See the Terminator say ‘Hasta la vista’ in 3-D
Arnold’s ‘good’ cyborg goes forward in time and back to the big screen
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s infamous murderous cyborg made a shocking transformation in his second screen appearance.
In 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the Terminator turned good.
Schwarzenegger shot into the Hollywood stratosphere after 1984’s The Terminator, in which he starred as the cold-blooded assassin from the future. The character’s rewiring was so dramatic, even Schwarzenegger had to be convinced it wasn’t insanity.
“Arnold hated the idea. He tried to talk me out of it,” director James Cameron recalls of the action classic, which has been converted to 3-D for a one-week re-release in AMC theaters nationwide starting Friday. “He said: ‘Jim, I’m the Terminator. I kick in the door and shoot everybody. It’s what I do. It’s what everybody wants to see me do. Don’t fix something that’s not broken.’
“And I said: ‘Yeah, that’s why people won’t see this coming. This is going to work.’ He eventually said, ‘All right, I trust you.’ ”
Arnold’s trust was well-placed: Terminator 2 became the highestgrossing film of 1991 (and of Schwarzenegger’s career) and sits at No. 77 on the American Film Institute’s list of top thrillers.
It was hard not to fall for Schwarzenegger as the emotional- ly clumsy cyborg who bonds with 10-year-old John Connor (Edward Furlong), the future rebel leader whose very existence the Terminator had tried to wipe out.
Sent back in time to protect John and his mother, Sarah (Linda Hamilton), the machine uttered classic Terminator lines, in Schwarzenegger’s thick Austrian accent, like “Hasta la vista, baby.”
“I was searching for that signature line, the equivalent of ‘I’ll be back’ from (the first) Terminator,” Cameron says. “I was watching MTV and the Tone Loc Wild Thing video came on. He sings, ‘Hasta la vista, baby.’ I thought, ‘That works.’ ”
Audiences were captivated by the movie’s cutting-edge special effects and touched by the emotion and pathos. (Spoiler alert, 26 years after the fact: The Terminator is lowered into molten steel to destroy his lethal technology.) The cyborg never sheds a tear, but he could have.
The success of Terminator 2 kicked the franchise fully into gear, with three additional films and a TV series. Schwarzenegger returned for a fifth film installment, 2015’s Terminator Genisys, to again protect Sarah Connor (now played by Emilia Clarke).
Though the Genisys reboot flopped critically and at the box office, the director, who hasn’t been involved since T2, is in talks to “reinvent a franchise that’s sort of run its course.”
Schwarzenegger would likely figure into any sequels, Cameron says. But the actor, 70, would pass the torch to new Terminators.
“We have to create something new and fresh that stands on its own,” Cameron says. “I would like to think that Arnold would be a part of it.”
The director has long forgiven Schwarzenegger’s initial doubts.
“He’s a smart man. We live in a Hollywood world with many unpredictable variables and an audience that’s fickle. So you try to play by a certain logical set of rules,” Cameron says.
“But sometimes you just have to throw that logic out.”