The saga continues

Coming to a theater near you, a new Terminator movie from James Cameron - Terminator: Dark Fate ...

the sixth installment in the Terminator franchise, though it serves as a direct sequel to The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, disregarding all other Terminator films as non-canon to the series and occurring in alternate timelines. The film will star Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger returning in their iconic roles Sarah Connor and T-800 "Model 101", respectively, alongside Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, Gabriel Luna, and Diego Boneta.

I'm a fan of the Terminator series. I saw the first one on a date with a guy named Rick :). Here's the college student Sarah on seeing the Terminator for the first time ...



I went to see the sequel with my mom. Here's how much Sarah changed in that time ...



There was much made about the Wonder Woman movie and what a feminist icon the main character was, but as I wrote here before, there is no better feminist movie role modal than Sarah Connor of Terminator fame (well, except for Ripley from Aliens, of course, also directed by Cameron).

I don't say this because Sarah was some kind of super-powered bad-ass princess like Wonder Woman. She began as a sweet and naive college student/waitress with a pet chameleon named Pugsley. She fell in love, lost her boyfriend after just a day, was pregnant and became a mom, all while having the responsibility of trying to save the world from a Terminator apocalypse. She had to evolve. She made a choice to do the right thing, but that took a heavy toll on her (she was locked up in an insane asylum for a time).

Now Cameron has brought Sarah back and once again he shows us what a feminist role modal looks like, this time one who is now in her 60s. Here's a bit from an article about the movie from Vanity Fair ...

Terminator: Dark Fate: Linda Hamilton Looks Tougher Than Ever

Linda Hamilton has come back to the franchise that started it all. Here’s an exclusive first look at a searing black-and-white image of Hamilton in action as Sarah Connor in Terminator: Dark Fate, the latest reboot of the classic James Cameron franchise. The actor once again plays Connor, a college student in the original 1984 film whose life was transformed when she was pursued by the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger). But it’s the second film, set 11 years after the events of the first film, that cemented the role’s iconic status, with Hamilton undergoing a hardcore exercise regimen to turn Connor from an everyday woman into a fighting machine of her own accord. Three decades later, Hamilton still looks every bit the action hero.

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The filmmaker [Cameron, once married to Hamilton, BTW] was also determined to showcase an older female lead in an action movie, and Hamilton seemed like the perfect star to handle that responsibility. “There are certainly plenty of fifty, sixty, seventysomething guys out there that just keep cranking along doing action movies and killing bad guys left and right. But there isn’t an example of that for women, and I think there should be,” he said. We concur.

Me too.