5 Reasons Why They’ve Never Recaptured The Magic Of Terminator

Just because they are emotionless robots, doesn't mean they can't be characters in their own right. Case in point; T-800s now-taken-for-granted ‘I'll be back’ line (not to mention his emotional baby-face development in T2) and T-1000’s sarcastic disapproving wave of the finger. Note also his brief frown at mercury shopping-mall mannequin, near the beginning of Terminator 2. These small simple touches gave untold depth to these supposedly heartless baddies.

But this was lost in the later incarnations of Skynet super villains, such as the overindulged and ultimately boring T-X from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines or the short-lived T-1000 from Terminator: Genisys. On the flip-side, personality in machines was taken to the philosophical rear-end extreme, as witnessed in the 'Genisys’ half-nano-borg John Connor and The SC Chronicles profoundly daft urinal-impersonating T-1001 played by Garbage front-woman Shirley Manson.

In the case of Robert Patrick's T-1000, from T2: Judgment Day, Cameron instructed the actor to think of his cold-hearted killer as less of a machine and more of an animal on the hunt, literally citing The Predator movie as one vital piece of source material.

This is why the T-1000 spends most of the film pacing around with a reptilian glare, and moving in the manner of a calculating feline ready to pounce on a defenseless John Connor mouse. All of these nuances made for an engaging and stark contrast to Schwarzenegger's All-Austrian-beef T-800 and made an evil mercury killing machine as scary as any monstrous creature from space.