The AI future is too scary even for James Cameron. Where can the Terminator franchise go from here? | Movies

James Cameron has a confession: he can’t write Terminator 7. And it’s not as a result of Hollywood gained’t let him, as he’s too busy making the brand new Avatar – it’s as a result of actuality retains nicking his plotlines. “I’m at a degree proper now the place I’ve a tough time writing science-fiction,” Cameron advised CNN this week. “I’m tasked with writing a brand new Terminator story [but] I don’t know what to say that gained’t be overtaken by actual occasions. We live in a science-fiction age proper now.”It’s an comprehensible quandary for the veteran film-maker. Again in 1984, when the primary Terminator film got here out, there was real shock worth within the thought of a killer robotic travelling via time from a future during which the wretched dregs of humanity survive in a chrome-plated hellscape dominated by their robotic overlords. Nowadays, the one far-fetched a part of the film is the bit the place the T-800 turns up alone and utterly bare, versus arriving flanked by a swarm of AI-guided drones.We might not have achieved time journey simply but, however we do have synthetic intelligences able to quietly instructing themselves sarcasm, city-wide facial recognition, and robotic studying programs deciding who lives and dies. That’s the center of Cameron’s downside: in 1984, Skynet was a terrifying piece of speculative fiction. In 2025, it’s principally LinkedIn with nukes. The creeping dread of AI isn’t a future shock any extra; it’s the information cycle. From AI-powered adware in our pockets to deepfake scams and voice-mimicking chatbots, the Terminator franchise not has the monopoly on making you wish to hurl your hi-tech private possessions into the ocean.Cameron appears to be caught between a rock and a tough place right here, particularly as this grand previous sci-fi saga hasn’t precisely been blowing anybody’s CPU in properly … a long time. Terminator: Darkish Destiny, which the saga’s creator at the very least had a primary hand in creating, struggled on the 2019 field workplace regardless of the return of Linda Hamilton and a storyline that attempted to combine the franchise’s basic “unstoppable hunter” system with a reunion tour for its surviving stars. Earlier than that, we now have to go all the way in which again to 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day to discover a movie that audiences actually warmed to. The wilderness years between these two films have been plagued by sequels that have been too bleak, or too daft.Basic system … Linda Hamilton in 2019’s Terminator: Darkish Destiny. {Photograph}: Kerry Brown/twentieth Century Fox/Paramount Photos/AllstarWhat Cameron must be in search of is an entire system reboot to reinvigorate the saga in the way in which Prey introduced followers again to Predator and Alien: Romulus restored curiosity in slimy Xenomorphs. All proof means that the 70-year-old film-maker is way extra within the present challenges surrounding AI, superintelligences and humankind’s fixed efforts to destroy itself, which doesn’t precisely lend itself to the type of back-to-basics, relentless-monsters-hunt-a-few-unlucky-humans-for-two-hours strategy that has labored elsewhere. The problem right here appears to be to fuse Terminator’s core DNA – unstoppable cyborgs, explosive chase sequences, and Sarah Connor-level defiance – with the often reasonably extra prosaic but equally scary existential anxieties of Twenty first-century AI doom-mongering.So we might get Terminator 7: Kill Checklist, during which a single, battered freedom fighter is hunted throughout a decimated metropolis by a T-800 working a predictive policing algorithm that is aware of her subsequent transfer earlier than she does. Or T7: Singularity’s Mother, during which a lone Sarah Connor-type should shield a teenage coder whose chatbot will sooner or later evolve into Skynet. Or Terminator 7: Phrases and Circumstances, during which humanity’s downfall comes not from nuclear warfare however from everybody absent-mindedly agreeing to Skynet’s new privateness coverage, triggering a military of leather-clad enforcers to gather on the effective print.Or maybe the longer term simply appears terrifying sufficient with out Cameron getting concerned – which, reasonably worryingly for the way forward for the franchise, appears to be the director’s important level. Then once more, if anybody could make the apocalypse really feel even worse than it already does, it’s the person who beforehand satisfied us that autonomous drones would hunt people from the sky and that machines would study to assume and kill for themselves. We should always believe he can do it once more.