Full disclosure: we were completely sober when we watched Terminator: Salvation.

And yes, it very much is the most relevant summer movie of the year.

Why? The Terminator franchise has a history of being timely, a sort of dark mirror reflection of current society when each film was created. The first film has been described as a punk love story – perhaps the most apt description of the feeling of alienation and disenfranchisement many young people had in the early 1980s. The shadow of some future nuclear conflict wasn’t science fiction as much as it was everyday headlines, and the idea that a relentless killing machine might come back in time and chase one of us down seemed possible if not probable.

It is the same feeling of disenchantment that led to the punk movement to begin with, and it is no mistake that the seminal punk film Repo Man opened a mere five months before The Terminator did – and was set in the same grime-covered Los Angeles that a few years before tore itself apart in some of the worst race riots in American history.

Sarah Connor started the film as a party girl stuck in a dead-end waitress job, who is jostled out of her comfort by a machine intent on killing her and a protector from the future who falls in love with her. In that movie, meaningful love is only possible in fleeting glimpses in odd situations set across a backdrop of sewer tunnels and back alleys filled with the homeless. It’s amusing to see Arnold’s T-800 walk into a gun store and simply order automatic weapons as though he’s picking up some Chicken McNuggets precisely because it wasn’t so far-fetched then. The Terminator caught some of the worst aspects of the Thatcher-Reagan years, especially as it appeared to those caught on the fringes at the time: traditional love and romance was bullshit.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day debuted in a much-different 1991, two years after the Berlin Wall fell and the spectre of global nuclear war faded. If The Terminator was a punk love story, Terminator 2 was a punk family tale: the fringe grew up and got a haircut. Despite being the future leader of the human race, John Connor desperately needs something very basic: a father figure. The T-1000, a liquid metal terminator, hunts John directly now, but the old enemy (Arnold’s T-800) is now his friend and protector – and the father figure he wants. Your enemy is now your friend, and your new enemy can look like anything. Nuclear war is no longer inevitable: you can stop it simply by destroying all the pieces of various terminators and blowing up the building researching them. The original ending, with a black highway at night, is intentionally open with an optimistic voiceover, reflecting for the first time a feeling of hope and empowerment: there’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.

Then came Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, two years after the 9/11 attacks and the War on Terror. The message changed drastically: Judgement Day could never be avoided, only delayed. To make matters worse our old protectors and value systems were worthless in the face of the new enemy. She could morph like the enemy from Terminator 2, but could bring energy weapons with her through time (previous terminators could not) – foiling the ‘airport security’ that at least put the machines on a relatively equal footing with their prey. It wasn’t the bad writing and overblown action sequences that made Terminator 3 suck, it was the times in which it was created. All the things that made the first two great and memorable movies, especially the second, were gone from the third because it 2003 was a time of hopelessness and inevitable destruction again. There was never a chance to make your own fate, and while ‘Judgement Day’ was pushed back it was never cancelled entirely – and we were only kidding ourselves when we thought we’d solved the problems.

Which brings us to why Terminator: Salvation is a great film, or at least the most relevant popcorn flick you’re going to see this summer (seriously, Transformers 2?) Quite simply, because it’s an extremely profound reflection of the state of our world. We’re learning that, like Sam Worthington’s Marcus Wright, our so-called enemies can be our greatest allies. The machines aren’t the clean, laser-firing skull-crushing future robots, but belch diesel exhaust as they pluck people from their hiding places with claws that came from the industrial revolution. Our military leaders may grossly miscalculate their chances of success, and the resistance is something we’re all part of as long as we’re receiving the message.

Something introduced in Terminator 3 and expanded greatly in the criminally-cancelled Sarah Connor Chronicles is periodic changes to the future timeline. While we may still be marching towards Judgement Day, we can have an effect on the future by our actions today – it isn’t simply a matter of hunkering down in a bunker and waiting for the nukes to fly. Salvation presents a changed future, unfamiliar from the first two flims: the optimistic clean-fusion batteries of the 1980s have been replaced with combustion engines and massive industrial complexes, and Los Angeles may still be a boneyard but at least there are plants in the Griffith Observatory. And the Arnold guy? He’s arrived ten years early, so Skynet needs to be fought throughout time because it’s going to continue to fuck around with its future as well.

Most importantly is this key element: Skynet is something that can be defeated again and our fate is back in our hands. And maybe, the John Connor of this timeline will send his friend Kyle back to just the right moment to stop it all from ever happening.

In short, it’s our story playing out on the big screen once again. The question is, what will the next Terminator look like? Maybe a little like the Sarah Connor Chronicles, where the machines try to defeat Skynet themselves by creating a kinder, gentler alternative. The war with the machines is really nothing more than a metaphor for wrestling with our own human nature. Arnold was wrong: it’s not in our nature to destroy ourselves, it’s just a habit we’ve picked up. Terminator Salvation achieved the highest honour for a summer action flick by being very relevant to our own lives, because for the first time in quite a while we – all of us – are once again feel empowered to make our own fate.

[story by Jason Mical]

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