If there’s one thing that separates the first two installments in James Cameron’s Terminator from the rest of the sequels, it’s the fact that Terminator 1 and 2 had an R-rating. And according to Arnold Schwarzenegger, that’s what makes the originals significantly superior to the other parts of the franchise.
Recently, Paramount released a new featurette from the upcoming Terminator: Dark Fate, where Arnold makes a return to the series along with Linda Hamilton and Edward Furlong. The footage offered up a glimpse at a world that’s descended into chaos as a full-fledged war has apparently broken out between humans and machines.
During an AMA on Reddit, the Terminator team took the time to answer fan questions and drop a possible spoiler or two, and when someone asked Schwarzenegger about the new movie’s rating, he got a very detailed and emphatic response from the actor who has, more than anyone else, become the face of the series:
“I am so delighted. I was sick and tired with the last time, when the studio decided to make it a PG-13 rating just because they thought there more dollars in there. I said, ‘Guys you’re so stupid…this is a story that is written and a franchise that is done and written for an R-rating and not Terminator the babysitter type of thing.
“That’s not Terminator, it’s cheating it’s greedy and trying to make more money. You have to be organic about this stuff. This is going to be an R-rated movie. I wouldn’t be sitting here today if it weren’t.
“I was so angry about them trying to cut out the blood and gore. In this movie, we have the gore we have the blood – I’m not even going to talk about what I do in this movie – Gabriel literally cuts people to shreds. There’s blood, there’s gore, there’s guts, you can see the heart being ripped out.”
And there you have it, straight from the T-800 itself, or should we say, Carl. Terminator: Dark Fate is going to embrace the violence and gore that the PG-13 sequels shied away from. That’s good to hear, too, as most fans will agree that the bloody violence of the first two Terminator flicks is what really helped sell the idea of a cataclysmic war in which humanity was in grave danger of being wiped out by future machines that felt no compassion or mercy for the enemy.
Also during the AMA, Gabriel Luna spoke about his Terminator, the antagonist of the new film. The design for this new cyborg seems quite similar to that of the Terminator from Rise of the Machines, which introduced viewers to Kristanna Loken’s female version of the killer machine. What sets Luna’s design apart, however, as he confirmed in the AMA, is that his can separate its endoskeleton from the rest of its body, allowing for two versions of the same Terminator to attack a target. Excited yet?
