Women In Action: The Evolution of TERMINATOR’s Sarah Connor
While we could always stand to see more of them, over the last thirty years it’s safe to say that media has seen an increase in action heroines and — most likely with some confluence — women are driving ticket sales like never before. A big part of the new era of cinematic female warriors was ushered in by Linda Hamilton when she portrayed Sarah Connor in the 1984 classic The Terminator. Co-written and co-produced by Gale Anne Hurd and director James Cameron, The Terminator became a pop culture phenomenon and seven years later, the world was introduced to a whole new Terminator machine and a what seemed like a new Sarah Connor with Hamilton reprising her role. Sarah Connor had gone from a regular teenage girl to a certified soldier with one mission: to prevent the rise of the machines, and, you know, save the world and stuff. Audiences were compelled by Connor like few other characters before her, and after the beloved but quickly cancelled television series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles came and went, she is once again gracing the big screen in Terminator Genisys.
As you can imagine, it’s no easy task to “update” a well-known character for a new generation of girls while staying true to her origins, but Terminator Genisys attempts to do just that. Thanks to some crafty time travel logic, Sarah Connor (now played by Game of Thrones actress Emilia Clarke) is on a new adventure which was brought to life in part by screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis and producer Dana Goldberg.
Goldberg summarized the evolution of the pop culture icon by saying, “You know, she’s nineteen years old before this thing enters her life and changes her life completely. And by the end of the movie she realizes that her life is never going to be the same. And then when you meet her in the second film, she’s on the verge of insanity, she has turned herself into a soldier, into a weapon, and she’s barely hanging on to that sanity, burdened by the knowledge and responsibility that she now has.”
“Our Sarah is a very different Sarah,” Goldberg tells us. “She’s living a normal life, much like the first Sarah, but she only lives a normal life until she’s nine years old. Her parents are killed in front of her and a machine grabs hold of her and says, ‘I’ll protect you. I’m going to protect you forever.’ But then also says, ‘Here’s what’s coming; here’s what your life is going to look like. And this is your fate.’ We always thought, like, most children as they’re growing up, if somebody tells you ‘This is what your life is planned to be; this is what your life is going to look like,’ you rebel. Because you don’t want to believe that your life is planned out for you; you want to believe in choice. And that was really important for this character that Sarah Conner is.”
For screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis, writing this revered character now for a new crop of fans was a great responsibility, in part because of the other popular lady action heroes that came before, something that we might take for granted in 2015.
Nevertheless, it was a thrill for her to get to expand Connor’s timeline as she explained by telling us, “[T]here’s something about moving the character also into our time, into the post-Ripley [played by Sigourney Weaver in Alien and Aliens, most notably], post-Linda [Hamilton] time that we inhabit, where the idea of the little girl who grows up knowing that this is always what she’s going to be — I mean, you are too young to remember, thankfully, the effect that Linda Hamilton’s persona and the character of Sarah in both those movies and the character of Ripley in the first two Alien movies, that when you’re sitting in the theater and you’re a young women, it is overwhelming.”
Kalogridis continued, adding, “Now that is not as foreign an idea to us as it was. So now you’re starting from the place of ‘We can be so many things,’ and girls know that from the time they’re much younger; they have so many different role models than they used to have. Now it’s much more about choice, it’s much more about decisions as to what you want to become. That’s the interesting thing about her, that she doesn’t have any. That there are no decisions she can make; everything’s mapped out and she can’t rebel. If she rebels, it’s literally the end of the world, from her perspective!”
Goldberg chimed in, revealing her own fan-girl moment, saying, “I will say that the first time they handed us the script and I got to read Sarah Conner saying the line ‘Come with me if you want to live,” I was really happy! The little girl in me just started to grin! And like I said, I have a twenty-one month old daughter. I want her to hear Sarah Conner say, ‘Come with me if you want to live.’”
Kalogridis added, “I’m very, very aware of the different role models that are out there, and so part of the idea of kind of wanting to expand — I have thought of it for a long time as — between Ridley [Scott] and Jim [Cameron], between Thelma and Louise and Ellen Ripley and Sarah Conner, I just think that we’ve been given these gifts of these amazing characters.”
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Who are some of your favorite cinematic heroines, Smart Girls? Tell us all about them in the comments!
Featured Image Credit: Paramount Pictures
