I Miss U all my Blog

It’s been ten years since Sarah Connor was first introduced to the future of her son and mankind. Sarah has been preparing her son John since his birth to be the warrior he would need to be to survive in this future and lead us to victory, however, Sarah is now separated from her son and confined to a criminal mental instution because she tried to blow up Cyberdine Systems – the company that will one day manufacture SkyNet.

Without the influence of Sarah, John has begun to doubt all of the training and warnings his mother has given him through the years and begun to believe she is just as crazy as the doctors and law enforcement believe her to be. He is set on being a rebellious teen until SkyNet changes its direction and sends back a terminator to target John instead of Sarah.

I adore Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I saw this film in the theatre when I was a kid and I still remember that experience to this day, the same way I remember Jurassic Park wowing me. Because of T2 I later discovered Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, and happily chose the red pill and went down the rabbit hole with James Cameron.

The version of T2 I have on DVD is the director’s cut and like any of his films, once you see a James Cameron director’s cut you don’t go back. I understand that Cameron makes long movies, but everything he is forced to cut out for time constraints or other reasons, seems to be just as good as the material he keeps in his theatrical releases and Terminator 2 is no exception to this rule. The most notable scenes eliminated here and re-added to the director’s cut are the dream sequence where Sarah imagines Reese visiting her and when John & Sarah repair the T-800 model. Of all the sequences cut out of the movie this is the one I would have fought to keep.

If you remember from the theatrical cut of the film as John, Sarah & the T-800 escape from the T-1000 old Arnold gets pretty banged up, and he has a conversation with John about how he can be made to learn things due to his processor. When they are alone the T-800 gets repaired by Sarah. Anyone who paid attention to the first Terminator should realize that Sarah should be the last person to trust this model of terminator, it killed Reese and came dang close to killing her; so when it powers down for repairs Sarah removes it’s processor chip and prepares to smash it – but John stops her. He convinces her to instead switch the chip to learning mode so that the T-800 can begin to adapt and be more useful. It’s John’s first real moment as a leader and he demands that Sarah respect that. It’s a great scene and the only reasons I can see for it being cut would be pacing or because the studio wanted a shorter movie. Either way I think it’s a scene that proves Cameron is superior to other “action” filmmakers as he manages to concentrate on character and story as well as the action set pieces that get audiences into chairs.

If you haven’t seen the original Terminator films I really encourage you to if you are a fan of science fiction, the franchise, or James Cameron. I greatly disliked Terminator 3: the Rise of the Machines and enjoyed Terminator Salvation, but neither of these two films holds a candle to the original two. It’s still my secret hope that when the rights to the franchise go on the auction block soon Cameron will secretly buy them up so that he can either stop the inferior sequels or oversee them so his vision can be seen on screen again.

Director: James Cameron
Writers: James Cameron & William Wisher Jr.
The Terminator: Arnold Schwarzenegger
Sarah Connor: Linda Hamilton
John Connor: Edward Furlong
T-1000: Robert Patrick
Dr. Silberman: Earl Boen
Miles Dyson: Joe Morton

Sarah Connor: 3 billion human lives ended on August 29th, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day. They lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the machines. The computer which controlled the machines, Skynet, sent two Terminators back through time. Their mission: to destroy the leader of the human resistance, John Connor, my son. The first Terminator was programmed to strike at me in the year 1984, before John was born. It failed. The second was set to strike at John himself when he was still a child. As before, the resistance was able to send a lone warrior, a protector for John. It was just a question of which one of them would reach him first.

Yes, yes. I saw Terminator Salvation two times in a row. What was I supposed to do? A friend wanted to go and so I went. It was fun.

I actually enjoyed seeing the film more on the second viewing and I have to day that is probably because through my entire first viewing I was constantly tense…I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was on pins and needles most of the film the first time because I love the first two films so much that I didn’t see any way that another installment of Terminator could add to the franchise after the disaster that was T3. Thank goodness my faith in McG paid off. I’d heard him speak so passionately about Terminator at last years Comic-Con and begun to get a sense that he of all people could make a worthy follow-up to Cameron’s visionary story. McG exceeded.

One of my favorite things in Terminator Salvation is that though the film has switched entirely to John Connor and away from Sarah we still get Sarah Connor in the film. Those that have followed the Connor’s since Terminator know that she recorded a series of tapes for John to prepare him for the future to come, the war with the machines and how he came to be. Now a grown man without his mother by his side to fight with him, John uses those tapes constantly in an effort to stay on top of the machines and the war to come.

As much as I loved McG’s vision of the future I still miss James Cameron at the helm. However, I hope that since Cameron isn’t there McG can perhaps get Linda Hamilton to reprise her iconic role if the story dictates it…

Marcus Wright: What day is it? What year?
Kyle Reese: 2018.
Marcus Wright: What happened here?
Kyle Reese: Judgment Day happened.

Sarah Connor was living her life like any material girl in the 1984; she waitressed by day, laughed with her roommate Ginger and went out on dates. Then one day women named Sarah Connor began to be killed and her world was turned upside down. Out of nowhere Sarah finds out that a machine from the future, a terminator has been sent through time to kill her because she will give birth to a legendary leader named John Connor who will fight back against the machines when they cause a nuclear world and enslave the human race, and in the future he is on the verge of winning. Sarah finds out that she is the one that trains him to become this great leader, military warrior and savior of man kind. After that day Sarah Connor’s life changed forever – and so did cinema.

Sarah Connor is one of the most respected strong women of cinema; she is a legendary character and one in a long line of leading strong women led by James Cameron. What makes the character of Sarah Connor remarkable is not one thing but many, and it all starts with The Terminator. Never before had such a strong yet feminine woman been brought to the screen; Connor wasn’t strong in the say Kathryn Hepburn was strong, she was strong in a whole new way. She learned how to make plastic explosives, field dress wounds and fight for humanity.

Every time I watch The Terminator I am amazed at how natural Cameron and Linda Hamilton make Sarah Connor’s transformation from simple citizen to guerilla warrior. One would think that to make that dramatic a change it would be clunky and sudden, but it is not. Even before she knew the definition of an H.K. and T-101 Sarah could defend herself, think on her feet, and by the end of the film she is motivating the soldier sent back to protect her, and fighting against the machines herself.

In The Terminator Cameron creates not just Sarah Connor, but an entire world with a future so bleak that an entire new avenue was opened in science fiction. Time travel tales had been told before, but never in such a way as he told them. The Terminator sets up an entire world that we cannot see, a heroine that grows to greatness before us and the possibility of a leader even greater than this heroine. Cameron creates a way for the future to crash into the present with the idea that they are so linked together that neither the viewer or the characters can truly know if anything they do will actually change the future or if their actions are creating the future they dread. It was unique when the franchise began and remains fresh and vibrant to this day.

While The Terminator is arguably a franchise fueled by testosterone one must never forget that like just a John Connor was trained by his mother, Terminator was built by Sarah Connor.

Director: James Cameron
Writers: James Cameron & Gale Anne Hurd
The Terminator: Arnold Schwarzenegger
Kyle Reese: Michael Biehn
Sarah Connor: Linda Hamilton
Detective Vukovich: Lance Henrickson
Dr. Silberman: Earl Boen
Punk Leader: Bill Paxton

Kyle Reese: Some of us were kept alive... to work... loading bodies into dumpsters and incinerators. The disposal units ran night and day. We were that close to going out forever. But there was one man who taught us to fight, to storm the wire of the camps, to smash those metal motherfuckers into junk. He turned it around. He brought us back from the brink. His name is Connor. John Connor. Your son, Sarah, your unborn son.