Why Make Another ‘Terminator’? Here Are Five Good Reasons
Three billion human lives ended on August 29, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day.
Then the sequels came.
First there was 2003’s Terminator 3: Rise Against the Machines, which featured Arnold Schwarzenegger back in his most iconic role as the T-800 robot, this time fighting against a female Terminator called the T-X (Kristanna Loken). After Schwarzenegger became the governor of California, the franchise soldiered on without him in 2009’s Terminator Salvation, set after the Judgment Day War and starring Christian Bale as John Connor, the leader of the human resistance against evil sentient machines. That went so well people liked the audio of Bale yelling at the crew more than the actual film. Schwarzenegger returned for Terminator Genisys, but that movie did so poorly (adjusted for inflation, it made less in the U.S. than the original Terminator) that plans to continue its story in two more sequels were quickly scrapped.
Now that it’s official that Terminator 6 is happening, and headed to theaters in the summer of 2019, the question then becomes: Why? As a Schwarzenegger apologist scholar who is looking forward to this new Terminator, I hear that question a lot. Skeptics want to know how I can defend the sequels made after series creator James Cameron left the franchise in the early ’90s. And they wonder why on Earth I would still want to see another Terminator after the mess that’s been made of it over the last 25 years. How many times can a franchise burn you like Sarah Connor in that terrifying dream sequence from T2 before you finally give up?
My defense of the later Terminator sequels, or at least the two with Schwarzenegger, will have to wait for another time. (Although you can still read my review of Terminator Genisys if you’d like.) But just so I don’t have to defend myself over and over whenever someone gets on my case about still loving The Terminator, I made this list of five good reasons to make T6 in 2019. Sarah Connor faced the unknown future with a sense of hope. I do too.