10 Ways to Make an Awesome Terminator Sequel

By Daniel Bowen / November 8, 2012

The first Terminator movie is probably my favorite movie of all time. Sure, it isn't overally smart or mature or complex, but it has everything a great movie- particularly a great blockbuster movie should have. Firstly, it has a beautifully constructed and believable romance story which is a miracle considering the film only takes place over a couple of days yet we truly believe the main protagonists Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese are in love. Secondly, it has one of the most sympathetic protagonists on film in the form of Sarah Connor, and her transition from everyday waitress to butt-kicking badass is the best cinema has ever seen. And last but not least, as much as I personally dislike the guy, it has the greatest and most threatening movie villain in cinema history (until maybe Terminator 2).

Although many fans often get angry when they hear about reboots or sequels this many years later (just look at the negative response Star Wars Episode VII is getting) I for one miss the Terminator franchise and at this point couldn't care less if they reboot the thing or come out with the much rumored Terminator 5... you know, as long as they are good. As bad as the Star Wars prequels were (and they weren't all that terrible), they didn't have any effect in ruining the greatness of the originals- if anything, in comparison, they made those films even better.

I am perhaps one of a few people who didn't hate Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines or Terminator: Salvation... but those films were unarguably and quite considerably also the worst in the franchise. There were many, many reasons for this, and this following article explores what made the first two movies so great, what made the next two movies somewhat lackluster, and from this, 10 ways any future production company who may buy the rights to the franchise, and any writer and director should remember when making Terminator 5.

10. Don't Forget Time Travel

Terminator: Salvation wasn't quite Terminator because it missed out one of, in not THE most important element and selling point from the original movies... Time Travel. People love their Time Travel movies (Back to the Future, Looper, The Time Machine) and have done for years, so to not include any element of Time Travel in a film in the Terminator franchise is a massive mistake.

Although Terminator 5 should be heavily involved in exploring the war with the machines in the future (or now, our present), we still expect to see this idea explored somewhere in a sequel. My suggestion would be to split the narrative somewhat, with half of the film focused on John Conner, and half the film focused on a battle for survival in the past, with these stories intertwining somehow... but more on this later.

This idea of a time machine which enables people and machines in the future to send back warriors to protect or cause havoc in the past is ingrained in the Terminator franchise, and now that the series has stepped into this future we expect to see what these machines look like, how they were made, why they were made, and why they had to be destroyed. There is a lot of fun filmmakers can have with this idea of time travel (some ideas I will explore later) so to not include any element of this in Salvation was the biggest mistake of the film, and perhaps went someway into killing this franchise.