The 25-year-old Terminator franchise, once the standard-bearer for the science-fiction genre, is on its last, titanium-reinforced, exo-skeletal legs. Let’s send it to the scrapheap.
The first sign of Terminator’s impending demise appeared a few weeks ago, when Fox finally canned The Sarah Connor Chronicles after the much-hyped series failed to latch on with viewers in its second season. The death knell came courtesy of the Memorial Day weekend box-office results, which detailed Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian’s crushing defeat of Terminator Salvation at the multiplex. And it wasn’t even close: Warner Bros. costly reboot fell to Ben Stiller’s lightly-regarded comedy by almost $17 million over the three-day holiday.
So what happened? Leading up to its release, Terminator Salvation appeared to have everything going for it: a massive budget (rumored at upwards of $200 million), a major star (aided by a timely dose of controversy, no less) and a full-blown promotional campaign. Thanks to the wonders of CGI, the filmmakers even managed to throw in an Arnold cameo for the more nostalgic fans. T4 seemed poised to wipe away the unpleasant taste left by the 2003 pseudo-sequel Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, hand star Christian Bale an unprecedented second mega-blockbuster franchise and turn co-star Sam Worthington into a household name.
Less than a week later, Bale has moved on to promoting Public Enemies, Worthington is still regarded as “that other Australian guy” and T4’s score on Rotten Tomatoes’ (admittedly flawed) ratings scale is less than half that of the much-maligned T3. This coming weekend, expect an injured, slow-moving T4 to be swallowed whole by Disney/Pixar’s latest animated juggernaut, Up.
In hindsight, T4 was doomed long before America’s collective Terminator fatigue became evident. With Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, director James Cameron gave us the best of horror and sci-fi, torturing us via a solitary, seemingly unstoppable villain – a sort of high-tech Michael Myers – and tantalizing us with a vision of the future that inspired countless what-if scenarios and dorm-room debates. But T4’s storyline dispensed with those hallmarks, leaving us with what is at best a Road Warrior remake with robots. At worst, it’s a post-apocalyptic Attack of the Clones.
What’s most unnerving about T4, though, is that despite its aforementioned handicaps, it still had the potential to be a great summer tent pole flick. All evidence indicates that earlier drafts of the Terminator Salvation script – before the filmmakers capitulated to Bale’s many demands for changes – contained a significantly more compelling, far less problematic storyline than the one that ended up on the screen.
Which brings us to the ultimate moral of this story: Don’t entrust the rebirth of a franchise to a pair of neophyte producers and a director who’s little more than a glorified hired gun. (No offense to McG, who I’m sure isn’t nearly as douche-y as his moniker suggests, but nothing in his oeuvre suggested he’d be the second coming of James Cameron.) It takes a director like Sam Raimi (Spider-Man), Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins) or J.J. Abrams (Star Trek) to pull off a job like this, not a guy whose crowning achievement to date is Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. Take the lesson to heart, Hollywood, lest your big-budget brainchild wind up alongside Punisher, Superman Returns and Planet of the Apes in the reboot graveyard.
It may be tempting to give the filmmakers a pass in the hopes that they’ll iron out the kinks with Terminator 5 (sans a demanding Christian Bale, hopefully), but let’s do the sensible thing and bring an end to it, now. Like Edward Furlong’s John Connor in T2, we have a chance to prevent the worst of the damage from ever happening, before the once-mighty franchise falls so far that the word “Terminator” inspires as much bitterness and rage among sci-fi fans as “Jar-Jar Binks.”
