The last three Terminator sequels were so heinous, so egregiously stupid, so brain-bleedingly convoluted that we should probably just dump the whole franchise in a vat of molten metal and call it a day. But still, as bad as those movies were, it’s hard not to get at least a little bit excited about the upcoming Terminator: Dark Fate. It is the first movie since 1991’s T2 to bring back the franchise’s original mastermind James Cameron alongside Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and from the look of the new trailer that dropped this week, it’s everything we could want from a Terminator movie in 2019: Explosions! Sarah Connor as a grizzled badass! Arnold as a Terminator inexplicably named Carl!
The trailer doesn’t seem to give away the film’s major twist, either, which is apparently something we have to worry about after Terminator: Genynynynynys or whatever that one was called. It actually looks… pretty good?
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The film reportedly picks up where T2 left off, completely ignoring the other sequels, but according to James Cameron, those terrible movies actually played a big role in steering Dark Fate in the right direction—because they gave the crew a reminder of what not to do.
“One of the things that seemed obvious from looking at the films that came along later was that we would need to get everything back to the basics and that we would need to avoid the mistakes of making things overly complex and that we needed to avoid stories that jumps around in time and one that goes backward and forward in time,” Cameron told Deadline in a new interview. “Let’s keep it simple in the relative unity of time. With the story, let’s have the whole thing play out in 36 hours or 48 hours. In the first two movies everything plays out in less than two days in each one so there’s energy and momentum.”
It also sounds like this could be the start of a whole new Terminator franchise, too—if all goes well this time around. “We spent several weeks breaking story and figuring out what type of story we wanted to tell so we would have something to pitch Linda [Hamilton],” Cameron said, according to Deadline. “We rolled up our sleeves and started to break out the story and when we got a handle on something we looked at it as a three-film arc, so there is a greater story there to be told. If we get fortunate enough to make some money with Dark Fate we know exactly where we can go with the subsequent films.”
Give the whole interview a read over at Deadline and try to let your broken, embittered heart get excited about the prospect of a new Terminator movie. This is James Cameron, after all—first, everyone thought Titanic was going to be a gigantic flop, and then it became the biggest movie of all time. Then, everyone thought Avatar was going to be a gigantic flop, and then it became the biggest movie of all time. We should learn to trust the guy at this point.
Terminator: Dark Fate is set to hit theaters November 1.
