How Sarah Con­nor kept the Ter­mi­na­tor fran­chise running

When Ter­mi­na­tor 2: Judg­ment Day arrived in cin­e­mas in the sum­mer of 1991, a whole sev­en years after the first film, the T‑800’s shift from bad guy to good guy instant­ly became one of the most talked-about twists of the decade. But Arnie was not the only one to under­go a dra­mat­ic trans­for­ma­tion. At the heart of both James Cameron’s orig­i­nal film and its action-packed sequel is lead hero­ine Sarah Con­nor, as played by Lin­da Hamil­ton, whose remark­able arc con­tin­ues to evolve in this year’s Dark Fate.

When we first meet Sarah Con­nor in 1984’s The Ter­mi­na­tor, she’s a timid wait­ress con­front­ed with a truth so strange and bleak that most peo­ple would choose not to believe it. Yet rather than shy away from the hor­ror and uncer­tain­ty of her sit­u­a­tion, Sarah does what she needs to – first for self-preser­va­tion, then out of a sense of duty to her future self, her unborn son, and the rest of humanity.

Ear­ly signs of self-suf­fi­cien­cy and lev­el-head­ed­ness reveal an inner strength that Sarah must rely on lat­er in the film, as oth­ers try to con­vince her that she’s been mis­led or that they know what to do next. She lis­tens, she learns, she weighs every­thing up – and then she does what she thinks is best. Despite her appar­ent uncer­tain­ty and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, Sarah trusts her instincts. It’s that intu­ition which makes her even­tu­al­ly change her mind about trust­ing Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) after ini­tial­ly being fright­ened of him.

Through­out The Ter­mi­na­tor and Judge­ment Day, Cameron and Hamil­ton remind us how very human this woman is. She is vis­i­bly dis­traught when she learns of the mur­der of her close friend, appears ter­ri­fied when she thinks she’s been kid­napped, and is angry when peo­ple don’t lis­ten to her. Sarah is only brave when she needs to be. She is, after all, an ordi­nary woman – so it comes as a gen­uine sur­prise when we rejoin her in Judg­ment Day only to find that she is now a fear­some force of nature.

The sec­ond film opens with Sarah explain­ing in a weary voiceover how ​“three bil­lion human lives end­ed on August 9^th, 1997”. We imme­di­ate­ly sense that this ver­sion of Sarah Con­nor is hard­ened, clin­i­cal, dis­pas­sion­ate – more machine-like. When we actu­al­ly see this old­er Sarah, she is in peak phys­i­cal con­di­tion, doing chin-ups from her secure cell in a psy­chi­atric hos­pi­tal. When she escapes from the facil­i­ty with her son and the now repro­grammed T‑800, she tells John, ​“I didn’t need your help. I can take care of myself.” She’s not wrong.

This Sarah is smart and resource­ful. The life she once knew is a dis­tant mem­o­ry; she now only exists to keep her son safe. Every­thing else is irrel­e­vant, which is why she has put so many plans and back-up plans into motion, spend­ing years mak­ing use­ful con­tacts and look­ing for ways to gain the tac­ti­cal advan­tage over the foe she knows will one day come for her.

Yet Sarah’s strength doesn’t just lie in her new­ly acquired skillset. She’s so deter­mined to change the future that she goes to the extreme lengths of attempt­ing to mur­der the man she holds respon­si­ble, only to then be over­come with her own all too Ter­mi­na­tor-like behav­iour. She is a deeply lay­ered char­ac­ter, with a clear back­sto­ry, moti­va­tion and real, often con­flict­ing emo­tions. Beneath all that steely prag­ma­tism and deter­mi­na­tion is a des­per­ate woman plagued by night­mares, liv­ing in fear of her own des­tiny. There’s even a hint of hope in her clos­ing voiceover, even as she acknowl­edges the ​“unknown future” still fac­ing humankind.

In Ter­mi­na­tor: Dark Fate, it’s Sarah who kicks things off once more, first in a throw­back to Judg­ment Day and then in a voiceover in which she talks about the future that once was – the future she pre­vent­ed. This Sarah is tired but can­not rest because there are still Ter­mi­na­tors to be destroyed. She’s devel­oped a dry sense of humour, is often quick-wit­ted and has no time for your bullshit.

In pro­tect­ing Dani (Natalia Reyes), she finds a renewed sense of pur­pose. Because she was once that woman being hunt­ed, and there’s no way she’s let­ting every­thing she went through be for noth­ing. As the bond between these women devel­ops, we begin to recog­nise some­thing of the younger Sarah in Dani – name­ly her raw emo­tion and courage – and this in turn is reflect­ed back in the now much old­er Sarah, mak­ing her dra­mat­ic devel­op­ment across all three films even more pronounced.

Over the course of 35 years, Sarah Con­nor wit­ness­es all man­ner of trag­ic events but she is not writ­ten to be a trag­ic, sad woman. In the first film she says, ​“I didn’t ask for this hon­our and I don’t want it.” But by the time we reach the end of Dark Fate, we under­stand the extent to which this hon­our shaped her into one of the most com­plex and inter­est­ing female char­ac­ters in film history.