Today's News: Schwarzenegger will be back... again. And again.

I had this to report on Schwarzenegger's busy upcoming schedule on MovieScene:

http://www.moviescene.nl/p/147930/schwarzenegger_terug_voor_expendables_3_en_terminator_5

Now I'm not afraid to say I like Schwarzenegger and his action movies. Some of them I consider to be among the finest action flicks in existence (first and foremost Terminator 2: Judgment Day). And judging from his performance in the recent Expendables 2 and The Last Stand, he can still pull off solid action scenes without making you stop and think 'this guy is too old to be doing this'. In fact, you don't have to think about it, since his scripts are doing that for you in many a moment of good-humoured, tongue-in-cheek hilarity. However, nobody can continue doing this forever without the risk of losing credibility. Especially a guy who was once one of the top-grossing action stars who now seems to do little else than recycle past glories. Schwarzenegger appears to be going that way, considering all the sequels he has in store for us. The Expendables 3 I'm least worried about, since that franchise is basically built around action movie veterans getting together to blow shit up in acknowledgment of a long career of doing just that, so Schwarzenegger fits in perfectly with the rest of them. He did it to great comedic effect in the second Expendables movie, after teasing us with a glorified cameo appearance in its predecessor. The Expendables 3 can merrily have him continue down that path of rampant death and destruction with the other warmongering musclemen that have done the same for many many years. After all, why bother spending old age sitting at home playing Scrabble when you can go out and engage in massive shootouts, maiming people and blowing up tanks and helicopters?

Terminator 5 is a more delicate matter in my mind. After all, the various powers-that-be (or in most cases, have been, considering the rights to the franchise have passed through many production companies' clutches up till this point) have carefully and increasingly moved away from Schwarzenegger's involvement in this cyborg-infested universe. Terminator Salvation briefly included a cameo of the Austrian Oak's digitalized head - the Governator himself only had to give his permission for the use of his facial features, instead of actually doing any physical stuff  - but none of the other Terminators in that film had much to do with Schwarzenegger. Furthermore, the TV-series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles ignored Schwarzenegger entirely, and revealed that in the story of this world, anyone's face and body can be applied over a metal endoskeleton for Skynet's nefarious genocidal purposes. Sure, there were quite a few muscular dudes straight out of the gym who could be viewed as obvious stand-ins for that iconic but inaffordable (and unavailable) ultimate Terminator, but there were also quite a number of people who played similar cyborgs, and one of them - Summer Glau, naturally! - pulled off a totally un-Schwarzeneggerish killing machine with more complexity and emotional subtlety than we ever witnessed in any of the actual films, without losing anything when taking up arms and brutally shooting people up. Something Glau managed to do compellingly for 31 episodes (that show should have run longer, especially considering the major cliffhanger that now ends the show and leaves us in the dark). Plus, she looked better in her undies than Schwarzenegger did in his bare butt.

So basically, we started getting used to the idea of a Schwarzenegger-less Terminator universe, a world where Ahnuld is not actually needed to make for interesting 'man vs. machine' drama and visually appealing future battles. The Terminator franchise has proven to do just fine on its own without repeatedly reintroducing the daddy of all Terminators, and thus having the original Terminator return might hurt that notion. I for one have little interest in seeing more of Arnold in T5, since T3 already felt like an uninspired rehash of T2, were it not for its surprisingly dark ending. If Terminator 5 follows Terminator Salvation, which seems likely - though we should never take this for granted, considering the constant messing with the timeline that, for one thing, allowed TSCC to follow T2 while retconning T3 and TS completely - it would be the first time we saw Schwarzenegger's T-800 in a future setting (not counting the T2 3D theme park ride). What to do with that notion? Either he's a real Skynet controlled Terminator and he's out to kill people (like in T1), or he's a reprogrammed Terminator and fights for the human resistance, as was the case in T2 and T3. He might be a bit of a 'grey zone' killing machine, like Marcus (Sam Worthington) in TS, a cyborg whose loyalty is undecided, but that too has already been done in both TS and TSCC. Plot wise I can't think of much scenarios that would help reinvigorate the franchise with Schwarzenegger's presence, but then I'm no producer or screen writer, so what do I know?

And then of course Schwarzie is slated to do the very late sequel to Twins (1988!), called Triplets: a project I'm sure few people really are actively interested in watching after having to wait no less than twenty-six years for it! And to top it all off, he's scheduled to do another Conan the Barbarian flick (which should have been done in the Eighties as was promised, but sadly that proposed third installment called Conan the Conqueror got scrapped and we got that shitty Red Sonja movie instead). This despite that fact Conan has already been rebooted only a few years ago, starring Khal Drogo Jason Momoa, but that film flopped somethin' fierce, so it comes as no surprise that the studio would be eager to make us forget all about it. Fortunately there's still a few original projects in Arnold's pipeline, but for the most part he seems adamant to return to past success. And if he continues to go the tongue-in-cheek way for all of those projects, like he has done so far, his old age could soon prove very repetitive for his audience. Like a granddaddy with memory problems who continues to tell his grandchildren the same jokes over and over again. That would be a sad final phase of Schwarzenegger's otherwise illustrious career...