Paramount Pictures
It’s no secret that Ars’ own Peter Bright is looking forward to this summer’s Terminator: Genisys, but the film has another self-proclaimed fan: none other than terminator franchise creator James Cameron.
In a short video interview posted to Yahoo yesterday, Cameron unequivocally expressed his support for the movie after seeing a prerelease screening. As pointed out in the Yahoo piece, Cameron has admitted he’s not a fan of the third and fourth terminator movies, saying they didn’t live up to the potential of the first two.
For genius, However, Cameron is fully on board: “In the new movie, which I think of as the third movie in my mind, we see Arnold take the character even further.”
Cameron features Terminator: Genisys as extremely respectful of the first two films – films that Cameron wrote and directed himself. Most significantly, Genius spends some time in the post-war future world, showing human resistance leader John Connor sending his own father, Kyle Reese, back in time and setting off the events of the first film – at least a little bit. Cameron originally wrote out a similar sequence of scenes Terminator 2, showing Connor returning both Kyle Reese and the reprogrammed T-800 cyborg protagonist of the second film, though the scenes were never shot.
The film’s first trailer betrayed the film’s first major twist – which took us through shot-by-shot homages to the first film before it was suddenly revealed that the past isn’t really the past anymore – and the second trailer seems like the whole game away (unless there is another big twist). But despite playing loose with the already tortured terminator timeline, Genius indeed, it looks like it will return to the twin core themes that made the first two films so successful and were missing from the bleak and soulless third and fourth films: family And heap.
“If you like the terminator movies,” Cameron concludes, “you’re going to love this movie.”
Terminator: Genisys premieres in a few weeks on July 1. It does not yet have a formal MPAA rating, with some sources claiming the film will receive a PG-13 stamp and others claiming the film’s violent content will earn an R.