![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
As far as I'm concerned, the Terminator franchise is a trilogy, with T1, T2, and this latest one, T6, finishing it up. If you haven't yet, don't bother seeing any of the others.Even if you're one of those who needs to "finish a story" or "hear the whole thing", don't bother. It keeps getting retconned and rebooted, so you're really not losing any of the story by not seeing the others.
I would also recommend the TV show the Sarah Connor Chronicles, but I don't think it's necessary either, because this latest film is also a soft reboot that makes that show ... I'm going to say "a different timeline", because the whole franchise is about time travel, so I can rationalize away any incongruities that way.
So, yeah, in my personal headcannon, the story is a trilogy right now with T1, T2, and T6. And I say this as someone who is fine with all 3 sets of trilogies being part of the Star Wars canon, so that ought to tell you something about how little I care about T3-5.
So here's what I think about the Terminator trilogy...
#Irony: The original Terminator movie is about Sarah Connor - a woman who eventually gives birth to the leader of the resistance who is supposed to save the world. It has male action characters, but it's ultimately about Sarah and her relationship with Kyle Reese. It's basically a romance story set in a pre-apocalyptic action film.
The second Terminator movie is about Sarah Connor again, now a fucking badass guerrilla warfare soldier. And, again, it has some male action characters, but it's still about Sarah and her psychological journey from "normal girl" to Mother Of The Saviour And Terrorist. She does her own ass-kicking in this film, keeping up with literally super-human characters in the protection of her son, John.
The rest of the films I won't mention because they're terrible and not the point. The original two films, that set the story and the standard for the Terminator franchise, are a WOMAN'S TALE.
Here's the irony ... people are pissed off because of the strong woman-heavy cast of the latest Terminator film, and accusing it (as they always do of anything that doesn't subjugate minorities in the plot or in the telling of the story) of "pandering" to the new "identity politics" of the feminist cult and younger generations.
It's like people complaining about sci-fi, or Star Trek in particular, getting political. Like, have you ever SEEN the original shit before? That's what IT IS.
Terminator is a chick flick. That's why it's so good. It's a woman's story. It's just that the woman in question, and her story, doesn't involve flowers or wedding dresses. I mean, for fuck's sake, it even includes her getting pregnant and raising a child as an integral part of the plot!
Women have a lot of different stories to tell. Some of them are action stories. Some of them involve fights and fast cars and war and blood and death. When you tell a woman's story, not just what men *think* about women, but her actual story, you get diversity; you get adversity; you get pain; you get pleasure; you get redemption; you get vindication, you get action; you get adventure; you get hardship; you get conflict.
Whether her story takes place in the home or on the battlefield, those are still what you get when you tell women's stories.
Telling these stories isn't "pandering" any more than literally telling *any* story for a commercial enterprise is "pandering" because the producers want to make money from the sale of that story. It's not "identity politics". People want to make money, and they don't make money if they refuse to sell to literally half the population of the planet.
Women have stories to tell.
And in the case of many of these amazing stories finally being told, it's often the same story that they have *been* telling. You just weren't paying attention.
I wrote all of that before seeing the latest film. This was completely my reaction to seeing online criticisms from whiny boys about "too many women" in the new movie. I hadn't seen the movie and I didn't read any reviews, I just saw some complaints about "pandering" and "identity politics" and all the usual bullshit that comes every time women play any kind of role in an action film that isn't the sexy villain, the refrigerator'd girlfriend, or the current love interest.
Now that I've seen the latest Terminator, and realizing that I like it and reflecting on why I like it and the first two but not the rest, I think my claim of this being a woman's story is consistent.
I think one of the main reasons I didn't like the rest of the films (and there are several reasons not to like them) is because they stop being a woman's story, not just because they were poorly told or executed.
The rest of the movies, if I recall correctly because it's been a long time since I've seen them and I only saw them once because they were terrible, unlike the first two - the rest of the movies stop being about Sarah Connor, and start being about man vs. machine, using the term "man" in this context as deliberately gendered and not a shortened form or stand-in term for "humanity".
Linda Hamilton wasn't even in all of the other sequels. Those movies were not about her journey. They became about John Connor, or about Arnold, or about continuing to bleed a franchise. But since the story ultimately is about Sarah, taking her out of the story led to the storytellers losing focus.
Hence reboots and direction changes. They lost sight of what made the story interesting in the first place. I mean, sure, the special effects of both were groundbreaking, so from a technical point of view, T1 & 2 were interesting on production quality alone. But even if we can appreciate a pretty movie, if the story isn't at least as good as the effects, it won't become a classic, iconic, a genre-setting game-changing film (I'm looking at you, Avatar, where even Sigourney Weaver couldn't save that movie).
T1 & 2 were that kind of film because the story telling gave the special effects a purpose. The effects were a *vehicle* to tell the story, not the other way around. T6 brought us back to the story, back to the premise, back to its roots, even with the use of a soft reboot plot device, which, incidentally, basically implies agreement with my assessment that the other 3 movies pretty much don't count.
What makes the Terminator movies interesting is the woman's story. Once you remove that, no amount of action or special effects save the film. Because women's stories are still just people's stories, it *could have been* possible to move on from Sarah and start telling the story of another person in the saga, even if the next person's story was a man. It *could* have been done.
But the next 3 producers / writers / directors didn't treat it as someone's story, they treated it as men's eye candy, and, apparently (by implication), men don't care about the story, they only care about the action.
I mean, I suppose that explains why porn written for het cis men (and a lot of gay cis men) is all "fuck the plot, it doesn't matter why these two people are screwing, as long as we get to the screwing!" People just assume that men don't care about the story, only the action.
But I would propose that the success of the films and TV shows that are successful and/or popular in the last several years suggests that men *do* care about the story too, they'll just take pointless explosions if that's what's available. And if you can marry a good story with a well-produced film in a genre that is favored by men as a group (whether you personally *liked* the story or not), that movie will do very well at the box office, or at least it will do well in popularity over time.
The trick, apparently, is to get enough men to relate to a good story that happens to feature a woman (or several). But that doesn't seem to be a problem with storytelling, that seems to be a problem with the collective male bias and expectations.
Anyway, it's late and I'm rambling. Point is, now that I've seen the latest Terminator in the franchise, realized that I like it, and thought a little about *why* I like it, I think that the reason why I dislike the previous 3 movies is because they stopped being a woman's story.
As I keep pointing out in my Poly-ish Movie Reviews, and to people who keep trying to recommend movies and books to me, I am very character driven. I need to either identify with a character or want to know a character - like, date them or have them in my social circle - in order to enjoy a film or book. If a writer can get me to connect to a character, the story doesn't even have to be all that well-written or produced for me to like it.
When Terminator stopped being a woman's story, it stopped being a people's story. It became fluff. It was all action with no real purpose. I suppose there might have been some themes in some of the sequels somewhere, but really, the story ended with Sarah leaving the focus. Without a focus or a purpose, the story just kept getting lost. And the movies sucked.
So when the saga became once again a woman's story, I enjoyed it, and I think it was a fitting chapter in the longer tale.
And if there's anything I can ever say good about reboots, it's that it gives me the opportunity to pretend that the chapters the reboot scratches over don't exist. I mean, that's also why reboots suck - they overwrite previous chapters, and if you like those previous chapters, then that's a bad thing.
But now I can safely reconcile "Terminator is a trilogy made of T1, T2, and T6 and let's pretend the other 3 don't even exist" in my head, because even the franchise seems to be saying "yep, those other 3 don't exist, here watch this reboot that erases them!"Those are the 3 that are telling a woman's story and that story is what makes Terminator interesting. The others lose sight of this, and consequently are just not as interesting to those of us who are story-dependent.
Women have stories to tell. And our stories are interesting.
I originally wrote all of this in 3 Facebook posts. In the comments of one of them, somebody asked me how I felt about "the big reveal".
Spoiler alert!!!
He said "I thought [the big reveal] was a bit hokie and unnecessary. Are we really still at a place where 'it's not your son, it's you' is a shocking twist. Why not just set her up as 'the one' from the beginning. I guess it was an attempt to parallel the Sarah Connor arc, but it felt ham fisted. I'd like to think we could just say this is the new savior in the initial introduction and then the arc is in watching her become a badass through the course of the movie."
I said that I had some mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I figured out the "plot twist" the very first time Sarah assumed Dani was the next Mother Mary and Grace didn't confirm it. So, yeah, it felt clunky and easily guessed.
On the other hand, I think it added to Sarah's character arc, not just paralleled it. I like that she became bitter and resentful because she was always on this path. Her character in T2 was cynical and nihilistic, so once she saved the world and lost her son, there's no reason to assume she'd become the same bubbly girl she was in T1. Sarah is *damaged*, and with robots from the future trying to kill her and her child, why wouldn't she be?
I feel that the big reveal was partly because we, as a culture, and action film fans as a demographic, *would* still see it as a twist, and partly because it was, again, more about Sarah than about Dani. This was still Sarah's story. It was the story of the beginning of her passing the torch, but her story nonetheless.
A woman in Sarah's position very likely would become bitter and resentful to have spent her entire life being told that her sole worth was in her ability to birth babies. Literally her life was worthless without her son, as they tried to kill her first to prevent her son being born. Once her son was born, she wasn't even worth killing (except as someone in the way).
So she became basically an unlikable character. She became as unlikable and jaded as a male action character is allowed to become and still be a hero. The action genre abounds with cranky, unlikable male heroes. Women in this line of work are going to turn out similarly.
And then she had to learn the big reveal and get past her cynicism.
And yet, she is STILL the Mother Mary. That is still her role. She isn't raising John anymore, but she is still raising up the leader of the resistance. That is still her role in life and still her purpose and still what gives her worth. Which is an interesting role to be assigned in a film that very clearly has modern feminist values.
I think that we as an audience could handle a "woman is the saviour" story from the beginning and her arc be her growing into that role, at this point in our culture. But perhaps in another film.
I think in *this* film, since we are still telling Sarah's story, making that the plot twist was one possible path they could have gone down that does fit. Because putting Sarah in the Wise Old Mentor role that our hero comes to for training, Mr. Miyagi style or even Old Luke style, would have been a lot less interesting than seeing Sarah struggle with Dani's journey including being unable to recognize it for what it was.
It could have been done, and I bet with a talented writer it could have been done well. And it possibly could even still have been done with Sarah being grudging and cynical and resentful over her Mother Mary role and disbelieving about Dani. With the right writers, I think that path could have been taken and the big reveal wasn't necessary.
But I'm not unhappy with this path being the one they chose. I think we as a culture still have a hard time accepting women saviours and action characters unless we throw some kind of traditional role in there to make us more comfortable. Like Black Widow's big secret in the MCU. I mean, why couldn't she *just* be a sociopath because she was raised and programmed to be? No we had to make her big secret all about motherhood.
And Captain Marvel is still getting shit for being "arrogant" and "a bully" when the male superheroes are just accepted that way. I mean, Tony Stark is an asshole but there aren't Quora questions dedicated to "why is he so mean, couldn't he just smile more?"
And I think the T6 writers knew that. Frankly, I think they all knew that, which is why they shifted focus off Sarah and onto John and Kyle in the last 3 movies. They were pandering to their target demographic. I think they knew that if word leaked out that Dani was the new John, they would get blasted and a large chunk of fans would boycott it on principle, so they had to "sneak" it in.
Not that it's stopping the complaining, of course. I mean, that's what got me started writing about it in the first place even before I saw it - men complaining about too many women in an action film and why we gotta ruin their childhood like that?
So, yeah, I'm not sure we could have just said she was the new saviour from the beginning. Maybe, with the right writers. But I think we're not yet in a culture where surprising the audience with a woman saviour is passé. Add that together with it still being Sarah's story and her struggle to come to terms with their respective roles, and I think it worked ok.
I mean, if you think about it hard enough, the entire story is a bit ham-fisted and forced. This isn't great literature here. It's an action film that had 3 episodes with some clever writing ... for action films. A lot of action films are "we need a great car chase scene, so how do we get them onto the Autobahn driving backwards in a Ferrari with an F15 chasing them?" Like, surviving a fall over Hoover Dam and sinking? Really? They just popped up to the surface at the foot of the falls with all that water falling down on them instead of being pummeled to death by the roiling waters?!
So the big reveal wasn't out of character, IMO, for the genre of movie, and I think it fit into Sarah's story. But these criticisms of it are not wrong.
My bottom line is that even the reveal, with all its legitimate criticisms, is still part of Sarah's story, which makes it fit into the woman's story trilogy that makes these 3 chapters in the saga such excellent films and the other 3 chapters suck because they are not Sarah's story, not a woman's tale.
T6 is Terminator's redemption film. We are back to telling Sarah's story, and that's why it works. Women have stories to tell. And when you allow us to tell them, the films are engaging, interesting, and they work.
