William C. Martell - The Terminator Movies

Listen, and understand! That Terminator is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!

I have always loved the first two Terminator movies, so when the Terminator: Genisys trailers began coming out I couldnt wait to see it. I had seen all of the previous Terminator movies either on opening night or (if they were sold out) sometime over the opening weekend. I always hope that the next one will be as good as the first two. Because Genisys is supposed to be the first in a new trilogy, I thought it would be fun to watch all of the movies again and write a book about them.

And that would be a great way to kick off a new series of my own where we take a look at different film franchises. There have been books and articles on one film or even two films, but why not look at *all* of the films in a series? Compare them, see how the stories connect, how the characters age and change (or dont). Since Hollywood has become a big sequel machine, lets take a look at all of these sequels. Are the new films as good as the old films? Are there themes or plot threads that run through all of the films? Since every film that makes money ends up being the beginning of a franchise (whether they like it or not) Ive decided to look at a dozen of these franchises over the next few years... starting with the Terminator movies.

Because I am a screenwriter, and tend to watch films with a writers eye, this book is focused on the story elements of the films and how they work. But I love movies, so much of this book will be devoted to finding a deeper appreciation of these films just as a film lover. While talking to a friend of mine about this new series, I told him it would be like the analysis of Die Hard in my Secrets Of Action Screenwriting book, and he told me hed seen Die Hard a dozen times and never noticed many of the things I had pointed out in that chapter, like the symbolism of Hollys watch throughout the film. So if you are just a movie lover or a fan of the Terminator movies, there will be all kinds of fun cool stuff you may never have noticed before. Hey, you can impress your friends the next time you watch the films.

As a professional screenwriter I once had a momentary connection to the Terminator - in the very early 1990s I sold a screenplay called Treacherous to a producer who set it up at Hemdale, the company that made the first film in the series. Hemdale was one of those great mini-majors which flourished in the 1980s making movies like The Terminator and Platoon, but like all small scrappy companies with a string of successes, they began to expand and make more expensive and more risky movies... and ended up in financial trouble. To dig themselves out, they sold the sequel rights to The Terminator to Carolco and Gale Anne Hurd, which allowed James Cameron to make Terminator 2: Judgement Day. But they held onto the TV rights. When the second Terminator film came out, they were interested in doing a TV series about the Terminator, and because I had a screenplay in development there (with Mickey Rourke and Brian Dennehy attached) the producer of my film asked me to pitch my take on how I would turn The Terminator into a weekly TV series that would last at least 100 episodes.

If you are not in the business, you may not know that a TV show is usually a break even business until you hit 100 episodes and it can be stripped - reruns sold into syndication so that they can have Seinfeld on every day at 7pm on some station. 100 episodes means they can go almost half a year without repeating an episode. In addition to figuring out how to have 100 episodes of Terminator TV (Ill be back... after this commercial message!) Hemdale only owned the rights to the first film, so I could not use anything from the second film.

So my pitch was a weekly show that was similar to the old Fugitive TV show - Sarah and her 8 year old son John are on the run from a Terminator, and each week they go to a new town to hide and become involved in the towns problems or social issues and help solve them, leaving just as the Terminator discovers their new location. The series would be about how Sarah teaches John to be a human being at this young age, so that he wont turn into a machine when she teaches him to be a warrior after he grows up. I thought it was a great idea, and the Fugitive TV show had run 120 episodes. Money in the bank! Except Hemdale went bankrupt and my Treacherous film didnt get made there (it bounced around for a couple of years - set up at Universal for a while, and then finally got made by ITC with 20th Century Fox distributing). And that ended my connection with The Terminator except for buying tickets to the movies.

RAW INFORMATION

Because the new film just came out on BluRay, I thought wed take a look at the five films so far in the Terminator series, but first a note on each chapter. Because I believe that pacing is an important part of screenwriting and filmmaking - and even film viewing - I have noted the time in minutes and seconds that have elapsed since the beginning of the movie in parentheses before most major scenes. So (62:15) means that this scene begins 62 minutes and 15 seconds since the film has begun. This is done for every film except Terminator 2: Judgement Day, where I have included what I call a timeline at the end of the chapter that breaks down what happens in the film into 5 minute increments. One of the reasons why I did this is to compare the pacing for each film and also so that you could compare the length of action scenes or dramatic scenes or suspense scenes from one film to the next. For instance, if you want to compare the Canal Chase in Terminator 2" (four minutes and forty five seconds) to the Armored Car Chase in Terminator 5" (just under a minute) you can understand why Terminator 2" rocks.

Ive also supplied the box office numbers, budgets, running times, both Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes scores, and the results of the Cinemascore audience polling to give you more data to compare. Which made more money in the United States, Salvation or Genisys? You can find out. Though some of these numbers may not mean anything to you, they are often an indicator of things like whether we will ever see the next two movies in this current proposed trilogy.

But enough about the raw statistics, lets look at the movies!

Release date: October 26, 1984

Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn, Lance Henrickson,

Writer: James Cameron & Gale Anne Hurd, plus Will Wisher jr.

Director: James Cameron.

Producer: James Cameron & Gale Anne Hurd and John Daly.