Now that the Terminator: Judgment Day introduced the T-1000 has been met with poor reviews, a disappointing box office haul, or both.
Things may seem dire for the James Cameron series, but there is another similar franchise that recently saved itself from the scrap heap with a critically acclaimed reboot that redefined the formula of the series. Like the Terminator movies, the first two Predator installments were well-received. Yet also like the Terminator sequels, the subsequent Predator projects all attempted to reboot the series, and all of them failed to impress critics despite (or perhaps because of) their departures from the original movie’s formula.
However, unlike the Terminator series, the Predator movies have been salvaged. Hulu’s Predator prequel Prey is a massive success with viewers and reviewers alike, arguably even more than optimistic forecasts expected. The original, intense, and irably simple Prey took the premise of the titular alien hunting down human victims and set its action in 1700s Comanche territory. The Terminator franchise can’t set its next installment hundreds of years ago quite as easily, but what Terminator 7 can borrow from Prey is the ingenious decision to introduce a new Final Girl for the franchise.
Terminator Needs A New Final Girl
Amber Midthunder’s Naru, like The Terminator’s Sarah Connor, is an unexpected heroine who Prey viewers are worried could die right up until the movie’s ending. For Terminator 7 to successfully reboot the Terminator series, the project needs a new Final Girl whose survival isn’t guaranteed instead of another umpteenth version of Sarah Connor. This would bring stakes back to the action of the Terminator series, something that has been notably absent since the second movie of the franchise. Even though Sarah Connor technically died offscreen between the second and third Terminator movies, she remains an un-killable character whenever she does appear in a new Terminator movie.
Viewers watching both the fifth and sixthTerminator movies could rest comfortably in the certainty that neither movie would kill off the franchise’s most famous character, sapping these sequels of any meaningful tension as a result. This is exactly why Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Dutch didn’t appear in any Predator sequels, since viewers don’t want to watch an indestructible character but conversely don’t want to see their old favorite characters killed off solely for the sake of a mean-spirited surprise. Any sci-fi action sequel that wants to raise the stakes of its plot needs to give viewers a reason to believe that the lead character could end up dead, something that Sarah Connor’s appearances in the franchise fail to achieve. Predator’s prequel Prey pulled this off with Naru, and Terminator 7 could redeem the Terminator film series by borrowing this trick for the next sequel.
