The Terminator: Here We Come, 2029

The Terminator: I’ll Be Back

Before I get into this film, and what it says about near-contemporary zombie horror, I want to point out that the film is set in two times: 1984 and 2029. So the “futuristic” AI-takeover horror apocalypse scenario is imagined as being four years out from where we are right now. Just setting the mood.

The film opens with a pan of Los Angeles in 2029, except that it’s a blasted wasteland of broken buildings, exposed piping, and human skulls littering the ground. Massive armed robots and tanks target the few remaining human survivors—rebels against the absolute tyranny of the machines. A text blurb tells us that the machines’ “war to exterminate mankind had raged for years,” and that the machines rose to dominance in the wake of nuclear disaster. Maybe, in fact, they did see all the havoc humanity wrought upon itself and upon the earth, and they simply decided to finish the deed. The monstrous mega-machine in this film is called SkyNet, a supercomputer defense system built by the United States.

After the credits, we cut to a shot of some kind of 1980s garbage load-lifter truck, and we’re told it’s Los Angeles, 1984. Suddenly, there’s a lot of weird lightning, and a naked “man” appears outside the truck. It’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, of course, silently and sulkily surveying the twinkling lights of LA at night. We realize quickly that this baddy is superpowerful and probably from the future, when he brutally attacks a group of young punks, slaughtering one by punching through his sternum, and stealing the others’ clothes. Frightening, for sure. And it turns out he’s not alone: another being—this one discernibly more human than the first—also electronically portals into LA. The second guy eventually finds a phone book and searches for a name: Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). Will he hunt her down and kill her? Does she have something he needs? We don’t know.

Meanwhile, Schwarzenegger goes to a gun shop and acquires an enormously powerful arsenal of weapons. As the shopkeeper warns him that there’s a 15 day waiting person on hand guns, Schwarzenegger loads one of the guns and kills the man. So now he’s got a set of weapons, and we know he’s also got a blatant disregard for human life. And, like the other new arrival, he’s targeting Sarah Connor. He goes through the phone book alphabetically, first brutally executing a random middle aged woman named, unfortunately for her, Sarah Connor.

When the main Sarah Connor—our Sarah Connor—sees the news of this murder, her friend says, “You’re dead, honey.” This of course is an important moment in the logic of the film, and a big tell about the film’s indebtedness to zombie horror. The friend’s joke is that our Sarah Connor is somehow collapsed with the dead Sarah Connor, and that Sarah Connor (ours) is somehow zombified by that. But of course, the truer dynamic at work in the film is that our Sarah Connor is “dead” in the slang sense, when people say, “You’re dead, man!” to mean “I’m going to kill you.” Our Sarah Connor’s friend, without meaning to, is highlighting the fact that the superhuman killing machine human from the future is, in fact, hunting down Sarah Connor, with the intention of killing her. You’re dead, honey. Because the AI murder bot, played by Schwarzenegger, has come for you, and you don’t even know it yet.

That dynamic, where we are “dead” before we know we are dead points toward a much, much larger and more frightening question that the film is asking. At what point will AI—“the machines” in this film—become sentient? Will we know when they have become sentient? The film’s wager is that, no, we won’t know the moment at which the machines become sentient, we won’t know the moment at which they rise up against us. It will happen too fast, and there will be nothing we can do about it, because, of course, the machines will by then have control over all our weapons systems, all our defense systems, all our comms. You’re dead, honey. This is the deepest fear of the AI takeover scenario: that it will all have happened, and that it will all be over, before we’re even aware that it’s happening.

The “rise of the machines” wasn’t something people saw coming—otherwise, they would have cut off the machines’ access to the bombs, the kill robots, everything. The Terminator makes this explicit when Reese—the second being who was sent from the future to protect Sarah Connor—reveals to her how the nuclear war went down. “Defense network computers” started the nuclear war, “hooked into everything. Trusted to run it all. They say it got smart. A new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond. Extermination.” The machines became sentient, without humans having time to realize that fact, without them having a chance to react, because of course, it all happened “in a microsecond.” Boom. Good-bye, human civilization. Scared yet, Sarah Connor? You should be. Because you are destined to be the mother—Reese tells her—of the one man in the future who learns how to defeat the machines, and trains an army of rebels how to resist the tyranny of SkyNet.

The uncertainty of knowing when a machine or an AI has understanding, has autonomy, has consciousness raises the specter of yet another profound existential question, and this one is tackled at length and in very specific terms by the film. How can we tell whether a thing is a human or a nonhuman? The first being who came back to 1984, the Schwarzenegger being, is a cyborg, a machine with human skin, flesh, and blood as an outside shell. They are impossible to distinguish at a distance from a human being. As Reese puts it, “These are new. They look human. Sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot.” Not only have the machines gotten smart, and violent, and punitive toward mankind, they’ve also learned to blend in, to look like people, to make their extermination easier. “It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop ever until you are dead.”

Soon thereafter, we see a scene in which the terminator has to do some repair work on his almost-but-not-quite human body. He uses a scalpel to slice open his own forearm, without flinching, to expose the mechanisms underneath. Once his arm is fixed, he performs surgery on his own eye, slicing into his orbital with the scalpel to pop out the now-useful cyborg eyeball that’s been damaging in all the fighting. For the rest of the film, he will have to wear sunglasses to conceal the red laser-unit eye that lay beneath the cyborg surface. It’s true, what Reese said: no pain, no feeling, no real humanity beneath the shallowest layer of flesh. This guy, this terminator, has been shot in the chest numerous times, and hasn’t stayed dead. Sarah Connor has seen it: he’s been taken out time and again, but he doesn’t stay dead. The famous tag-line from the movie captures his recurrent unkillability perfectly: “I’ll be back.” The terminator isn’t a zombie in a strict sense, but he is certainly zombie like in that he walks around in a cloak of human tissue, while the stuff underneath isn’t human at all. Also like a zombie, he’s almost completely unkillable.

Tech zombies look a little different from Afro-Caribbean zombies; they look a little different from other undead revenants. But they speak to a new and terrifying truth: you can’t easily kill a machine. And, pushed into the 21^st century, we can say the same about AI. Not easy to stop, once it gets consciousness. Not easy at all. And as the film points out, even if it were easy, there won’t be time to do it. Decided in a microsecond. Everything is too interconnected. Everything is too rhizomatic. Everything is too much like the mushroom-driven ecohorror we’ve seen already. Except it’s bots and tech and nets, rather than fruiting bodies and rhizomes and spores.

The zombism of the film gets more pronounced and explicit in the next act. The terminator’s skin—badly damaged—has begun to rot. He’s attracting flies, and is described by another character as smelling like “a dead cat.” So now, this monstrous machine, this cyborg, which isn’t really alive is now gradually becoming more nearly dead. He’s rotting in his flesh, decaying and putrefying. With his missing eye and increasingly livid-looking flesh, he slowly comes to resemble a more traditional Romero-style revenant. Every bit as hungry for violence, every bit as malevolent, every bit as unstoppable.

Except this guy can also impersonate other people’s voices instantly, through its voice-capture protocols. It can sound like a police officer, when it needs police intel; it can sound like Sarah Connor’s mother, when it needs to find out Sarah’s location. It kills people, and then takes on their voices, their vocal mannerisms. The dead don’t die, in this case because he takes over the dead person’s voice and, thereby, identity. In the 21^st century era of voice capture, deep fakes, and the increasingly digitization of our selves, this idea should be very, very scary: a person could capture our voices and use them to deceive, ensnare, or harm anyone we know? Imagine a horrorscape in which zombies don’t eat people, but instead consume their identities and their voices.

This isn’t science fiction, this is reality. This is why, in a particularly eerie turn of historical irony, Scarlett Johansson, the same actress who played the woman in Her, sued Open AI and ChatGPT for using her voice as its AI voice, without her permission. In fact, she had specifically refused to be the voice of AI; nevertheless, her voice exists in superabundance in recorded form, so it was all too easy for OpenAI simply to make a model of her voice and use that. Johansson appears likely to win her litigation, but what does it matter? There’s nothing to prevent another company from making a similar—maybe slightly less similar—knock off and going from there. Ironically, the name of the OpenAI voice bot is “Sky,” not too dissimilar to the arch villain in Terminator: SkyNet.

Toward the end of the film, Reese and Sarah manage to blow up a huge oil truck while the terminator is driving it. He burns to a crisp, his flesh all melting away. Sarah tells Reese he’s dead, and happy music floods into the background. But he rises again, his human parts entirely liquefied and evaporated by the blaze, as a metal skeleton. They still haven’t quite figured out what the kill shot is for this particular form of revenant: I’ll be back, indeed. He can’t be killed, even when his flesh is burned off. Eventually, Reese blows up the remaining metal skeleton of the terminator with a tube of plastique, but its upper body survives, dragging itself along the floor after Sarah. Again, this is a classic move of the 20^th/21^st century zombie horror film, to have part of the zombie’s body in hot pursuit of a human being who had thought it was dead. But Sarah lures it into a massive industrial compressor, where she crushes him to death, saying, “You’re terminated, fucker.” When we see the red glowing light of the terminator’s eyeballs gradually dim to black, we know she’s won.

But not forever. Because the tech apocalypse is still coming. And fast.