Terminator Salvation

The hero of Terminator has always been (and in my mind always will be) Sarah Connor.

At its core, the Terminator franchise is all about Sarah Connor’s journey from frightened waitress to defender of humanity. Played flawlessly by Linda Hamilton in Terminator 1 and 2 (and quite admirably by Lena Heady in the TV series), Sarah Connor is the definitive transgressive female action hero. More so than Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, more so than Angleina Jolie in Tomb Raider, even more so than Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, Hamilton’s Sarah Connor broke all the rules about what women could and couldn’t do in action movies.

See, in Terminator 1, there’s nothing all that remarkable about Hamilton’s character. She wakes up, finds out that she’s destined to give birth to the messiah (forgive the intentional use of Biblical imagery), and is told that she needs to survive long enough to ensure his existence. And then from that point on, Kyle Reese and the Terminator wage war over her magic uterus. In flim-studenty terms, Connor plays the slasher-slick role often referred to as “the last girl.” She gets chased around by monsters, is threatened at every turn, watches every one of her friends get gunned down, and then manages to outsmart the bad guy at the very last second. There’s nothing revolutionary here. It’s also hard to ignore the fact that the premise behind Terminator 1 is that the one thing Sarah Connor is good for is making babies. You don’t need a doctorate in gender studies to see the problems there…

But come Terminator 2, Sarah Connor turns the game around and starts playing by her own rules. She says screw it to all this talk of destiny and imminent destruction and decides to make her own future. And even though she’s already given birth to John (which, according to Kyle Reese in Terminator 1, is all she’s supposed to do), she takes the battle to Skynet herself and starts blowing stuff up left, right and centre, learns how to use all sorts of machine guns, and beats the heck out of anyone who stands in her way. She even gets to utter a pretty cool one-liner at the end of the first movie. This is the character that wrestles with existential issues of free will and destiny. This is the character who holds vendettas and exacts revenge. This is the character who is, plain and simple, really freaking cool.

But here’s the kicker: despite being a super-badass warrior in T2, Sarah Connor still gets to be a mom. And that’s not something you see every day.

In most action flicks, women can either be fighters or mothers, but you can’t have it both ways. In other words, if a girl wants to be an action hero, she has to act like a dude. She has to drink whiskey and curse like a sailor and play with guns (and I’ll spare you the Freudian associations that several film theorists have made), but as soon as you’re a mommy, you’re out of the game. Take Kill Bill, for example: the entire point of the movie is that the Bride has to hang up her swords as soon as she has a daughter. Or take any cop show you’ve ever seen. The guy cops can have any number of kids, but the gal cops are always unmarried with no children.

But Terminator doesn’t play by this rule. In T2, Sarah Connor leads the war against the machines (in fact, she’s the driving force behind the assault) and at the same time raises young John. To sum it up, take these two separate lines of dialogue, both spoken by Sarah Connor in T2:

“Men like you thought it up. You think you’re so creative. You don’t know what it’s like to really create something; to create a life; to feel it growing inside you”

[After breaking Silberman’s arm]
“There’s 215 bones in the human body. That’s one.”

How often does any character, male or female, get to preach about human life and loving their kids, but also get to say something so unbelievably cool in the middle of a fight? It just doesn’t happen. I’m hard-pressed to think of even one other female film character that’s such a diehard superhero, but is also prominently figured as a parent.

And so, imagine my disappointment when in Terminator 3 it was casually announced that Sarah Connor had died of cancer and that was that. Here was one of the coolest, most ground-breaking characters of the past thirty years, and she didn’t even get the dignity of dying on screen. Not cool, man. Not cool.

But all is not lost!!

Hamilton will be returning as Sarah Connor in Terminator Salvation in a voice-over role as the grown-up John Connor listens to the tapes she’s left him. Johnny-boy will continue to learn from Sarah’s teachings as he struggles to defeat the Connor family nemesis Skynet.

Usually I cringe when filmmakers shoehorn dead characters into a sequel, but I’m more than willing to make an exception here. Lind Hamilton is the heart and soul of Terminator, and Salvation just wouldn’t feel like a worthy successor without her.

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