Just Stop Already! Issue #6: Terminator Movies

 

Just Stop Already!

 

Movies are a great art form, but Hollywood is a business, so if something translates into a financial success—whether it’s a genre or type of movie or a trend—chances are it will be exploited and repeated until people are sick of it. But, sometimes producers, writers, and/or directors want to cut corners, or are just desperate to make money, or are creatively bankrupt. All of these factors result in frustrations for the audience that take on many forms, and in this series I explore some of the tropes, trends, bad habits, and financial exploits of Hollywood films. Sometimes when it comes to movies, I feel like saying…just stop already!

 

Issue #6: Terminator Movies

 

I used to call myself a Terminator fan—used to being the key words. What changed? Primarily, the addition of four sequels that failed to live up to the first two films, but I also changed throughout the years as I watched the first, second, third, and fourth over and over. While the third and fourth got worse every time I re-watched them, the first and second just seemed to get better. As of writing this, I have not seen the fifth or sixth since theaters when they first came out.

It wasn’t long after I watched The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day for the first time that Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines came out in theaters, in 2003. I don’t know if the reason we didn’t go see it was because it was R-rated (both Terminator films are among the first, if not the first R-rated films I ever saw) or because we just didn’t know it had come out, but I don’t remember exactly when I saw the third Terminator for the first time. I remember buying it on DVD from a pawn shop after I had bought the first and second on DVD, probably around 2006, and had seen the others a few times. I liked the third movie a lot the first time I saw it, but recognized something was different about it compared to the first two. Many of the special effects were more modern (and better, especially compared to the first), the action was cool, it was funny, and it finally caught up to the post-apocalypse by the end, which we had only glimpsed before. But there was something…missing. 

Then, in 2009, the sequel I had waited to see for so long came out: Terminator: Salvation. It was firmly set in the post-apocalyptic world of the machines, there were new and old terminators, and John Connor was played by Christian Bale, who I recently had seen in one of my favourite movies from the year before, The Dark Knight. I saw Salvation on opening night, and I thought it was good! But, again, there was something missing. It was different from the first two, and definitely different from the third one, but better, or even as good? I couldn’t tell just yet. I liked the action, the special effects were pretty cool, and the casting was good, but nobody else seemed to like it all that much, including many Terminator “fans.”

During the intervening years between 2009’s Terminator Salvation and 2015’s Terminator Genisys, I went from teen to adult, and from enjoying movies as a hobby to movies being a full-on obsession. 2015 was the year the reboot replaced the sequel. Three big “sequels” that came out were not just following up a previous installment from years back, they were also trying to start up dormant franchises in slightly new directions with the same old elements you came to love about them in the first place, only with some new characters in addition to returning ones. First there was Jurassic World, then Terminator Genisys, and finally Star Wars: The Force Awakens. At first, Terminator Genisys seemed like it had potential. Arnold Schwarzenegger was back in a bigger role (reduced to just a quick CGI cameo in Salvation because he was busy in politics at the time) as an aged T-800, and many pivotal characters from past movies had been recast and dropped into a plot that was heavy with time travel and sought to rewrite the future yet again, but in an even more action-packed and unexpected way than T2.

When Genisys came out, I still called myself a Terminator fan. The first two were (still are) among my favourite movies, and the second one in particular was (still is) in my top ten of all-time. Terminator 3 hadn’t aged well. Yeah, some of the action was still cool, but the jokes and callbacks weren’t funny to me anymore, the characters were kind of annoying, and I didn’t like the idea that it made T2’s ending pointless. Salvation had likewise deteriorated in quality, to me. The action was cool, but it just wasn’t as cohesive as the first two movies, which I later learned was largely due to the writer’s strike which resulted in shooting the movie without a finished script. The R-rated version on Blu-ray is what should have come out in theaters in the first place, though it still didn’t significantly boost the quality of the storytelling. You know how when something looks bad, but something worse comes along, and it makes the thing that looked bad before not look quite as bad anymore? That’s pretty much what happened to Rise of the Machines and Salvation when Terminator Genisys came out.

I had to check back on my reviews for the fifth and sixth Terminator movies to refresh myself while writing this, because, as I said in the intro, I haven’t seen them since, and I don’t plan on watching them again anytime soon, if ever in this lifetime. I’ve had a similar realization about Terminator 3 and Salvation: I’ve seen them enough times now that I don’t really need to watch them over again when I revisit the first and second films, but I would definitely watch three and four again over five and six, and not just because I’m slightly nostalgic for them. Genisys was a desperate attempt to reboot the series and start a new trilogy, as was the 2019 re-reboot Terminator: Dark Fate. Unlike Genisys, which tried to follow the continuity of the previous films up to a point before detouring into a new timeline, Dark Fate just wiped the sequel slate clean of everything that came after T2 and tried to be the new Terminator 3, but did so in an instantly ill-fated way by killing off John Connor.

I could have done a Just Stop Already entry for some of my other favourite franchises, like Alien or Predator or Jurassic Park, but the truth is the Terminator franchise is the one I truly feel needs to stop. There have been decent movies in all of those aforementioned franchises beyond just the second one, but while I could say that’s true for Terminator as well, the fifth and sixth demonstrated that the series is destined to just keep going downhill. Terminator 2 is one of the best sequels ever in terms of its storytelling, but in terms of turning The Terminator into a franchise, it was actually the worst sequel possible. First and foremost, it’s too good. It cannot be topped. The other problem: it ends in a satisfying way and hints that the future of the series is unknown, but it isn’t necessarily over. The most obvious direction to go in, it would have seemed to me, would be to do a movie in the post-apocalypse, pretty much like what we got with Salvation, only better. Instead, Rise of the Machines just redid the same kind of plot as the first two.

The first Terminator had some action, but it was a pretty low budget production, crafted by a young, talented director who relied more on tension and horror to fuel the compelling narrative and propel the characters. T2 had a far bigger budget which allowed for more action, and while it didn’t rely on horror or tension in the same way as before, it is still quite tense and serious and scary at times, yet also far funnier. It created a unique appeal that could not possibly be duplicated—and that is what doomed Rise of the Machines to mediocrity. T2 now feels like lightning in a bottle. Terminator 3 tried to be as action-packed and as funny and as serious and as horrific and as tension-filled as before, but it just couldn’t balance all of those things very well at all. Salvation didn’t even try to be funny, really, it was just trying to be bigger and more action-packed than T2, which again, led to a less enjoyable and less successful sequel. I used to think the third, fourth, and fifth movies sucked because of a lack of involvement from James Cameron, but after having a hand in the story and production of Terminator: Dark Fate (even selling out so hard that he helped market the damn thing), I realized not even the original creator could save the franchise anymore.

Terminator was a full-fledged film franchise after the third movie, but it was heading down a path of self-destruction. It seemed the studios forgot some of those essential elements of The Terminator and T2 and decided all that really mattered was making a movie that had more action and humour than T2. The Terminator is a beloved classic, don’t get me wrong, but it hasn’t had the same kind of overall lasting power in the pop culture consciousness as T2 because T2 is a summer blockbuster to its core. The Terminator franchise had to live up to that, according to producers, because it had to make as much money as T2, which was a lot. When profit is the priority, the result is bringing back the wrong kind of elements, such Schwarzenegger himself. He may be the best part of the third, fifth, and sixth, but the effort to bring him back felt more desperate with every return he made.

James Cameron did the same thing to the Alien franchise that he did to Terminator. He made the Alien sequel, Aliens, an action movie on top of being a horror sequel, and then most sequels after that tried to be an action movie too, even when it was unnecessary to do so. The Alien franchise might have finally broken that curse, but I don’t think Terminator ever will. T2 will be remembered as one of the best action movies of all-time until the end of time, but if/when they do bring Terminator back with another sequel or reboot, it would be nice if they went back to the horror roots of the first movie, which is still remembered as one of the most original of its kind from the 1980s.

Many fans have suggested a simple, low budget, character-focused horror movie without any returning stars to bring the franchise back, but I doubt that will happen. If Terminator 7 ever gets made, and it’s just the same kind of big, loud, obnoxious attempt as the last two, I will not go see it. It would take something totally unexpected and completely different with the name “Terminator” attached to get me to see it. Hollywood, I know you will probably still bring back Terminator again one day, but please, just stop trying to drive down the T2 road. There’s no pavement left to drive down. Back it up, and take a different path. 

 

Related: 

-Top 10 Terminator: Dark Fate Mistakes

https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2019/11/top-10-terminator-dark-fate-mistakes.html

-Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991): Favourite Films Series

https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2017/08/terminator-2-judgment-day-1991.html

Alien: Romulus Spoiler Analysis

Alien: Romulus Spoiler Review: Return to Form or Shameless Repetition?

 

Spoiler Free Review: http://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2024/08/alien-romulus-review.html

Context & Perspective On the Film: http://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2024/08/alien-romulus-context-perspective.html

 

One advantage to separating my reviews into spoiler-free and spoiler-filled is it gives me time to process my thoughts and feelings alongside those of others to see if what I noticed or felt aligns with anyone else. In the case of Alien: Romulus, I am certainly not the only one who had some major issues with the new movie, but fan reception does seem to be a bit divided in spite of more positivity than has been heaped on any Alien movie probably since Aliens.

Some, like myself, are not quite sure what to make of this new reboot. I think calling it the best since Aliens is a veil of artificial praise. I mean, I guess it’s true, but that doesn’t mean Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection, Prometheus, Alien: Covenant or even the AVP movies are worse than Romulus in every possible way. Structurally, sure, it’s probably more solid than most of the sequels, but it helps that it takes elements from all of them and retools those familiar elements into something of a synthetic copy of Alien and Aliens: it looks right on the outside, and the inner workings make it function correctly, but it’s still an imitation of greatness, not true greatness on its own.

Here’s a baseball analogy for all the sequels. Aliens was a home run, no question. Alien 3 was a walk to first base after the batter got hit with the second pitch. Alien: Resurrection was a base hit, but the hitter just barely got to first without getting tagged. The first and second AVP movies were strikes. Prometheus was a huge swing but ended up a foul ball. Alien: Covenant was a safer swing, but the hitter got tagged on the way to first. So, what is this new one, then, in terms of its quality and success?

Alien: Romulus is a bunt. It seemed like it was going to be a big homerun swing, but then the batter stopped short, sent the ball bouncing down the middle of the field, and somehow made it all the way around the bases. Okay, not all the way, that would imply a homerun bunt. The hitter made it to third. This extended sports analogy (a rarity for me) is all to point out that Alien: Romulus got the job done, but it feels a bit like when J.J. Abrams or Colin Trevorrow got their jobs done with rebooting Star Wars and Jurassic Park respectively. The studio hired someone who could make something that would bring in the old fans, new fans, and get everyone on the internet talking in order to generate more buzz and more clicks, whether the buzz was good or bad or mixed. In the end, though, a lack of new ideas became apparent the more fans talked about The Force Awakens and Jurassic World, and this is already the case with Alien: Romulus merely a week after its debut.

First, let me start with a positive: the opening. When the font for the intro titles matched the original Alien’s title font and the quiet, long shots of space began to reveal wreckage of the Nostromo, I was instantly intrigued, and the reveal that the original xenomorph (nicknamed “Big Chap” by the crew during Alien’s production) was encased in some kind of chrysalis, was not something I had expected at all. I was caught off guard and fully hooked once the company retrieved this thing and brought it aboard the Romulus space station. As the new characters were being set up, I kept thinking back to Big Chap. Are we going to see it alive again? Will these new aliens be derived from it? Is it going to come back later in the movie? Once the characters got aboard the ship and discovered the facehuggers I knew an answer was coming. And then, it hit a turning point. I went from loving the movie, to lamenting a critical creative decision that made the rest go downhill.

We see the mangled upper torso of an android next to a hole melted through the floor by xenomorph acid, and I thought maybe it was going to be a Bishop model because it visually matched how Bishop ends up in Aliens. We don’t see it in detail right away, and there’s a great jump scare with it that actually got me. Then, they prop the remains of this artificial person up on the desk…At first, I was shocked to see Ian Holm back as Ash! Once again, it was something I had not anticipated, but the idea of familiar android faces returning isn’t new. I knew intuitively this was not going to be the same Ash from Alien; the explanation that it’s a different model with the same likeness made sense. But, Ian Holm died a few years ago, and even if my brain didn’t know that, it could tell what I was looking at looked…off. That’s because here we have yet another case of a CGI deepfake from Hollywood.

I did my research, and from what director Fede Alvarez has said, the decision to revive Holm’s likeness as Rook was made early on, and he has taken responsibility for the decision. I don’t outright hate the idea like some have expressed, but the execution was horribly misguided. Just like with previous CGI recreations of actors who have passed away or are now much older than their recognizable younger personas, it does not look convincing. Alvarez brought Holm back “for the fans” apparently, but to the casual viewer, he’ll just seem like a slightly off robot, and some may recall there was an android that looked similar in the original Alien, but if the point is to give fans a recognizable face they haven’t seen since the original, why not do it with an entirely animatronic special effect, instead? That was done with Bishop in Alien 3 and it was one of the best scenes in Alien 3. An animatronic likeness might have even been easier to do than have another actor stand in for the scene then manipulate his face with computer graphics (his mouth in particular, which moves in a completely unnatural way) and attempt to pass it off as if Ian Holm had really played the part.

Remember in Alien when they set Ash up on the table and there are a couple shots when you can really tell it’s a dummy before it cuts to Ian Holm with his head pushed through a hole in the table, all covered in milk and yogurt to obscure the visual trick? Maybe the CGI deepfake was paying homage to that. Joking aside, they could have avoided this controversial inclusion by doing things a little differently. I don’t normally make suggestions for how I would have done something, but in this case, I ask: why not just have him obscured by shadows so we can’t see his face so clearly? It would have been creepier, and the voice was so uncannily similar anyway that fans would have figured it out just the same. When we see him on the computer screen later on, the digital obstruction makes it look much more convincing. Why not just do that, if there’s such insistence on including him?

Regardless of who is responsible, I can’t deny that having a CGI lookalike to the android character from the original Alien feels exploitative, cheap, and demonstrative of what visual effects can (try to) do now. I don’t care that the late actor’s family gave their blessings. Even if he was still alive and they had done it, I wouldn’t have felt the inclusion was strictly necessary or well executed, but the fact that he isn’t alive makes it look and feel even more wrong and impossible to believe. It’s the fakest looking thing in an otherwise very consistent and visually enthralling film. I’m surprised that the likeness of Holm/Ash was always the initial consideration for the script, because the more logical choice, to me, would have been to bring back Michael Fassbender’s David from Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.

When Rook started talking about the discoveries he made during his research aboard Romulus, I was shocked at the direct connections to Ridley Scott’s prequel films. Based on the marketing and the way it had been talked about in interviews, I had expected this midquel to distance itself from the much-maligned previous two movies and focus solely on being akin to Alien and Aliens and nothing more. I actually liked the Prometheus references, although showing the ampules the black goo came from in a hologram was pointless and made no sense. If there were no concerns about tying into Prometheus/Covenant, they could have gone one step further and made David the returning android. I thought maybe Fassbender had declined to be involved, but it doesn’t sound like they even asked him, though I see no reason as to why they couldn’t have made that work, story-wise.

All the exposition about what happened on Romulus is given to Rook, a character we have never seen before (despite trying to look like the original android character), and if it had been given to David in the same situation, it would have had the same effect for ignorant viewers, but a stronger impact for “the fans” without changing anything for the characters or the rest of the plot. Speaking of plot, as cool as it was to have Big Chap back, the mere fact that the company retrieved the alien life form from the Nostromo and studied it on this remote space station makes it seem even more unlikely that the company wouldn’t know anything about the species at the beginning of Aliens. It doesn’t disrupt the canon too badly, but does make you wonder how an android can upload all knowledge and research through a tiny little chip inserted in its neck, yet not transmit knowledge of the greatest extraterrestrial discovery to any other company employee in those 57 intervening years before the discovery of Ripley’s pod.

Then, there’s the issue of what, exactly, Rook tells the characters (and the audience) about. Big Chap wasn’t actually killed by Ripley at the end of Alien, and it came back to life on Romulus and wreaked havoc before being officially killed. It reminded me of how we don’t really know what happened in the colony prior to the marines getting there in Aliens, except we do know what happened here because Rook told us, and it made me wonder if seeing Big Chap killing people aboard Romulus, then getting killed for good, only for new aliens created by the scientists to kill everyone remaining, might have been a more interesting and slightly more original movie. Instead, we get a lot of the same stuff we’ve seen before from this point on, only with fewer characters involved. I liked the characters well enough, although a couple of them were hard to understand due to their accents, and none of their deaths were that unique, or that gory.

Having only one character killed by a chestburster felt more obligatory than restrained, and it came off as less violent than past instances despite being done with practical effects, because the chestburster comes out all lethargic, which isn’t scary. Apparently, this was by design, but I don’t think it was a good choice. It certainly wasn’t Alavarez’s worst choice, though—you could take your pick of bad creative decisions here, but for me it was the repurposed dialogue. The lines from the androids “I prefer the term artificial person myself” and “perfect organism” were fine, I could believe those things would be said by multiple synthetics, but forcing Andy to say Ripley’s most famous line from Aliens was terrible. I can’t even articulate all the reasons why that should not have been in the movie. It felt like they really just couldn’t help themselves. I appreciate that many fans are viewing this movie as a “love letter” to the franchise, and I do respect the care that went into the visuals at least, but the writing really let me down, in different ways from Prometheus or Alien: Covenant.

The other big spoiler everyone is raving about is the surprising reveal of the human-alien hybrid (“the offspring”) in the film’s “fourth act” which has just become mandatory at this point, and, as I said previously, doesn’t even come as a surprise. The concept is an inversion on Alien: Resurrection’s ending: instead of a Queen giving birth to a human-like xenomorph which instantly kills its mother, a human gives birth to a xenomorph-like human which instantly kills its mother. Yeah, it’s gross and off-putting and freaky, but it’s also rushed, the creature grows to a comical size instantaneously, and it looks a little uncanny in a couple shots, despite being played by a real person. Again, for the casual viewer, it will hit harder, but for those of us deeply invested in the franchise, it’s just yet again a riff on something we’ve seen before, and the bastard’s abrupt end comes about the same way as the end of Big Chap in Alien, the Queen in Aliens, the newborn in Alien: Resurrection, and the protomorph in Alien: Covenant.

A lot of my spoiler review has been negative, but I’ll end with some of the biggest positives I took away from Alien: Romulus. What I hated the most about Alien: Covenant was Ridley Scott couldn’t seem to decide how the xenomorph came to exist. Was it made by the Engineers, or did David create it? Did anything make them? Do we even need an answer to that question? Somehow, Fede Alvarez found a way to acknowledge the canon of the original Alien and Prometheus/Covenant while also bringing back a little mystery to the creature. The way I understand it: the black goo in Prometheus was derived from the original xenomorph species. If they keep this canon, then it means the Engineers are our creators, but not the creators of the deadliest species in the universe, and David merely recreated them instead of outright invented them. It’s convoluted as hell, but more satisfying at least, as far as I’m concerned.

I said in my spoiler-free review my favourite character was Andy, and part of the reason was how the expectations of an android were subverted in a clever way. It is not a mystery like in Alien that Rain’s “brother” is synthetic, and he’s programmed to be her protector, giving it a pinch of Terminator 2 that I didn’t mind at all. In Aliens, we’re pretty sure Bishop is a good guy, but we’re suspicious of him because of what we know Ash did to Ripley and the rest of the Nostromo crew in the first one. The other characters in Romulus don’t like Andy, which feels like some purposeful commentary on racism and ableism given Andy is black and has programming issues which makes him behave oddly. At first I was sure we would be seeing memes about Weyland’s new autism bot, but luckily David Jonsson is such a good actor he made the character work, and then when he gets updated aboard Romulus he takes a dark turn, which is a nice way of giving us a bit of deceitful Ash from Alien and a bit of heroic Bishop from Aliens, with Jonsson embodying two versions of his character under one skin.

As for the creatures, I found the facehuggers looked a little janky compared to how they looked in Aliens. The reason I’m comparing them directly to the ones in that particular sequel is because they have never done as much of the scaring since that movie. I didn’t find them as scary because it felt like they were too easy to avoid, but it was cool seeing them in greater numbers and swimming after their victims. Once again, the timeline of incubation is tossed out the window, which bugged me, but the full-sized xenomorphs looked incredible—probably the best they’ve looked since Alien: Resurrection—and had some creepy moments that were well shot. I did wonder if we might see the Queen, but I’m indifferent to her being absent. Some fans speculate that Ridley Scott hates the concept of the Queen because James Cameron came up with it, not him, and as long as he’s attached to these movies we are unlikely to see her return. I believe Scott could be that petty, but I don’t know if that’s entirely true.

I’ll answer the question I posed in the title. Alien: Romulus is a return to form, because it shamelessly repeats what worked best before without taking any big risks. I can’t say I’m that surprised now that the dust has settled, so to speak. Disney fronted the money for this thing, and it might not show when you look at the insanely repulsive ending and the way the whole thing brings the series back to pure survival horror, but it sure does show when you see what it is at its core: another Alien movie without any new, clever ideas. Perhaps gone are the days of sequels like Alien 3 or prequels like Prometheus that take big swings which don’t always pay off, but at least tried. Alien: Romulus, as a whole, feels a bit effortless, or maybe the effort was just put into the wrong areas. That’s not to say no effort was put in at all, but in terms of structure and the seed of the idea, it was a safe bet from the start, executed well, and without any hope of truly living up to Alien or Aliens.