With Arnold Schwarzenegger reprising one of his most iconic roles in Terminator: Dark Fate, fans of the franchise are in for a treat. It’s not every day that the stars of genre-defining films get together to do it all over again in a new entry decades later, but this is Terminator we’re talking about–there’s time travel, alternate futures, genocidal computers, and killer robots. Anything can happen.
That said, Schwarzenegger’s return to the series does raise one nagging question: Why would a Terminator age? In hunting for an answer, we chatted with Terminator creator and Dark Fate producer and co-writer James Cameron, and it turns out the answer was under our noses all along–or at least, under someone’s nose.
“Look, it’s all in the first film,” Cameron told journalists in Los Angeles, video-chatting in from the set of his Avatar sequels in New Zealand. “Sweat, bad breath, everything–he’s a cyborg. The ‘org’ part is ‘organic.’ There’s flesh over the outside.”
“The bigger question is how something that’s got some kind of synthetic material that’s not flesh can come through the time field, but that’s another geek-out story for another time,” Cameron added as an aside.
“He’s organic on the outside,” the filmmaker continued. “He’s got to eat to support the organic part of his body. It might only be 30% of him by weight, but he definitely has human flesh. The science behind that is complete bulls***, but it’s a cool idea, right?”
So what about that “under our noses” joke? Well, Cameron pointed out that in the original Terminator, there’s a scene in which someone comments on the T-800’s major stank. “In the first movie, he’s actually got sort of gangrene and his wounds are kind of rotting by the end of the film,” Cameron explained. “When the guy pounds on the door and says, ‘Hey buddy, you got a dead cat in there?’ It’s like, he’s rotting. His human flesh is dying before it all gets burned off. All biological systems are subject to age unless you were to specifically genetically tinker that out, which obviously they didn’t do. So his outer form ages.”
In T2, the T-800 says his metal endoskeleton can run for 120 years, even after its semi-organic outer layer has rotted and sloughed off. And Dark Fate shows that that process just happens to look exactly like normal human aging. “The flesh will die and fall off eventually, and then he’ll just be the endoskeleton walking around,” Cameron said. “A little harder to blend in at that point.”
So the next time we see a T-800 in a Terminator movie, will it be a shiny CG endoskeleton walking around? That’s a possible route they could take should Dark Fate prove to be Schwarzenegger’s final appearance in the franchise–but Cameron also said to not rule out the possibility that the Governator might be back yet again after this.
“It’s an interesting point. I mean, I think that you could make a strong case that there was probably a rack of Arnold-based T-800s up in the Skynet version of the future, and some or all of them were dispersed through time to targeted places,” he teased. “I wouldn’t rule out ever seeing Arnold again in a Terminator movie. Look, if we make a s*** ton of money with this film and the cards say that they like Arnold, I think Arnold can come back. I’m a writer. I can think of scenarios. We don’t have a plan for that right now, let me put it that way. I think what we’re seeing is that there’s a lot of goodwill for that character in the audience.”
Terminator: Dark Fate hits theaters Friday, November 1. In the meantime, early reactions so far are positive, and James Cameron has revealed that he’s already planned out two Dark Fate sequels.