Terminator 5 Manifesto

You like Terminator right? Ditto and right now T5 is running rampant on the gossip mill; Justin Lin’s in… Justin Lin’s out… Paul Walker Wha?! … How is it all making you feel eh? Pissed off? What is so wrong with Hollywood actually taking note of the fans and, I don’t know, making way more money by listening? Hell, we don’t even want James Cameron to come pick up his piss soup (it ain’t gonna happen at this stage anyway), we’ll just cross everything and hope Megan gets an artist (Ridley Scott?) who can turn urine into the kind of alcohol transients drink to reach valhallah! Can I get a Hallelujah?! Amen!

The military and war aspects of Terminator are major draws for many a fan, the merge of Science Fiction and Science Fact with a realistic portrayal of war… one of the biggest questions when new Terminator films go into production is; will this be it… will this be the future war movie… the war we saw in glimpses over the first 2 pictures?

The fans believed they would get to see the mighty war against the machines (or at least the final days of war with the machines).

So James Cameron lured fans with a facet of his movies which he never actually delivered… the Future War. Also, as a filmmaker and a story teller he believes the story ended with Terminator 2. Then why does the story feel incomplete?

Jim Cameron always stated he wished he would have created Star Wars, (something of that scope), he had it with Terminator, a series one film away from a Trilogy… a Terminator Trilogy… fans waited but each year went by and we saw nothing.

Terminator 3 was set to be hot talk in regard to sequels but it never seemed to happen… However in 2003 it did happen (and most of us would rather forget what we saw).

The war we saw was an empty facade, the tactical military mission based elements are not there because Jim Cameron didn’t think that far ahead perhaps. Or maybe he did and shrugged off more work with saying he’d told his story.

We, the fans, want to see it but as long as there is a Mostow or a McG waiting in the wings to hang their star on a Terminator movie we won’t get it and anyone who tries to make Terminator into something it’s not is an epic failure. Mostow really did adhere to the world of PG-13 rules and McG made a film a 1 year old could watch not to mention the fact he handed everyone a copy of “The Road” and stated “This is the film we are making”. So indeed these people were not making Terminator movies at all, they just happened to have Terminators in them.

No REBOOT/RECHARGE/REHASH/REHYDRATE/REANIMATE/REINCARNATE. Get it right or f*ck off.

Hollywood is a well oiled machine and as with SkyNet, it runs on facts and figures, sentimentality has no place in the world of cold hard numbers.James Cameron is a prime example of Hollywood’s lack of emotional connection… Cameron created Terminator (not on his own obviously) and what did he do with it? He sold it to his wife Gale Ann Hurd for the sum of a cup of coffee… now if that was your creation, your baby, would you sell it so casually? No. And why not? Because YOU thought it up, it was your idea and the very idea of selling it would make you feel like stabbing yourself in the face with fifty kebab skewers. James Cameron comfortably signed away his movie because he was using Terminator as a leg-up to better things and when it actually took off he couldn’t believe his luck… *KERCHING*…

*meanwhile in James Cameron’s mind*…

“So, we were successful?”
“Yes Jim, we were.”
“So, what does it mean?”
“It means the studio want more…”
“No, not right now, they can wait. Terminator has opened the door to a better place… ”
“Where to? Narnia?”
“No, think Fern Gully… but blue… ”

James Cameron didn’t intend to make Terminator 2 but he knew his reputation needed the boost so into the studio he went and when he returned it was with style, action, budget and Arnold on a FatBoy (the bike, not a small festive child) and from that point Cameron knew he couldn’t make another Terminator movie… he quite simply used Terminator to make himself a name, just like Mostow and the ever ebullient McG but none of the men who have helmed the franchise thus far have ever loved the saga like the fans do. We know what we want, we know what’s right and what’s goddamn ridiculous (T3 mostly) and we know the finer details down to a T. Ask us what we want Miss Ellison and you shall get mucho dinero in return.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has been working out and Next month filming will begin on his first full feature movie since T3: Rise of the Machines. His muscles are growing and he is looking more like a Terminator each time the paps snap him.

Here is what we want to see:

• A film that goes back to the roots of the saga. The dark tone of the first movie and not what happened from T2 onwards.

•  A-List Director with 20+ years of experience in the field of action/sci-fi movies.

•  Arnold Schwarzenegger as a bad T-800 CSM-101

•  A deep meaningful story with effort to include information and characters from mainly the first two movies. eg. Introduce us to Sgt. Perry who was mentioned in the first movie by Kyle Reese.

•  Show us a continuation but one that gets the series back on track

•  Show us Kyle Reese, not as a main character but as a smartly conceived digital/live model cameo done with the assistance of the only real Kyle “Michael Biehn”.

•  Bring the Termination back to the Terminator series. If you wanted to rent a copy of The Terminator (1984) in the United Kingdom you had to be 18 years old to watch it. Why not do what we want and put it back up to 18 and make it gorier, scarier and an intense horror as well as sci-fi/action.

•  Give us the war movie we deserve with a true Terminator chase plotline woven through the middle of it. A Mission, a journey an epic showdown/ultimate cliffhanger to a final installment of Terminator (T6).

•  The movie has to stand alone as a story and if you have not seen the others it needs to make sense without throwbacks to 4 other movies.

•  We want to see things we’ve only seen glimpses of before; the weaponary, the costumes of the resistance, the sets.

•  No homages every 5 minutes.

•  No humor.

• No love stories. The only love story that mattered in t1 was Kyle and Sarah.

•  No redesigns of machines. Eg. Flying HK and Ground HK

•  The film makers need to be making a Terminator movie not their “Take” on a terminator movie.

•  Branding by laser scan on human prisoners.

•  Human prisoners forced to load bodies.

•  Human prisoners used for manual tasks.

•  Show the ground HK and the Flying HKs being constructed in a factory within skynet.

•  Show an army of endoskeletons marching against the humans.

•  Push boundaries by creating a future war battle only seen on a small scale in the first two movies… open up the battlefield into mass carnage and blood.

•  The SkyNet Pyramid.

•  The infiltration to the home of the skynet central processing unit (CPU) located inside The SkyNet Pyramid.

•  The final realization that the very thing trying to kill John all along is just an inanimate object in a central core running off lots of nuclear energy.

•  Smashing the defence grid.

•  Allowing entrance to SkyNet.

•  Allowing infiltration and destruction of the building by tactically taking out each section – Terminator factories, cold storage etc.

•  The sending back of all the Terminators explained.

•  We see where they went through from the future to the past.

•  T-1000 cameo

•  Show the time displacement used and to the knowledge of the resistance destroyed.

•  Filmmakers need to think cash cow instead of instant cash back! If the movie is actually really good the fans will go back more than once.

•  Arnold really needs to act dead-pan and emotionless, T2-T3 he did not have the same presence he had in the first movie, he became a kid’s best friend, this just about worked for T2 but by T3 the character had become a cartoon version of the character he once was. T3 was almost a showboat for bullshit for the, at the time; “upcoming governor”. Apparently Arnold gave all the thumbs up for the rubbish comedy his character was to face and useless one liners that never really stuck… and if they did stick it was for all the wrong reasons “Talk to the hand”.

•  Bring back the writing talents of William Wisher Jnr. (he co-wrote the first 2 movies with Cameron and has written script treatments for a 5th and 6th movie already, so he wants to come back and help save the franchise).

•  Bring back the excellent and one and only Terminator music by Brad Fiedel.

The first Terminator movie took itself seriously. Maybe T5 should too…

If Genesis Bombs they could always make Terminator 5 with Bale and Arnold