In August, director James Cameron he was awarded Legends status by Disney with the likes of Angela Bassett, Harrison Ford and composer John Williams. Even though he just turned 70, Cameron, the Oscar-winning film director and technological pioneer, has no intention of slowing down.
In a wide-ranging interview, he discusses a new Terminator project and the threat of artificial intelligence – but admits that writing science fiction is getting harder in the 21st century.
October will mark the 40th anniversary of the original “The Terminator,” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a cybernetic assassin sent back in time from 2029 to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, whose unborn son will one day save mankind from being destroyed by Skynet, a hostile artificial intelligence.
And while he thinks the first movie in the long-running franchise is qualitatively “pretty obsolete,” he also believes it was “a bit prescient on certain things, like the emergence of AI, the potential existential threat of AI, which is transforming our world before our eyes.”
But as science continues to evolve in our contemporary technological society, Cameron laments it harder to write science fiction.
“I’m working through some of the themes that I want to bring into a new Terminator film or possibly even a kind of a reboot of a larger story framework and it’s difficult right now because I want to let the smoke clear on the whole thing.”
Because science continues to evolve, however, the “smoke” will never clear. And while technology develops at a greater pace than it did 40 years ago, it has always been the case that science progresses. It seems that Cameron’s actual concern is that he may be hampered from creating science fiction that will remain prescient from longer than the immediate future. But is that necessary for a good science fiction film?
The genre of science fiction is an apparently elusive one. A precise definition of which stories comprise these stories has been debated for decades among authors and filmmakers. The types of films Cameron has made, however, seem to fall within the explanation provided by Wikipedia.
Science fiction is a genre of speculative fiction, which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology.
More than that, however, it seems key to the best science fiction films is that the “imaginative or futuristic concept” is more than just a MacGuffin. According to Psychology Today, “What the great works of sci-fi are really good at is helping people grapple with the concerns, conflicts, and anxieties of the day through the comfortable distance of a parable.” As with Cameron’s Skynet, the technology introduced in a sci-fi film must be essential to the fear explored within the film.
Both Cameron’s “Aliens” and “The Terminator,” two iconic sci-fi films of the 1980s, both examine the loss of self at the hands of a futuristic creation. Just as in the original “Alien” film directed by Ridley Scott, vulnerable humans become hosts for alien offspring. In “The Terminator” franchise, artificial intelligence threatens all of humanity, while one particularly focused cyborg threatens to kill one particular human.
That said, it seems the clever author or filmmaker may always find inventive ways to use future technological or otherworldly creations to highlight our fears. It may be that artists may need to be more creative in their science based concepts or be satisfied telling exciting stories that may be obsolete (from a technological standpoint) in the near future.
Screenrant: “Terminator 1 is Pretty Obsolete”
