Arnold Too Old To Play The Terminator Again? Maybe Not…

It’s been reported that Schwarzenegger will not only return in Terminator 5 (codenamed Terminator: Genesis), but he’d also return as a Terminator.  If that’s true… it almost sounds cringe worthy on the face of things.  Arnold is 66 years old and to simply step in front of the camera with some makeup and a leather biker outfit just would not work.  It wouldn’t.  Not least because his title character, the T-800, comes off an assembly line.  That means they should all look identical, i.e. a large muscular man in his physical prime.  Even the hair should be similar (‘flock of seagulls’), the only reason the T-800 in Terminator 2 had a different haircut was because it was a unit captured by Connor that had its hair cut – to get at it’s CPU and give him a 90’s do, see.  Some people say, well, maybe there are older T-800’s.  Impossible.  If the T-800 entered service in the late 2020’s, and the war is over by 2030, then there is no time frame for it to visibly age by 25 years.

Anyway, while Arnold is too old to just don the shades, there is a way to make it work.  I hate to say it would involve CGI, rather, it would involve Jim Cameron technology.  A while back Cameron, who ironically directed the only two Terminator movies that matter, pitched the idea of bringing Dirty Harry back to life using said ‘Avatar Technology’: “How about another Dirty Harry movie where Clint looks the way he looked in 1975?”.  Cameron says that it’s possible.  If it was done right, and it certainly wasn’t done right in Terminator: Salvation, it could work.

Since there’s also speculation that the next movie might ignore the two poor sequels, it would be pretty fucking cool to not only bring back Arnold Schwarzenegger but also Robert Patrick.  Patrick doesn’t exactly look like a spring chicken himself these days either, you know.  In that way, they could pull a ‘prequel’ that is set in the future… the last battle to send a T-800 back after the T-1000.  This would also explain how the T-1000 is visibly aware of who the T-800 is when prompted (‘big guy on a bike’), early in Terminator 2 despite having not yet encountered Arnie in that movie.  Can you imagine how fucking awesome it would be to see Uncle Bob on screen again, not a day older than he appeared in 1991?  Even better, alongside a young Robert Patrick?

Alas, all of this is just fantasy.  Let’s face it, expect the worst, it’s coming.