Terminators are human-scale killer robots, so called because their purpose is to terminate human life. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s muscular non-acting adds a deliciously charmless implacability to their pursuit of our ultimate terminus. These killing machines must, according to the logic of the franchise’s world-building, be ‘coated’ with human skin in order to travel back in time and to infiltrate our secret hideouts – although the story suggests that future humans all keep dogs, since they can ‘smell’ something is not right about these killer robots, so you’d think their disguise is more or less useless. But the ‘real’ reason why Terminators look like us is to reinforce the fact that we are the cause of our own downfall. During the course of the film their flesh tends to be ripped away to reveal the grinning metallic head of death beneath.
Of course humanity never does come to an end, thanks to a series of increasingly disappointing sequels: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) was followed by Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), which in turn spawned Terminator Salvation (2009), Terminator Genisys (2015) and Terminator: Dark Fate (2019). Then there was the television show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the many spin-off video games, from T2: Arcade Rampage, RoboCop Versus The Terminator and Terminator: Dawn of Fate through to guest spots in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon and Mortal Kombat 11, as well as myriad comics and novelisations. Time travel enables both good and bad guys to come back and overturn what their antagonists have done, providing an endless number of rebootable narrative possibilities. Goodies come back in time and undo the end of the world, while baddies come back in time and reset the end of the world. In the first and second movies, the end of the world is narrowly averted; in the third the stopping of the end of the world is narrowly averted, so the world ends again.
Science fiction fandom has a term for these determined, single-minded killers: berserkers. This word was appropriated from Viking tradition (it refers to a warrior who gets so carried away in battle that he fights in a terrifying frenzy – devastatingly and with no thought of injury) by the American science fiction author Fred Saberhagen in 1963. Saberhagen’s berserkers are machine intelligences that are implacably life-hating and take the form of gigantic spacecraft that fly around the galaxy, compelled by their programming to seek out all life and destroy it. The berserkers were, we learn, created as an ultimate war machine by a now-extinct organic life form, the ‘Builders’, to help them win an interstellar war against their enemies, the ‘Red Race’. For reasons that are not explained, these machines not only destroyed the Red Race but turned on their creators and eliminated them too.
Saberhagen published dozens of ‘berserker’ short stories in the science fiction magazines of the 1960s and 1970s, later assembling them into no less than sixteen novel-length publications. But although the original stories are little read today, a great many later science fiction books and films have been influenced by the idea. Gregory Benford wrote a whole string of ‘Galactic Center’ novels in which humanity is forced to flee across the galaxy, pursued by implacable machine intelligences set on annihilating them. The British science fiction writer Alastair Reynolds’ ‘Inhibitors’ sequence (the first in the series was Revelation Space in 2000) embroiders a similar story. The TV show Battlestar Galactica, commissioned in 1978 to cash in on the success of Star Wars, imagines a life-hating robot species called the Cylons, who persecute the last human remnants in space, having already ended their world; the flashier remake of this series (2003–9) explores the motivations of these machine intelligences in greater detail, without ever making any more sense of them.
Iterations of a similar end-of-the-world idea also occur in video games and films. The popular game Mass Effect (2007) is an expansive space opera in which organic life forms come under periodic attack from a life-hating alien machine species called the ‘Reapers’ – giant sentient and synthetic-technological starships.
As machines and technology become an increasingly fundamental part of our lives, so the tales of their uprising intensify. The most successful and resonant of all the recent stories of technological apocalypse is the Matrix trilogy. Directed by the Wachowski sisters, these films tie together several themes as well as technology: it is also religious apocalypse – the story of a saviour figure gifted with miraculous power who has come to save the world. And it is a kind of zombie, or ‘techno-zombie’, story, as ‘Smith’, the malign computer intelligence, infects increasing numbers of people, turning the global population into an army of belligerents, all focused on one destructive aim. To me it presents a fascinating portrayal of disease.
Like the best science fiction, The Matrix is more effective as a metaphor than as a piece of internally consistent world-building. The trilogy’s premise is that human beings have been enslaved by machine intelligences in a post-apocalyptic future: our bodies are being held in individual pods and used as batteries to run the machine world. To distract us from our confinement, our minds are plugged into a collective virtual reality – the Matrix. This makes no sense on its own terms, but to pick holes in the conceit is, of course, to miss the point. These movies express a metaphorical truth about modern humanity’s dependence on computers and our shift to a virtual simulacrum of life. And, as metaphor, they are as eloquent as they are cool.
The first film in the trilogy, The Matrix, is a classic of its genre. The movie’s core conceit and many of its specific details have acquired widespread cultural currency, although its sequel, The Matrix Reloaded (2003), is regarded as a disappointing anticlimax, and there’s even less love around for the final instalment in the trilogy, The Matrix Revolutions
