Always Coming Back

I had a hankering the other day to watch a feel-good fun-time movie during my stationary bike ride, so I put on Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991). It’s a great ride—at least, the first half is—that’s also dripping with cheese. I always think it’s kind of a shame what happened with this franchise. I started watching T3 (2003) the next day, just because I hadn’t seen it in a while; it’s just a shame that Cameron didn’t want to be involved. The action scenes are garbage compared to T2—unfair, I know, to compare a ho-hum B-movie to an action classic, but even so, what were they thinking? If the action was good, that movie would have been fine and might even have led to better things.

As it is, Terminator always feels like a franchise that was really let down. It’s a time travel story, for Christ, they can do anything they want, they have killer robots, why are the movies so bad after the first two? Actually, I don’t care about why they’re bad; I just find that whenever I watch a Terminator movie I automatically start thinking of fun shit they could do; like, is it really so hard?

For instance, what if the future sent back a team to steal secrets from the Cyberdyne lab while it was under attack in T2? They use the break in and chaos to sneak in, then jack into the network and steal designs from the computers, then run away before the place is blown up. This is just one example of a way to use the time travel—this heist could be done by a competitor that then uses the tech to build a different Skynet. You can spin out all kinds of stories about people trying to manage the weird time travel screwups and alternate universes—why not have fun with it?