I'm toying with the idea that the Terminator movies are becoming part of a modern myth. I saw the preview to T4 and realized that the target audience was too young to have seen T1 in a theater, and that as far as I know, not only are there no actors who were in both T1 and T4, there aren't even any of the same characters. This was probably true of T3, too. For whatever reason, this seems to be a story that modern, Western society wants to hear again and again. You could say the same thing about Star Wars, Star Trek, and James Bond. But Star Wars was created to be a myth, so it's kind of cheating. Plus the themes of the first movie aren't in the later ones. They are just advancing the plot (pre-advancing?). Star Trek is more of a world that you inhabit when you watch. The themes of TOS, TNG, the spin-offs, and the movies are all pretty different. The James Bond movies are formulaic to the point of being practically the same movie, but they seem to be more candy-coated fun.
T1 was intended to be candy-coated fun, but somewhere along the line something happened. I'm getting a vibe that I can't quite put my finger on that there is something else going on here. Each Terminator story addresses the same themes (man vs. machine, stopping an unstoppable adversary, changing your fate and the fate of the world, family (not so much in T1)) from a different angle. But I think the cool part is that James Cameron didn't set out to make a modern myth. It just grew into one. We just kept coming back to hear the same story again and again.
What do you guys think? Am I on to something or am I going all English Major on something that doesn't really deserve it.
