Bring the horror back to the Terminator franchise

[Too Much Garlic]

What I don't understand is that when they do the battle damaged Terminator make-up, they don't go full T1 with it - it's always clean and sanitized and the skin doesn't even come off in a realistic manner anymore.

Heck... they should go all zombie look with it, as the more the skin and tissue is damaged, the more it deteriorates and rots. Someone actually made a bust that looked insanely creepy and awesome.

We need to bring the decay back to Terminator. And I think it could be more successful if they brought the horror back. Zombie movies sell... so why cannot Terminator be sold like that?

Imagine seeing a swarm of terminators encircling your hide-out, skin peeling and rotting, and the metal endoskeleton showing in gross ways through the damaged skin... and then the faint glowing red eyes in the dark, coming closer, searching, from side to side, their heads turning with the eyes, silent, locking on to targets and killing them in an instant in a sudden flash of movement or with a plasma bolt.

Bring the horror back to the Terminator franchise. Horror sells... and it's weird that the producers and filmmakers took it out of horror and keep doing timetravel instead of the future war (though I know why: because they just copy T2)... and this franchise was BUILT for horror and suspense and tragedy.

Lately there's been talk of James Cameron being back into doing a new one. I really wish he would stop his reboot talk and just do FUTURE WAR. That is what everyone wants. That's what Salvation tried to give us but failed.

I want the future war that Reese told Sarah about. About the death camps. About working day and night. About loading bodies (probably for sampling to make terminators). About one man, who taught them to fight, and the eventual attack on Skynet where they win and Reese volunteers to step into the time machine at the risk of death, in order to save his friend and mentor, through saving the woman he loves.

And if people say you cannot make that movie, because everyone knows it, then I'll just say: adaptions of books work. Movies based on actual history works. All it requires is a good scriptwriter, a good director, good actors, and the studio keeping the **** away from production.

It can be done. The framework is there. It's just the bare minimum. You can do so much with adding filler to that framework. Filler that works. Filler that makes the viewer care about the world, the struggle and the characters in it. It doesn't have to follow John Connor or Kyle Reese. It could follow anyone. Even just a civilian trying to survive and protect someone they care about, seeing the battle unfold around them, seeing the horror... seeing the relentless hunter killers... and eventually experiencing the paranoia of people you know come back and look weird and kill everyone... the stories spreading of loved ones feared dead, coming back and going crazy. Learning the horror of the terminators... getting paranoid about the people you are with or meet out and about, then seeing the rubber skin ones, learning to spot them and run away or destroy them from afar... until the T-800's come along, being completely indistinguishable from regular humans... devastating every hide-out, every lone survivor... in the struggle... to annihilate humankind.

Why can we not get this movie?

 

[batguy]

The problem is T2. It was an amazing movie but the franchise became a victim of its success.

The owners have spent decades chasing the T2 high again. They think 'Terminator' is a PG-13 blockbuster tentpole where big stars save the world and the movie saves their fiscal quarter. That's not realistic. The franchise needs to go back to being R-rated genre flicks.

 

[Too Much Garlic]

One of the things that was done decently well in Fallout 4 was the synths sent out in the likeness of others... sometimes without even having removed the original person first... and the chaos and paranoia that created among people. How the reason behind it was handled in the game though, was utterly dumb, though. But the concept was there.

The terminators being sent out to infiltrate, to gather information, probably trying to pinpoint who are leading the humans... and finding out about John Connor... and trying to find him and kill him, manipulating people along the way to get closer. I'm thinking... the reason the terminator opened fire in the hideout was because they had dogs and they alerted the people there. If there had been no dogs... what would it have done? It was traveling with people. So it doesn't just kill on sight. It had a mission. Maybe the mission was to find hideouts. Maybe it had another mission. Or... it had more than one mission. And what did it do after destroying the hideout? It clearly didn't kill Reese... and I doubt it was taken down. Would it have left, found another group of people to lead it into another hideout. Most likely.

 

[Cephus]

Just stop with all these franchises. Terminator was good. Terminator 2 was great. It's been crap since then. Stop making bad movies, just chasing a buck and start making good movies!

Hollywood won't do that, will they?

 

[Solo4114]

I honestly don't think that Terminator can actually work as a "horror" film anymore. For that matter, I don't think Aliens can, either. A big part of that is that the horror elements work best when the monster is mostly unknown; when you don't know if you can escape it or defeat it. That sense permeated the first Terminator film because our protagonist and audience surrogate knew nothing about terminators and was having to come to grips with this terrifying reality. Same story with the first Alien film. It's terrifying because it's...well...alien.

This is a big part of why the subsequent films significantly deviate from that formula: they know they can't chase that same high because the audience knows the monster now. You could go through the motions of the monster monstering as it does, but it won't have the same impact. So how do you keep it impactful? You change things up. Alien becomes a war movie where our hero has PTSD and has to go confront the horrors she's trying to forget. T2 becomes a sci-fi F/X extravaganza that flips the script by giving the good guys their own Terminator this time around.

Every film since then in both series has missed the mark because they were reiterating what came before, rather than innovating.

Put another way, instead of going "back," the films need to go forward and innovate further. To some extent, Prometheus tried to do this by exploring the nature of the Engineers and such...but it dropped the ball because it played a little too much in the "mystery box" lane, and, well, that s*** sucks. There's a lot of really cool imagery and interesting ideas that get explored in Prometheus, but for all it does really, really well, I find it somewhat unsatisfying story-wise because of how the third act wobbles. And Covenant...well, I barely remember that, honestly.

With Terminator, the problem has been too much reliance upon formula. T3 was kind of interesting insofar as it depicted the actual fall of humanity. But otherwise, it was basically T2 just farther along in the timeline. T4 had some interesting stuff in that it depicted snippets of the future war, and had a good terminator who didn't KNOW he was a good terminator, but story-wise was all over the place. Genesys tried to again flip the script, this time having a YOUNG Sarah Connor save KYLE, and then they go jumping around in time. I thought Genesys put a decent capstone on the series, although it was fairly disjointed. Then you get Dark Fate, which completely ignores all the other T2 sequels/timelines, and which...uh....I don't really remember.

And that's the real problem with Terminator: you've done various takes, there's been mostly iteration instead of innovation, and each time they try to innovate, the fans reject it, the sequels get canceled, and the story never really concludes.

Honestly, at this point...I think it's best to just leave the Terminator franchise alone. Certainly, you can't keep telling stories about Sarah and John Connor and whatnot, and Arnold's too long in the tooth to continue portraying the role. So either you need to dramatically depart from what happened before and try something really new, or you need to just leave it alone.

 

[Too Much Garlic]

Though Arnold was integral to the first two movies, he wasn't so much for the latter ones. You can easily do a Terminator movie without him as a terminator. If you absolutely had to have him in the movie, make him an old soldier who was part of the the military research and is why some of the terminators look like him. Just don't make him a cartoon character like in the deleted T3 scene, but make him more like Dutch. Heck.. just make him BE Dutch from Predator and officially link the series, so Alien, Predator and Terminator are all connected.

Zombie movies work and you know the monster and you can still make it scary, so I don't really follow the logic there that you can't do a scary terminator movie. You can make supernatural movies and keep making them scary... so again... it can be done. It's not the monster itself that is the only scary part. It's the encounters and the characters experiencing them.

Doing a future war terminator movie you focus on the characters. Alien worked because you had believable characters. Jurassic Park worked because you had believable characters. The first Terminator worked because you had believable characters. The sequels usually always skimps on creating believable characters - they are mostly always more simple, cartoony and with over-the-top story developments.

Make it like a war movie thriller with horror elements, were you focus on the paranoia, distrust and desperation and the horrors of war and what Skynet subjects the survivors to in its pursuit to annihilate them

None of which is anything we've seen in a Terminator movie since the first one.

 

[Too Much Garlic]

And not to forget: the fast paced music in the first two movies helped create the tension. None of the sequels even came close. I'm not saying they have to go back to 80's synth style. The closest of the current composers managing that style of tension build-up in his scores is Hanz Zimmer. I'm sure they can find someone who can make a score that actually makes you sit on the edge of your seat while watching the movie.

 

[Too Much Garlic]

And since it is dealing with artificial intelligence... you can even play with that in the story. That the machines learn and become their own individuals, struggling to free themselves from the oppressive control of Skynet.

There are so many things you can do in that frameeorks of the future war Reese lays out in T1.

I just feel the moviemakers limit themselves and then make dumb, unnecessary changes and convoluted story-beats... just so they can keep remaking T2.

 

[Astyanax]

I honestly don't think that Terminator can actually work as a "horror" film anymore. For that matter, I don't think Aliens can, either. A big part of that is that the horror elements work best when the monster is mostly unknown; when you don't know if you can escape it or defeat it. That sense permeated the first Terminator film because our protagonist and audience surrogate knew nothing about terminators and was having to come to grips with this terrifying reality. Same story with the first Alien film. It's terrifying because it's...well...alien.

This is a big part of why the subsequent films significantly deviate from that formula: they know they can't chase that same high because the audience knows the monster now. You could go through the motions of the monster monstering as it does, but it won't have the same impact. So how do you keep it impactful? You change things up. Alien becomes a war movie where our hero has PTSD and has to go confront the horrors she's trying to forget. T2 becomes a sci-fi F/X extravaganza that flips the script by giving the good guys their own Terminator this time around.

Every film since then in both series has missed the mark because they were reiterating what came before, rather than innovating.

Put another way, instead of going "back," the films need to go forward and innovate further. To some extent, Prometheus tried to do this by exploring the nature of the Engineers and such...but it dropped the ball because it played a little too much in the "mystery box" lane, and, well, that s*** sucks. There's a lot of really cool imagery and interesting ideas that get explored in Prometheus, but for all it does really, really well, I find it somewhat unsatisfying story-wise because of how the third act wobbles. And Covenant...well, I barely remember that, honestly.

With Terminator, the problem has been too much reliance upon formula. T3 was kind of interesting insofar as it depicted the actual fall of humanity. But otherwise, it was basically T2 just farther along in the timeline. T4 had some interesting stuff in that it depicted snippets of the future war, and had a good terminator who didn't KNOW he was a good terminator, but story-wise was all over the place. Genesys tried to again flip the script, this time having a YOUNG Sarah Connor save KYLE, and then they go jumping around in time. I thought Genesys put a decent capstone on the series, although it was fairly disjointed. Then you get Dark Fate, which completely ignores all the other T2 sequels/timelines, and which...uh....I don't really remember.

And that's the real problem with Terminator: you've done various takes, there's been mostly iteration instead of innovation, and each time they try to innovate, the fans reject it, the sequels get canceled, and the story never really concludes.

Honestly, at this point...I think it's best to just leave the Terminator franchise alone. Certainly, you can't keep telling stories about Sarah and John Connor and whatnot, and Arnold's too long in the tooth to continue portraying the role. So either you need to dramatically depart from what happened before and try something really new, or you need to just leave it alone.

Agreed, neither Terminator nor Aliens are horror films in the first place; they're action-thrillers at best.

 

[Too Much Garlic]

The first of those franchises had lots of horror elements in there.

 

[batguy]

The Terminator TV series worked better than any movie has since T2. They made it into sort of an ongoing French Resistance thing in modern Los Angeles. Only the whole war is a secret, the Nazis are time-traveling Terminators, and they have to prevent the war to win it.



Q. How do you make more sequels to 'Back to the Future' today, with 2015 looking nothing like it did in the second movie?

A. You don't. The original story was concluded, the original actors are decades too old now, the original continuity/timeline is unworkable . . . and 'Terminator' has the same list of problems. If the franchise cannot be left in retirement then the only decent option is to start over.

We all know the first new movie is going to be some kind of "soft reboot/remake" of the old material anyway (Force Awakens, T3, et). So, please, do everybody a favor and complete the job. At least get the benefits of a reboot.

 

[Astyanax]

The first of those franchises had lots of horror elements in there.

Having a horror element or two doesn't make it a horror movie. Otherwise, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom could all be called horror films.

 

[Too Much Garlic]

You can easily make a sequel to Back to the Future with its 2015 and future still being like that. It is not a movie series of our reality. It can have its own versions of reality. It's a story.

That's like saying because our past wasn't a certain way, then we can't make steam punk stories.

And they are still in the horror genre. Their whole basis is created from horror. So the comparisons to clearly non horror style stories is a little silly. Sure, they are not like the lazy jump-scare every other minute horror, and horror isn't their only genre, but saying they are not horror is wrong.

 

[batguy]

You can easily make a sequel to Back to the Future with its 2015 and future still being like that. It is not a movie series of our reality. It can have its own versions of reality. It's a story.

Yeah, but "what idea can we rationalize?" is not really where the goalposts are. Writers can come up with flimsy excuses to put almost anything on the screen. A TV character can wake up from a dream and erase a whole season of storyline. Somehow Palpatine can return. Ripley can be cloned. 75yo Arnie can still be a Terminator because only his skin ages. Etc.

An idea has to work in a broader/deeper way. Palpatine & Ripley should not have returned. Old Arnie does not look as threateneing as young Arnie.

 

[Too Much Garlic]

Flimsy excuses? It's a story. It's not reality. They don't need to explain why their 2015 looks like that. That is just the reality of that story.

Stories would be awfully limited if they had to adhere 100% to our reality. Then we wouldn't have stories... we would just have biographies and history.

Come on.

 

[Astyanax]

And they are still in the horror genre. Their whole basis is created from horror. So the comparisons to clearly non horror style stories is a little silly. Sure, they are not like the lazy jump-scare every other minute horror, and horror isn't their only genre, but saying they are not horror is wrong.

Nope, that argument doesn't hold water either. Aliens (1986) absolutely has its original basis in the horror genre (monsters that hunt you down after bursting from someone's body), but it is absolutely NOT a horror film. It's sci-fi action with horror elements. Heck, it's more a military war movie than it is horror.

And I also disagree with your basic premise that Terminator has its own basis in horror. A post-apocalyptic assassin robot sent back from the future, with an unlikely hero also sent back for protection is far more a sci-fi basis than a horror one. Just because it's scary in a few parts (but mostly not) doesn't make it a horror film either.

And IMDB disagrees too. And YouTube. And Amazon Prime.



Sorry. Not horror. Never was.

 

[CB2001]

Honestly, the same issue kinda happened with the Xenomorph from Alien. Over time, people lost fear in it. Even more so that when it came to the video games based on the franchise started using the Xenomorph as canon fodder, it basically made them no longer induce fear. It wasn’t until Alien: Isolation made fans fear the Xenomorph like they had when it was first introduced. The same is true with the T-800 Terminator. It was something to fear. The film was basically a slasher movie and the Terminator was like Michael Myers or the shark from Jaws. It was a threat, it was deadly. When Kyle tells Sarah that it can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with, it reaffirms exactly everything we’ve seen up to that point, that this machine is something you pray you never come across if somehow the line between fiction and reality were to blur. And, as of yet, the franchise hasn’t gotten back to that. And I doubt they ever will.

 

[Astyanax]

Honestly, the same issue kinda happened with the Xenomorph from Alien. Over time, people lost fear in it. Even more so that when it came to the video games based on the franchise started using the Xenomorph as canon fodder, it basically made them no longer induce fear. It wasn’t until Alien: Isolation made fans fear the Xenomorph like they had when it was first introduced. The same is true with the T-800 Terminator. It was something to fear. The film was basically a slasher movie and the Terminator was like Michael Myers or the shark from Jaws. It was a threat, it was deadly. When Kyle tells Sarah that it can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with, it reaffirms exactly everything we’ve seen up to that point, that this machine is something you pray you never come across if somehow the line between fiction and reality were to blur. And, as of yet, the franchise hasn’t gotten back to that. And I doubt they ever will.

Totally agree. The same thing happened to the Borg in Star Trek. In earlier episodes they were truly unstoppable and terrifying. And then Star Trek: First Contact gave them zombie capabilities and a queen, and the fear factor was gone.

 

[batguy]

Flimsy excuses? It's a story. It's not reality. They don't need to explain why their 2015 looks like that. That is just the reality of that story.

Stories would be awfully limited if they had to adhere 100% to our reality. Then we wouldn't have stories... we would just have biographies and history.

Ep#9 didn't need to explain how Palpatine returned. The movie was gonna suck because of it either way.

The future 2015 scenes have always been the weakest stretch in the BTTF trilogy. That's not an example of something working. In 1989 it was done as "a series of jokes" because even then it was a no-win implausible situation. (Flying cars in barely 20 years? The highway dept takes 20 years to fix a pothole.)

 

[pengbuzz]

Honestly, the same issue kinda happened with the Xenomorph from Alien. Over time, people lost fear in it. Even more so that when it came to the video games based on the franchise started using the Xenomorph as canon fodder, it basically made them no longer induce fear. It wasn’t until Alien: Isolation made fans fear the Xenomorph like they had when it was first introduced. The same is true with the T-800 Terminator. It was something to fear. The film was basically a slasher movie and the Terminator was like Michael Myers or the shark from Jaws. It was a threat, it was deadly. When Kyle tells Sarah that it can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with, it reaffirms exactly everything we’ve seen up to that point, that this machine is something you pray you never come across if somehow the line between fiction and reality were to blur. And, as of yet, the franchise hasn’t gotten back to that. And I doubt they ever will.

Villain Decay.

They need to give the franchise a rest for about 5-10 years and then return with a new cast. The Future War would be a good place to start (as long as it's night-time and not like Salavation.