James Cameron has a confession: he can’t write Terminator 7. And it’s not because Hollywood won’t let him, as he’s too busy making the new Avatar – it’s because reality keeps nicking his plotlines. “I’m at a point right now where I have a hard time writing science-fiction,” Cameron told CNN this week. “I’m tasked with writing a new Terminator story [but] I don’t know what to say that won’t be overtaken by real events. We are living in a science-fiction age right now.”
It’s an understandable quandary for the veteran film-maker. Back in 1984, when the first Terminator movie came out, there was genuine shock value in the idea of a killer robot travelling through time from a future in which the wretched dregs of humanity survive in a chrome-plated hellscape dominated by their robot overlords. These days, the only far-fetched part of the movie is the bit where the T-800 turns up alone and completely naked, as opposed to arriving flanked by a swarm of AI-guided drones.
