By Shanee Edwards
Terminator Genisys isn't so much a sequel or reinvention of the Terminator franchise that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a household name, but more of an alternate timeline within the Terminator universe. This latest installment gives us a deeper exploration of the story and its female warrior protagonist, Sarah Conner.
Of course any writers taking on such a popular franchise three decades after it began would no doubt be intimidated. But writing partners Laeta Kalogridis (Shutter Island) and Patrick Lussier approached the task with excitement. They started the process with one specific idea they felt they had to be included in the script: The old Terminator from 1984 battling the later one from 2017.
“There was just something about Arnold [Schwarzenegger], the actor, the iconic action hero from the ’80s and from the ’90s and beyond. The idea of him older fighting his younger self and -- how many of us would like to knock sense into who we were at a younger time – and I’m not saying that’s what he wanted to do, but the idea of fighting who we were, something about that spoke in a way that went beyond the story. It seemed like something everyone could relate to,” said Lussier.
On film, the scene is extraordinary and apparently took an entire year to create using digital special effects. This scene alone is worth the ticket price. But luckily, Genisys has even more additions to make us love it, particularly Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones), as Sarah Connor. She’s tough as nails, rebellious but still grounded, similar to Linda Hamilton’s performance in the first two films, only slightly more vulnerable.
In Genisys, the Terminator has been guarding Sarah since she was nine years old, protecting her after the parents were killed. The time they’ve spent together has defined their relationship in a way that feels different than in the other films. Sarah even refers to the Terminator as “Pops.” We asked the writers if the nickname was an attempt to humanize the machine, but the idea came from another place entirely.
“It actually started as a thought exercise of ‘what would you do?’ said Kalogridis. “Because a lot of it comes out of Sarah’s personality – this [having a Terminator protect you] is an embarrassing thing when you’re a teenager. When you’re a child, it’s a little bit comforting, but obviously she’s been completely terrorized by the death of her parents. You need to call him something that will keep attention off of you. You need to call him something that, though he does not appear to be qualified to be caring for a young child, he actually is in some way related to you. That’s where it came from – her desire to not be questioned about why she was with this big, silent, weird guy.”
Lussier also weighed in. “The choice of ‘Pops’ specifically came from the idea of what was in pop culture at the time. It was all those sort of goofy ’70s sitcoms and family shows and could there have been some kind of Happy Days rip off with someone called Pops. Certainly and she would probably have watched that.”
When we asked what else was new about this updated version of Sarah Conner, something that perhaps she didn’t have in the previous films, Kalogridis said, “That’s funny, because I would never say, ‘didn’t have.’”
We asked her to explain. “There’s only so many hours that you can explore that character in the first two movies, so what can we explore further that, if there had been more time, could have been done or might have been done? Part of what was so interesting was that in the first movie, Sarah was an innocent. The Sarah in the second movie, although we don’t really think about it as much now, she’s in her 30s and has had a child, so her orientation to the world is really different. Her life was fairly normal. So this was a person [Sarah in Genisys] who didn’t get to have any normal life from the time she was nine years old on and has never had a significant relationship with another human being, unlike Sarah Conner in the second movie, who has raised a son to the age of 10 or 12.
“So, to me, it’s not so much about how you would update her, because I would actually say the female warrior character is pretty archetypal and timeless. I don’t think you’re updating as much as you are saying okay here’s that character – what is she like after she knows what is coming but before she is a mother. That space in between those two places and in many ways, we wanted her to be a rebellious teenager. That she would say, ‘I’m not going to fall in love with that dude [Kyle Reese, played by Jai Courtney] because you tell me I have to.’ It comes down to: what is she protecting?” said Kalogridis.
A lot of sci-fi movies use the trope of time travel to tell a multilayered story, but putting characters into multiple timelines seems terribly difficult to do as a storyteller. We asked the writers how they kept track of which character was in what year.
“White boards with diagrams, pictures and scribbles. It’s craziness!’ said Lussier.
Kalogridis added, “And even then you know there are going to be paradoxes that aren’t going to be resolved. You accept that there are plot holes and that’s just it. You have to decide which ones you can live with and which ones you can’t. That decision is hopefully based on how the characters carry on through the story and what the audience cares about and what they don’t.”
So if events in the film don’t make complete logical sense, blame it on the unresolvable paradoxes of time travel, not the writers!
We asked if Kalogridis and Lussier had any advice for writers trying to break into the science fiction genre.
Kalogridis said, “Purely practical advice? You’re probably going to have your best luck breaking in through television, unless you happen to be a director as well and even then it’s going to be very hard. New sci-fi tends to break out even more on TV now.”
Lussier gave his perspective, saying, “Or you write Under the Skin or something that’s lower budget, something that’s completely out of the norm.”
“Or you do Ex Machina,” said Kalogridis.
“Or The Machine,’ said Lussier, “You approach it with, okay I have limited resources. Write for the resources you think will get the movie made. So often people think, ‘I’m going to write this new thing and it’s going to have $200-million budget’ and it’s so expensive that you can’t get it made. Start with something that could be made for $10 to $15 [million], because getting something made is the key to getting something bigger made. Start small, work big.”
Terminator Genisys was written using Final Draft.