it a good few years that I knew the iconic I’ll be back as… Ich komme wieder. Arnold’s T-800 model 101 (where T-800 meant the endoskeleton model and 101 meant the human image symbol) was extremely scary, soulless and perfectly emotionless.

There was no human element in this villain, no flashes of white or even shades of gray, such as in Darth Vader, who spent half an hour wondering whether to save his son or his own reputation as a galactic sleuth. There were also no terminator heebie-jeebies or winks to the viewer, and the T-800 character was not the subject of any on-screen banter, unless we consider as such the choice of the response option Fuck you asshole among other, more cultured possibilities. In addition, the less the T-800 spoke, the more he seemed cold and inhuman, and since he was only given fourteen lines of text to speak, count yourself lucky.

The tinted, distinctive Gargoyles glasses (a year before the T-800 was paraded in them by Clint Eastwood in Sudden Impact), in this installment used by the cyborg to cover a blown-out eye, completed the on-screen look, adding to the T-800’s final dose of darkness and a solid dose of awesomeness. Wearing tinted glasses, by the way, became an attribute of our recalcitrant time-traveling machine in subsequent installments. Prior to shooting, Arnold Schwarzenegger reportedly spent long weeks learning how to assemble, disassemble, reload and fire every weapon used in the film – without looking at the guns. The result was a more robotic approach to gun handling, which added to the awesomeness and credibility of the Austrian’s creation. Recall the shootout in Tech-noir, when the T-800 standing over the lying Sarah Connor changes the magazine in the UZI, looking not at his hands or gun, but somewhere in the void.

In order to make an indelible impression on audiences and write himself with golden voices in the history of cinema, Arnold only needed twenty-one minutes of screen time. And it’s hard to believe today that originally O.J. Simpson and Lance Henriksen (who reportedly came to the casting with gold foil on his teeth) among others, were tried on for the role of the Terminator Fortunately, Arnold, who came to the casting with muscles, won. Interestingly, initially the predator slayer was considered for the role of…. Kyle Reese, but at the casting in question he was considered the perfect villain.

Then there was the amazing theme song by Brad Fiedel and the unforgettable opening credits with letters flying across the screen forming the title. And then there are the action scenes, for me the best of all the Terminator parts. The electrifyingly dynamic shootout in the Technoir bar, and the darkly electrifying exchange of gunfire with the cops at the police station. All the awesomeness of the first Terminator, as it was to turn out, is not just some vague childhood memory of mine. Cameron’s classic watched this year, when I’m already 43, made a great impression on me, as if time had stopped for it, well, except maybe for the animatronics, which are a bit lame from today’s perspective.

Coming back to Arnold Schwarzenegger, I think James Cameron came up with the jack time travel motif especially for him, so that he could show the muscular Austrian with a bare butt on the screen. The moment when a naked Arnold, filmed from behind, walks up to the railings looking out over nighttime Los Angeles remains for me, and I mean this quite seriously, one of the most amazing and iconic in the entire franchise. The whole idea of a cyborg from the future and the soldier pursuing him, supposedly dreamt up to Cameron in a nightmare, although the truth turned out to be closer to plagiarism than a dream nightmare.

Schwarzenegger, with only one big starring role – Conan the Barbarian – to his credit, was still a relatively unknown and still budding actor in 1984 (which, looking at the level of later acting, he probably remains to this day), did an excellent job in the role of a fearsome cyborg devoid of empathy and any feelings at all, who didn’t bow to bullets or anyone else. To deepen the distance and feeling of alienation between his cyborg and the couple he pursued, Arnold avoided Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn on set. And damn, on screen it shows, until your skin suffers. The makeup, in the form of a burnt haircut and lack of eyebrows (supposedly these were insured in case they grew back badly after shaving), added an extra eeriness to his T-800 and completed the demonic image. Behind this image, and the amazing creation of the T-800’s endoskeleton, was the invaluable team of Stan Winston.

To this day, the sequences of repairing the hand mechanism or the T-800’s own cutting out of the remnants of a human eye are still impressive. But Stan Winston’s team also went a little soft when it came to animating the endoskeleton in the final scenes. Did you know that the T-800 suffered a leg injury after being run over by a tanker truck, not coincidentally? It was a preparation for making it easier for the puppeteers and animators of the later sequence of the walking endoskeleton, which pulled the damaged leg… no longer needed to imitate Arnold’s gait. The computer instructions displayed on the Terminator’s HUD display were written in the MOS Technology 6502 assembly language, which was, among other things, the central processing unit of the Apple II personal computer. The T-800’s method of displaying messages survived unchanged for the 35 years of the entire franchise.

The film, with a running time of 107 minutes, the shortest of the series, was released in Poland in the late 1980s as Electronic Killer. This translation, often ridiculed, had its logical justification, however. In Poland at the time, the word “terminator” meant… apprentice. Indeed, I myself remember the word if only from Historia żółtej ciżemki, where Wawrzuś (a tiny Marek Kondrat) apprenticed with Wit Stwosz. So the title in our country, understandably, was changed to something more catchy, interesting and, above all, understandable to the public, because no one would want to watch a film about some apprentice. The situation was to be changed only by Terminator 2: Judgment Day, already appearing under its original title, so that in the early 1990s the word terminator was already widely recognized in our country as a character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The iconic line I’ll be back, uttered by Arnold Schwarzenegger in an inconspicuous scene at the police station, was chosen as the 37th best movie quote by the American Film Institute, and ranks 95th in The 100 Greatest Movie Lines. A close second, and the famous one-liner would have read I Will Be Back, which Schwarzenegger himself insisted on, motivating his suggestion by the fact that it sounds more mechanical. Fortunately, Cameron brought him back down to earth quickly by replying that I’ll be back sounds more cinematic.

The film with a budget of less than seven million dollars, shot almost guerrilla-style, and with cottage industry methods (Cameron used his knowledge gained on the sets of cheap Roger Corman films), earned nearly eighty million, was hailed as one of the best pictures of 1984, became a worldwide phenomenon, set Schwarzenegger’s career for the next two decades, and remains to this day Arnold’s own favorite film. And if someone had told me back then, when I was a kid with baked goods (and by no means baked goods) on my face after a screening of The Terminator, that someday this same badass, murdering without blinking an eye, would someday instruct… what curtains to choose for a child’s room, I would have put my hand to my forehead and said: Oy, it burns.

TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY / 1991

It’s hard for me to believe this today, because I have tremendous respect for T2 and love to return to it, but when I first watched Judgment Day… it didn’t appeal to me much. I missed the character of Kyle Reese (I like Michael Biehn for the roles of Reese and Hicks from Aliens, what can I do?), but I missed even more the evil T-800, which in the sequel has already become such a bit of a cyborg-turned-hugger, if, of course, one likes to cuddle with cold steel. When it comes to overall momentum (the prologue is a masterpiece!) and special effects (T-1000 forever!), Judgment Day undoubtedly wins over the 1984 original. The film, by the way, earned as many as 6 Oscar nominations, 4 of which it turned into statuettes (best sound, sound effects, special effects, make-up), forever remaining the only film from the franchise with Oscar nominations.

But the good T-800 gnawed at me, because I still had in my mind the relatively fresh image of the merciless, petulant Arnold from part one. Compared to part one, in part two, the T-800 has already talked, and in the following parts it’s a shame to talk. Except for Salvation, of course, because there he uttered even fewer words than in the first part, or, to be precise, not a single one. And although James Cameron in Judgment Day doesn’t make too much fun of the T-800, we can already see the first symptoms of humanizing the cyborg and turning towards a strong warming of the image of this extraordinary babysitter with nerves of steel and patience worthy of a machine.

Deprived of teaching, the cybernetic organism from the future begins to learn catchy phrases, where to find the keys in a stolen car, and, albeit unconsciously, how to be the perfect synonym for a father to John Connor. As Sarah puts it, one who will never hit John, never let him down, and never say he doesn’t have time for him. And while in the finale the T-800 admits that he already knows why people are crying, he states self-consciously that he won’t be able to do it himself, and sacrifices his existence for the safety of John, Sarah and all of humanity. Edward Furlong, who plays the teenage John Connor, got along with Arnold Schwarzenegger from the get-go, as the young actor grew up without a father, and Schwarzenegger was able to fill the role both in front of and off camera. The two actors understood each other so well because their film incarnations were emotionally of a similar age.

In the sequel, not only is Arnold already on the side of good, in addition, he swears in front of John Connor that he won’t kill anyone again, bludgeoning people in the legs from now on. The vow is so strong that its echoes can be heard all the way in Terminator: Genisys, where Sarah Connor mentions that Pops (that’s what the T-800 will be called) sometimes shoots people in the legs. In the director’s version of Cameron’s film, in addition to pouring on John’s almost paternal feelings and stopping the systemically uploaded urge to kill, the T-800 under his tutelage additionally learns to express joy, displaying a horse-like grin no longer appropriate for this character, even in its positive guise. Apparently, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s favorite moments from the entire series are those in which the Terminator tries to be human, because, according to Arnie, this is something fun, not just constant action and violence.

And while it wasn’t so glaring in Cameron’s film yet, the Avatar director has set a dangerous precedent in the Terminator universe that will have disastrous consequences in subsequent installments, starting a veritable avalanche of Arnold-Terminator jokes and twaddle. What else needs to be said about T2 is that Stan Winston’s team here did the best makeup in terms of T-800’s facial injuries, in the entire franchise. Unfortunately, the hairdressing department didn’t show off, having styled the T-800, who arrived from the future, with a hedgehog haircut right away, although in the 1984 film the cyborg only gained this hairstyle after a trial by fire. Neither T2 nor any of the subsequent films make any attempt to explain the sudden change in the hairstyle of the T-800, which were supposedly produced on tape, and thus by design, repetitively.

Interestingly, James Cameron asked Stan Winston to direct a teaser trailer, what today is called a teaser. Cameron didn’t want this teaser to be just early footage, so with a budget of $150,000 Winston created a teaser trailer that showed a futuristic assembly line producing copies of Terminator, all of which looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Cameron was pleased with this short, which he released to the world before the release of Judgment Day, fearing the public’s reaction to the final trailers showing Schwarzenegger’s return as the Terminator (after the Terminator in the first film was, after all, clearly destroyed). The Terminator production line in the film, we were not to see until 17 years later, in the finale of Terminator: Salvation.

Saving McG was not the first film to recreate the image of the 1984 T-800, as the filmmakers had already set themselves a similar task in Judgment Day. At that time, however, they didn’t resort to computer superimposition of the younger Arnold’s face on the double, etc., but James Cameron had a section of the corridor built, dressed Arnold Schwarzenegger in the original Terminator outfit and glasses, and that recreated a shot from the original film of the 1984 attack on the precinct, which was shown to Sarah Connor who was in a mental institution.

Taking into account Arnold Schwarzenegger’s fee of $15 million, and seven hundred words of dialogue, he was paid $21,429 per word. The famous Hasta la vista, baby thus cost, bagatelle, $85,716. Thanks to the release of the brilliantly received sequel, which, with a budget of $100 million, earned more than $500 worldwide, the Terminator became the only character listed on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100th heroes and villains, as a villain and a positive hero. An unused idea that was supposed to be in T2 was to send two Arnolds / T-800s into the past, one good and one bad, before it was decided that the T-1000 would ultimately be the villain. The two-Arnolds idea was finally used in Terminator: Genisys. It is also mentioned in Judgment Day that the wounds on the T-800’s body can heal, but again, it is not until Genisys that the idea will be developed, and there will be talk of complete tissue regeneration that takes years.

TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES / 2003

And the jokes about the iconic cyborg, who shouldn’t be made fun of, began. I’ll tell you frankly that the famous star-shaped glasses, which the T-800 put on his face completely by accident, set up the whole movie for me the way a goal lost in the first minute sets up the team for the whole game, that is, moderately positively. I know that Terminator the glasses in question were immediately taken off and crushed under his shoe, but the aftertaste of profanity remained. Arnold Schwarzenegger returned to the role twelve years after the release of Judgment Day. It took that many years for the dust after the spectacular success of T2 to settle a bit, and for some director to dare to shoot a sequel, being doomed in advance to lose to Cameron’s masterpiece anyway. Schwarzenegger also had to contend with his own legend here, and while he did not fall in this clash sullenly, he did. And probably out of respect, or out of fear of Cameron’s reaction, he didn’t utter his one-liner business card in the Bridge film, namely I’ll be back. He replaced it conservatively with She’ll be back, and I’m back.

Arnold Schwarzenegger trained for three months, about three hours a day, before shooting began, when he found that he already had exactly the same body mass and muscles as he had 12 years earlier while filming Terminator 2. The 56-year-old actor was worried about his undressed scene (a hallmark of the series) because he knew viewers would compare it to those in previous installments. As is well known, Arnold performed perfectly without clothing. However, this was the last installment of the franchise in which we see Arnold in a nude version, as well as the last in which we see his arrival from the future at all. The film’s director, Jonathan Mostow, was unfortunately unable to wring as much out of Arnold as Cameron managed on the sets of T2 or True Lies, making the Austrian Oak’s acting in Rise of the Machines seem severely wooden.

Schwarzenegger here, moreover, stands in a pop-culture limbo between being a still menacing cyborg, able to stand up to the newer Terminatrix (by which he loses his head, literally), and being a cool cyborg, throwing cool lyrics like a glove; Talk to the hand is unfortunately such Hasta La Vista for the poor. Arnold’s image is also not improved by a much weaker make-up than in T2, in the final part of the film largely digital and artificial-looking. And one question troubles me, how did the T-800 in Rise of the Machines, a cyborg after all, brand-new and unwashed, know where to look for the keys in a stolen car, since John Connor in Judgment Day showed this trick to another copy?

As for the development of our hero’s humanity, already in this part he seeks redemption in his own way for killing John Connor. He does it a bit unconsciously, because he is programmed to protect the young John (the T-800 killed / will kill the older version in the future), and he has no choice but to protect this victim of fate, because in this version John Connor is such. However, the T-800 this time, instead of the affectionate protector we remember from T2, becomes a stern tutor, who checks Connor’s injuries with a sternness, at times jerking the hapless man around like a sack of potatoes, or abusing him by strangling him when pressed against a wall. Schwarzenegger at the time of the filming of Rise of the Machines was 56 years old on the counter, meaning he was closer to sixty than to fifty (but I fudged the conclusion), and although he still looked ferocious on screen, even in the unclothed version, he was already wearing, instead of a T-shirt, a turtleneck partially covering his neck, which betrayed the first signs of such, and not other, age of Arnold.

In a word, this was the last film in which Schwarzenegger still resembled the T-800 we knew; in future installments, the filmmakers will already have to reinforce the actor’s digital doubles, or push the audience with the bullshit (hello Genisys!) that the Terminators are aging and may be named Pops.

A close second, and from the Rise of the Machines we would have learned how the T-800 got such a face and not another. Well, its donor was supposed to be a certain military man, Sergeant Candy (Sergeant CANDY? What the hell?) played, of course, by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The military man, presenting the final work on the cyborg, smiles directly at the camera as broadly as he did in the director’s version of T2. It’s a pity that this scene didn’t make it into the film in the final version, because we would have known to whom we owed the T-800’s twisted teeth-drying. We would also have learned where the T-800’s voice came from, since Arnold in the scene in question doesn’t speak in his own voice, but one substituted by another actor. The voice, due to the accent, does not please the other military men. Then a government employee speaks up and… in Arnold’s voice he says Fix it. On the one hand, the whole deleted sequence as a separate thumbnail comes off pretty cool; on the other hand, it was too comforting on its own to be squeezed into a movie where we had to contend with star-crossed rose-colored glasses anyway.

The studios have long wanted to make a sequel to the Terminator films, but for a long time Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to participate in a potential sequel unless James Cameron was the director. This one, however, with his T2 said the last word on the subject and did not want to return to it. At the same time, major studios (including FOX) were apprehensive about making a big blockbuster starring Schwarzenegger, due to his now advanced age and the fact that he underwent heart valve replacement surgery in 1997. Cameron finally told his friend to just do it (star in the damn sequel) and that he would charge a mountain of money for it. The director argued his blessing on the fact that the T-800 character was as much Schwarzenegger’s as his own.

As expected, despite the presence of Arnold on board as the film’s driving force, the absence of the ship’s captain, i.e. James Cameron, meant that Rise of the Machines began the series’ box-office slide down an even keel. Jonathan Mostow’s film, with a budget of $140 million, 50 more than T2, may have earned a nice $430 million worldwide, but that was 70 million less in earnings than the Cameron sequel raked in at the theatrical box office. The biggest winner was Arnold, who negotiated close to $30 million for the role (even if the film had not been made at all), and stellar terms and privileges, such as $1.5 million for private jets, a fully equipped workout trailer, luxury three-bedroom apartments on site, 24-hour limousines, and personal security. It was the height of the actor’s popularity, a position to which he was never to return. Almost straight from the set of Terminator 3, he moved on to the California governor’s chair, which put his career on hold for ten years (ignoring episodic appearances).

TERMINATOR: SALVATION / 2008

A very brief appearance by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, willing but unable to act in the fourth installment due to lack of time (he had all of California on his mind at the time), agreed to use his face. But not as in Face/Off, but using computer effects. Arnold’s face was copied from the first Terminator (even the original 1984 hairstyle was retained) and digitally superimposed on the body of the understudy. The body of the T-800 was similarly bulked up as Arnold was in his younger days, a compatriot of the hero of this article, the justly built Roland Kickinger (two photos below). It’s interesting to note that Kickinger, who possesses a diastema like Arnold, had already played Schwarzenegger three years earlier in the lame TV movie See Arnold Run, about Arnold’s race for the California governor’s seat.

The plywood of Kicker’s body with Arnold’s digital likeness unfortunately looked so… average I would say, and gave the impression that this time the T-800 was more sad than angry. We see him, fortunately, literally for a few dozen seconds, silent and with a lack of facial expressions even more so than in the real Arnold in the original Terminator. And as soon as the excitement subsided, the shock and surprise of Schwarzenegger’s sudden appearance on the screen passed, the filmmakers seemed to have decided for themselves that enough of this clowning around and gave the command to FIRE! And after just a few seconds of frying with a flamethrower, we saw the naked endoskeleton of the T-800, as Father Skynet created it. This brief, silent appearance of Arnold’s likeness, obviously not included in his filmography in any way, adds absolutely nothing to the evolution of the Terminator character. It was at the same time the first film in the series in which it was someone else who uttered the iconic I’ll be back line (John Connor did), and the last on which Stan Winston, who died in 2008, worked.

Terminator: Salvation continues the decline in theatrical box office earnings started by Rise of the Machines and declining audience interest in the subject matter. With a staggering $200 million budget, Salvation earned a mere 371 worldwide. In an interview, Arnold Schwarzenegger expressed joy and relief at not starring in the McG film, which in my opinion is not all that bad (the film, not McG). According to the former Conan and equally former Governor, Salvation sucked or sucked, depending on how Arnold’s opinion was translated, which sounded like the title of a futuristic porn: Terminator Salvation sucked. Bold words toward a not-so-bad McG movie, especially considering what Arnold was about to fuck up in Terminator: Genisys.

TERMINATOR: GENISYS / 2015

Arnold, completing his second term as governor of California, was able to boast, or rather, to regret, a 32% approval rating from citizens. As time has shown, this was still 5% more than the Rotten Tomatoes critics’ endorsement for Terminator: Genisys. Yes, you calculated correctly, with Genisys showing a paltry 27 percent and Rotten Tomato. On the other hand, on IMDb, where movies are rated by viewers, the picture directed by Alan Taylor boasts a rating of 6.3/10, which is pretty good, and identical to Rise of the Machines, which was, after all, at one time more warmly received by both viewers and critics than the 2015 sequel. It’s well known how it is with sequels, especially their fourth installments, everything has to be more, better, stronger, louder, and, as the unwritten rule goes, dumber. Well, and at the same time.

.. the same as in the original, because that’s what the audience expects, but also different, because, after all, the development of characters and story can’t stagnate. I sympathize with the screenwriters, trapped between the hammer and sickle, tfu… anvil. Waiting for the next part of Terminator, therefore, we would like to get something similar to One or Two, so that that atmosphere and quality would return, but on the other hand, we would not like to see for the nth time simply the T-800 coming from the future to defend John Connor from some, for example, T-2000. This concept seemed to have run out of steam with the plot of Rise of the Machines, so already McG turned with the plot of Salvation in a completely different direction, throwing out of his concept even the canonical motif of time travel.

So, if we were going to get another Terminator with the then 67-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom the whole world loved for his role as an electronic killer, the script had to, first, somehow logically explain the T-800’s frumpy appearance, and second, put such a twist on the familiar story that the old and well-known components (Kyle Reese, Sarah Connor, Skynet, time travel) were shown in a completely new light, while trying to surprise the audience with something… surprising every now and then. However, the biggest problem with Genisys, underlying the legitimacy of the film in general, was that… no one was waiting for another Terminator sequel, and it was probably more expected to see the Spanish Inquisition than to see on the screen, and in a serious edition, a T-800 with gray hair and wrinkles on his face.

Genisys wasn’t what fans of the first installments were waiting for, today’s 40- to 60-year-olds, who said goodbye to the series with Arnold in 2003, along with the closing credits of Rise of the Machines. And certainly the aging T-800 wasn’t waited for by modern audiences growing up on The Matrix, Fast and Furious, Marvel films and the DCEU, or John Wick.

So in order to hit any target with the new Terminator, several versions of the 1984 T-800 with Arnold’s familiar face (more on that in a moment) were crammed into the film, hoping that Genisys would ride the wave of sentiment, like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, using the characters and copying the plot of A New Hope. And for younger generations of viewers, a lot of explosions, chases, colorful CGI, and Emilia Clarke, still basking in the flames of her Game of Thrones character’s fame, were packed into the film. Emilia Clarke was privately a big fan of the Terminator series films, and couldn’t believe that she would be working with Arnold Schwarzenegger himself.

The delight of her reunion with her childhood idol is evident in the film, by the way; Emilia Clarke beams with genuine joy in her scenes with Arnold together. In order to make their film more attractive, the screenwriters really put a healthy twist on the plot, for it turned out that, all in all, the future and the past have turned upside down, and Terminators, both bad and good, are sent into the past wholesale, and by who the hell knows. This was supposedly to be explained by the next installments of the Genisys Trilogy, as a new mini-series was planned for such a series, as you can read on the Internet. It was supposed to explain, but it didn’t, because it didn’t get made.

Let’s now look at all the versions of the T-800 appearing in Genisys, in chronological order. In a flashback spun in front of the audience and Kyle Reese, we get to see the events of 1973, when 9-year-old Sarah Connor is on a boat with her father, and sees first how Pooh’s hut… come to think of it, the hut with her mother inside it blows up (why the hut and the mother were blown up is unknown), and after a while liquid metal pours in through a hole in the boat, though the child might have mistaken it for water. Then a T-800 with Schwarzenegger’s 1984 face, familiar from Cameron’s film, appears. On his face are his trademark glasses, which, as we remember from the film King of the World, he wore only to cover the eye blown out in the car chase after Sarah and Kyle. Why and why he wears them in Sarah’s flashback is unknown.

The T-800 sent to 1973 rescues Sara, and we get a cool shot of him carrying a little girl in one hand and a smoking bazooka in the other (good thing it’s not the other way around – smoking girl and little bazooka). It’s just that we didn’t see him fight anyone with that smoking bazooka, and since Sarah mentioned the exploding house with her mother inside moments earlier, it’s my understanding that the T-800 just smashed that house, hehe. This goes along with a theory I came across online that the T-800 from the Genisys movie is… also an evil cyborg who was supposed to have infiltrated Sarah since childhood, so that he could eventually get to her son decades from now. Sound like a bunch of nonsense? That’s true, because it is a steak of nonsense. However.

Yet Kyle Reese, for a good three-quarters of the film, distrusts the Terminator, fondly called Pops by Sarah (Pops – diminutive for father, but too old to be called father; translated as Grandfather in the Polish version, and Guardian, or Guardian, in the credits). And in fact, when the T-800 in 2017 merely spots John Connor, he lets go of the big teddy bear from his hands and lashes out at him with whatever he has at hand (at Connor, not the teddy bear), automatically and without thinking, as if he was programmed to kill John Connor, as Kyle had said. After a moment of consternation and horror for Sarah and Kyle, who have just seen their son, whom they haven’t conceived yet because they haven’t mated, die, it turns out to their astonishment (and only theirs, since viewers knew about this plot twist from the trailer) that John Connor is composed of some liquid crap and turns out to be a Skynet appendage.

The T-800 breathes a sigh of relief that John Connor turned out to be the bad guy, and that Sarah will still like him. It made me think of the medal Frank Drebin received in Naked Gun for killing thirty drug dealers, and who, when thanking him for the medal, explained that the last one was actually hit by a car accidentally, but luckily it turned out to be a drug dealer.

Ok, because we’ve gone off the trail a bit. We’re back to the 1973 T-800, which we know is a product of the computer, Arnold’s face superimposed from the 1984 film, and that’s it. The body overlaid with Arnie’s digital face was lent this time by bodybuilder Brett Azar, whose face we see in the photo above. The same creation, only with a bare ass, appears in the initial events of 1984, i.e., among other things, in scenes supposedly from the first Terminator, because they were created and recreated in Genisys from scratch and almost 1:1. I’ll honestly say that the first shot of the T-800’s face after arriving in 1984, made me wonder if it was simply an inserted fragment of Cameron’s film, or a made from scratch copy of those scenes. Subsequent shots, however, already betray the computer-generated origins, especially the poorly computer-reproduced Bill Paxton, who plays one of the punks in the original film. I’m joking, of course, but it’s a shame that the budget was lacking for digital clones also of those three nice gentlemen worrying about Arnold’s clothes in the laundry; the illusion of realism of the whole sequence would have been more complete.

Now a second version of the T-800 enters the arena of events, that is, a cyborg somewhat advanced by time, who befriended Sarah in 1973. This one is already played by the real Arnold, but somewhat rejuvenated with computer effects and wrinkle-smoothing makeup. This T-800 says to the other, younger one that he’s been waiting for him for years. And this is where I always have a snigger, because T-800-Grandpa and Sarah have been waiting for the arrival of the T-800 for several years, knowing the place and time of his arrival, meanwhile when Grandpa just gets a solid shove from his younger self and clearly losing on points on the cards with all the judges, Sarah, who apparently overslept, is just running up the stairs, unpacking her sniper rifle, folding it up, loading a cartridge, milking a sandwich, fixing her makeup, taking a deep breath, and after just half an hour she fires a shot at the winning T-800. Beaten gars! – would have shouted Obelix, if he had played in the film, after all, Sarah took her sniper rifle to a street brawl and killed an unsuspecting T-800, who, although angry, fought Grandpa honorably, with his fists.

That’s right, Grandpa. Stretched like the Hulk’s pants, the Terminators’ aging motif enabled Arnold to reincarnate the T-800, despite the passage of a long twelve years since Rise of the Machines, and sixty-eight springs to the former Mister Olimpia’s credit. First of all, let’s ask ourselves, why would Skynet cover the Terminators with real human tissue, prone to aging processes? Sure, the Terminators’ primary task was to infiltrate and eliminate members of the resistance in the future. Ok, just how long would such infiltration last? A week, a month, a year? I don’t think anyone would suddenly jump to the conclusion that oh boy, this new thing doesn’t age, so why would the T-800s be designed with such meticulousness? And why were they created with the same face, when after the first spy detected, the next one would betray itself with a familiar face from a mile away? Well, and if such a T-800 was to infiltrate the ranks of the people, why was he made as a stocky bodybuilder, when the resistance members living in the ruins were starved and skinny.

Wouldn’t such a seasoned newcomer, who looks like he’s eaten all the steaks in the world, arouse the suspicions of resistance members already having hallucinations from malnutrition? Why then would Skynet even entertain the idea of imitating the aging of such a cyborg? It’s detached from any, even cinematic, logic, and it’s a great pity that the Genisys creators went down this particular aging path, instead of doing something completely at odds with the audience’s expectations.

Personally, I expected that in Genisys Arnold Schwarzenegger would not play the role of the aging T-800, well, because who will buy such nonsense, but we will see him as, for example, the designer of the T-800, the prototype of its appearance, stature, image and voice donor. A creator who lives somewhere in the middle of nowhere, guilt-ridden that he brought a monster into the world. After all, this is the direction Jonathan Mostow was already going, albeit only in outline and lined with humor, in the cut scene from Rise of the Machines that I wrote about a few paragraphs above. Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese escaping from the T-800 could thus, in Genisys, come across the trail of their pursuer’s designer, and the latter, driven by a need for redemption, would help them stop the monstrosity he created and released into the world. And only then would the unequal battle between the aging Arnie (the scientist) and the T-800 (the monstrosity) have real drama, and a fucking epic dimension.

It was reportedly James Cameron himself who advised producers David Ellison and David Goldberg on how they could use 67-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger in the film, stating that the living human tissue grown on the Terminators, giving them a human appearance, is not actually synthetic, but organic, and therefore the Terminators can visually age, and can live in society in their own way. With a brain that is a neural processor (a learning computer), the T-800 can actually become more human and not be discovered. We find several scenes in the film suggesting that the Terminator can afford to ponder the meaning of his own existence, as when the T-800 looks at his mechanical skinless arm as if wondering Who am I, where did I come from, where am I going, though in reality he probably thought Oh fuck, what is this!

Unfortunately, instead of a cool and surprising script, putting more emphasis on the terminator’s aging and maturation(?) processes, we got a T-800 smiling like a fool to the cheese every now and then (that’s how it used to be said), discreetly matchmaking Sarah with Kyle (have you copulated yet? How much are you going to copulate? Are you copulating or not!?), knowing all the events of the past and future, being able to make jokes, such as about Kyle Reese’s pants, and throwing around dry texts – this time the phrase of the day is Bite me! which he picks up from Sarah Connor. Of course, no one in this part, or indeed in Rise of the Machines either, stammers a word that in order for the T-800 to learn, a chip of his in his head must be switched to learning mode. I saw this myself in the director’s version of Judgment Day, I’m not making it up! The T-800 also gives lectures on time travel (he built the vehicle himself, by the way), and is so strong that he can break the laws of physics by getting out of a speeding car in the opposite direction of travel without doing a backwards hyc to the back.

And so we came to the third version of the T-800 from Genisys, i.e. Pops advanced through time by another thirty years (jumping the action from 1984 to 2017). Here he is already played by Schwarzenegger as he was in real life, that is, having wrinkles and gray hair (Arnold’s natural hair color), without hiding the actor’s age under makeup or CGI. The somewhat mangled rivalry between the T-800 and Kyle Reese comes to the fore, not only for Sarah Connor’s favor and appreciation, but also in terms of age, appearance and physical prowess. Grandpa / Pops repeats to the point of boredom that he’s old but not obsolete, yet he catches himself showing clear signs of aging, so humanly speaking. And it’s something that crunches in his knee, or his hand trembles, with which he can no longer accurately load magazines with ammunition.

And he goes into action with the big, aforementioned teddy bear under his arm. It’s a pity that Schwarzenegger’s Terminator started out carrying a shotgun and roses, a cool reference in Judgment Day to the band Guns N’ Roses, whose track was used in the film, and ended up as a subdated, or rather subplot Grandpa lugging a big teddy bear under his arm, symbolizing heck knows what, probably the ultimate softening of the cult hero of the grim 1984 techno thriller. On the other hand, such a stripped-down transformation of an electronic murderer into a tender caretaker who, in his own way, was even supposed to love(!) Sarah Connor, fits the pattern of humanization that has taken place in the cult character over the years. However dorky it may sound, of course.

The gray-haired T-800 perishes in a clash with the evil John, riding on codes of indestructibility, but eventually returns to the world of the living as a combination of T-800 and technology propped up by Skynet directly from the great cauldron of liquid metal into which he fell like Obelix as a child into a cauldron of magic drink. Genisys thus becomes the only installment in the series in which the T-800 does not die. Unfortunately, apart from a hand turned into a blade, like the T-1000’s, we didn’t get a chance to see how Grandpa would fare in such a release, what combat capabilities he would have, etc., as the film was a moderate success. And then still James Cameron came along, said that this film, like Salvation and Rise of the Machines in general, and we are starting all over again, with the awesome premise of Dark Fate.

There were also rumors that Genisys would be Arnold’s last film in the series, and that he was to be replaced by his son Patrick Schwarzenegger – a coincidence of names not coincidental. Alan Taylor’s film box-office rebounds a bit from the bottom reached by McG with Salvation, because with a budget of $155 million, it earned 440 at the theatrical box-office. The relatively good result, although it didn’t kick ass, probably came from the fact that audiences were a bit nostalgic for Arnold and his I’ll be back, a bit went to the theaters out of curiosity, and from the momentum generated by memories of the time of Cameron’s films.

TERMINATOR: DARK FATE / 2019

I lied a little in the introduction, because I don’t mean to hector Dark Fate at all, although at the same time I don’t consider it to be some outstanding sequel… albeit I’m watching it better than even Rise of the Machines. Also, the critics at Rotten Tomatoes were surprisingly well-disposed to Tim Miller’s film, because, as it happens, 70% positive reviews don’t walk a mile, and viewers also gave it 82% and a bucket of popcorn; on IMDb it’s also not bad at 6.2/10. Following the aforementioned law of sequels, and this one is all the way to the fifth, there’s again more of everything, albeit the script isn’t as multithreaded as in the previous installment, being a rather conservative paraphrase of T1, T2 and T3, as it uses probably all the character archetypes that appeared in those films. This time, however, it’s decidedly strong women who come to the forefront of the story, with Arnold in his proper form not appearing on screen until the sixty-sixth minute of the film.

James Cameron thought for a while that Genisys was a natural continuation of Judgment Day. However, when he decided to produce the next film in the series, Dark Fate, he chose to ignore the Genisys storyline. This was not out of malice or selfishness on the part of the director, but because Genisys had so messed up the chronology of events by interweaving several timelines with each other that untangling this knot in the next film would be a truly breakneck task. Therefore, Cameron decided to return to a much simpler starting point, the events of Judgment Day. Again, the axis of the plot is the savior, or in this case the savior of mankind, the terminator hunting her, or in this case two terminators in one terminator, in addition able to melt, to say the least, with delight.

There is also a protector, and in this case as many as three: a woman, a woman terminator and a terminator-terminator. In the background, we have quite an interesting plot of Sarah Connor’s thirst for revenge against the T-800, who, being a young, unfeathered cyborg (the body of the younger version of the T-800 is again lent by Brett Azar), killed her John. The plot is buckled by the motif of the T-800 trying to earn Sarah Connor’s forgiveness.

For in the T-800, after killing John devoid of any further sense of existence, probably out of boredom, something like a conscience recovers, and in order to occupy his free time, he sends Sarah the dates and places where the next Terminators will strike, so that she will have some purpose in life, converting tin men into scrap metal. Meanwhile, the T-800 starts a family for himself by rescuing a woman from a violent husband and helping her raise her son. As Sara soberly points out, the chosen one of the T-800’s heart, or CPU, somehow doesn’t notice for years that her beloved weighs 200 kilograms and doesn’t need to sleep. The T-800 explains that this is not a physical relationship, which can be seen as something like the very blind love the woman has for her savior. The plot of Carl revealing that he is in a relationship with Alicia and that he has an adopted son named Mateo may have found its way into the film inspired by a real-life morality scandal involving Arnold Schwarzenegger. After all, the actor revealed in 2011 that he had cheated on his wife Maria Schriver with their housekeeper Mildred Baena, resulting in the 1997 birth of a boy whom Arnold officially recognized as his son.

If we somehow turn a blind eye to the fact that the T-800 leads the life of a typical citizen (except for amassing a veritable arsenal in the shed), that he changed diapers, could listen very well and was, in his own words, a master of wit… we still have to turn a blind eye to the fact that his name is Carl, although it’s still a good thing he’s not Pops, as in sequel #4. And once we somehow buy that too, we have to swallow the soundest pill in the form of Carl’s profession, that of interior decorator. Not that I have anything against interior decorators, one of them just finished decorating my bathroom, and it’s coming out very nicely! Surprisingly, with each screening, all these motifs make me laugh less and less, and somehow I even find it pleasant to look at the (almost) humanized Terminator, who seems to be happy for the first time in the entire six-part story.

Although if you go back to 1984 and the premise of the first film, you’ll recall that the Terminator was not created by James Cameron to be happy! Cameron, looking at what happened to his child, could even say: you had one job: to kill! What the heck went wrong with winding up with curtains in balloons and giraffes!!!? He might have, if he hadn’t personally given the green light to a project titled Dark Fate. But on the other hand, since it turned out that replicant Rachel could get pregnant somewhere between Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, all in all, why can’t a Terminator cyborg have a partner, raise a child, decorate interiors, and sit on the couch watching a football game?

Arnold Schwarzenegger is understandably eager to return to the role that proved to be his lifetime achievement. In the meantime, he tried his hand at grim dramas like 2015’s Maggie and 2017’s Aftermath, and while he didn’t play badly in both of those films, audiences didn’t despair of seeing Arnold in a strictly dramatic release, without shooting, throwing opponents and one-liners. Hence his regular returns to the franchise, which has revolved around him in one way or another for over thirty years. I like Arnold’s image in Dark Fate, he’s good with a beard and gray hair put up in a hedgehog style. But first of all, if Cameron, who blessed Miller’s film, was so keen to disassociate himself from parts 3-5, deeming them non-canonical, why didn’t he bother with his own explanation in his sequel as to why and for what reason the Terminators age?

Second, Carl wears a beard, which just happens to make more sense than terminators advancing through time. Well, going back to the motif of infiltration carried out by the Terminators in the future, accoutrements growing beards wouldn’t be such a silly idea if the cyborgs were to be in the company of members of the Resistance for an extended period of time. Arnie’s makeup stands at a high level in Dark Fate, and although it’s CGI, the facial damage in every phase up to the complete destruction of Arnold’s face is a piece of good digital work. Also, the red eye of the mutilated T-800 finally moves, which was a pain of Stan Winston’s make-up in the first two installments, where the artificial eye remained forcibly, staring ahead while the other looked to the side. And then there’s the half severed hand, also a CGI effect; finally Arnold was able to play the ragged T-800 without hiding his own hand behind his back, which was unfortunately clearly evident in T2. Dark Fate also stands acting-wise above even Rise of the Machines and especially Genisys, in which the overall impression was spoiled by pairs of main characters that lacked on-screen chemistry and acting charisma.

The 72-year-old actor, a year before the film’s release, had to undergo surgery to replace a heart valve inserted in 1997. Unfortunately, the procedure went wrong and he ended up having open-heart surgery. When Arnold awoke after the fully successful operation, reportedly his first words to the hospital staff were, how else I’m back! A tough guy in the movies and in life, you might say. Arnold, however, despite his fair age and past surgeries, came off very believably in the action scenes of Dark Fate. It’s always nice to watch our childhood idol still healthily bludgeoning with rifles and screwing with another cyborg. On top of that, Arnold’s performance in the last film of the series was by far his best and most mature since Judgment Day, as if he knew he couldn’t mess it up because he was just saying goodbye to the audience and definitively closing the franchise and an era. Austrian Oak played the Terminator for exactly 35 years. Unfortunately, he couldn’t top the score of his eternal rival (and friend for several years) Sylvester Stallone, who played his Rambo for 37 and Rocky Balboa for as many as 42 years.

The Deadpool creator’s film made a spectacular flop, as on a really solid budget of $185 million, it earned an embarrassing $261 million in theaters. But that’s not at all what brought the Terminator franchise to the finish line. For it’s clear as day that the entire role of the T-800 in the 2019 film was written as a grand farewell to this iconic character. Arnold says loud and clear in the film that he will not return, his character has reached the wall, everything has simply been said about the T-800. The humanization, or closer to an imitation of a real human being, can be seen not only in the spiritual transformation of the machine, but also in the scar on the face of the older version of the T-800. The wound inflicted on him by Sarah Connor in the past, instead of healing and disappearing completely, turns into a scar as human as possible.

The character created by Schwarzenegger and Cameron, has evolved over the course of thirty-five years from an unscrupulous screen badass, to John’s protector, for whom the electronic (once) killer was willing to stand on one foot and kill no more people, the faithful protector of Sarah Connor over several decades, all the way to the guardian of the household, one who will prepare drinks, hug loved ones, help bring in groceries, while deep in his steel soul he is tormented by remorse for the evil he has done. Perhaps this is the ultimate triumph of the human spirit over Skynet’s cold calculation, that its own creation, which began by hunting John Connor’s mother, ended up dying with the words For John! on its lips, has finally won its heart and gone over to the side of the people not through zero-sum reprogramming, but of its own accord. And from that it’s only a small step to humanity.