As far as I’m concerned, James Cameron’s 1991 Terminator 2: Judgment Day is just about the perfect action blockbuster. Its combination of sci-fi philosophizing, kick-ass action, well-developed characters and humorous catch-phrasery has yet to be beat, so any attempt to return to the well is suspicious at best.
That doesn’t stop producers from trying, though: Following 2003’s surprisingly entertaining (if lightweight) Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines comes Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Fox, Mondays, 9 p.m.; premieres January 13 at 8 p.m.), a TV series that takes place following the events of T2. Chronicles basically ignores the continuity established by T3 and heads off in its own direction, picking up two years after the events of T2, with Sarah (Lena Headey, replacing Linda Hamilton) and her son, fated savior of mankind John Connor (Thomas Dekker, taking over from T2’s Edward Furlong and T3’s Nick Stahl) on the run from the FBI.
Sarah and John think they’ve averted the coming apocalypse, in which a sentient computer called Skynet will wipe out most of humanity, but of course they’re wrong. Judgment Day has merely been moved forward from August 29, 1997, to 2011, as the Connors learn when a new Terminator shows up from the future to kill John. Luckily, as before, another Terminator has come back to the past to protect him; in this case, it’s one that looks like a pretty teenage girl and first shows up undercover with the tongue-in-cheek name Cameron.
As played by Summer Glau of the cult sci-fi series Firefly, Cameron is by far the best thing about the show, an efficient killing (or mostly wounding, given that this is network TV) machine who is also, like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Robert Patrick in the movies, quick with a deadpan one-liner. Series creator Josh Friedman goes out of his way to re-create the tone of the first two films, frequently referencing continuity points and reusing characters (all played by different actors, of course). And he contributes nicely to the robots-who-don’t-understand-human-emotions canon of dry jokes (“In the future, you have many friends,” Cameron assures the whiny teen John, who’s sick of moving every time killer cyborgs from the future come after him).
Headey ends up with the show’s most thankless part, trying to live up to Hamilton’s iconic portrayal of Sarah, and although she does her best she still falls short.
Headey’s Sarah is too mopey, too scolding, and not quite believable as the inspiration for the greatest warrior humanity has ever known. And Dekker isn’t up to portraying that warrior, either, but at least he creates a consistency with Furlong’s equally snotty performance in T2. Stahl’s more focused, reflective John in T3 was probably the character’s finest moment, although the rumored casting of Christian Bale in T4 could top it.
The biggest problem with Chronicles is the way that it twists and contorts the Terminator mythology to shape it into something that might sustain a long-term TV series. There are time-travel paradoxes galore and tons of convenient coincidences, which can be excused in a feature film or two but become increasingly hard to swallow on TV week after week. Instead of a single, implacable cyborg villain, the show has a rotating cast of evil Terminators who are accorded less importance than the FBI agent chasing after the Connors. Obviously a TV show doesn’t have the budget for movie-quality action and can’t depict R-rated violence, but Chronicles sometimes feels disappointingly low-rent, and it’s hard to see how it can continue indefinitely without rendering Cameron’s powerful original story muddy and moot. For now, at least, it’s respectful enough to get the benefit of the doubt.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles ***