‘Terminator’: From bad dream to great box office
[...] somewhat of a starving artist, he was living off the remainders of others’ room-service trays in a pension while struggling to complete Piranha II:
Rebecca Keegan’s biography “The Futurist” describes the fever dream: “A chrome torso emerging, phoenixlike, from an explosion and dragging itself across the floor with kitchen knives.”
The young filmmaker proved both desperate and stubborn enough to bring his vision of a catastrophic war between man and machines to the screen.
According to Keegan, Cameron “didn’t see O.J. as a believable killing machine.”
Scrappy human freedom fighter Reese (Michael Biehn) arrives from the future to protect waitress Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) from the machinations of future-world-dominating A.I. Skynet.
Skynet has sent a cyborg assassin model T-800 (Schwarzenegger) back to the present to kill Connor before she can give birth to son John, who will eventually lead mankind away from the brink of extinction to take Earth back from the machines.
Schwarzenegger’s unforgettable performance as an unstoppable force, deft plot movement and Cameron’s signature roller-coaster story structure — all for $6.5 million — started one of cinema’s most successful franchises.
[...] Cameron made two more sci-fi classics: the criminally underrated “The Abyss” (1989) and the mind-blowing, hard-left-turn sequel to Ridley Scott’s moody “Alien” — “Aliens” (1986).
Cameron simultaneously let the story fly forward and created a closed loop, while exploding filmgoers’ brains with the first extensive use of morphing technology.
[...] the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), a terminator made of liquid metal (thus the shape-shifting visual effects), was intended for the first film, but the technology didn’t yet exist to present it onscreen.
Only a few movies can be truly said to have changed audiences’ expectations of visual effects, and “T2” is among them.
All this, and Cameron’s stated goal of getting an audience to “cry for a terminator” as this T-800 learns the value of human life.
A fourth film, “Terminator Salvation,” was intended to start a new trilogy, but it is now best remembered for star Christian Bale’s infamous on-set rant when the director of photography interfered with a scene.
The new film, “Terminator Genisys,” hadn’t screened by press time, but it seems to be taking alternative-reality time-travel cues from J.J. Abrams’ clever “Star Trek” reboot.
Rather than twist itself into a metallic pretzel to fit into the other movies’ and TV show’s continuities, it supposes that time travel creates a new chronological path.
The Dark World after helming episodes of “Game of Thrones”; it’s co-written by Cameron confederate Laeta Kalogridis (“Shutter Island,” executive producer on “Avatar”); and stars Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen on “Thrones”) and Jason Clarke (“Zero Dark Thirty”).