2009’s much-maligned fourth Terminator movie Salvation was a flop with critics, but Harry Potter villainess Helena Bonham Carter’s cut performance could have saved the movie. Released in 2009 after being edited down to a PG-13 to appease the studio, The Babysitter director McG’s Terminator Salvation failed to resonate with franchise fans or newcomers and left many reviewers unsatisfied.
A post-apocalyptic action-adventure, Terminator Salvation saw McG move the series away from the contemporary sci-fi action of the first 3 Terminator movies in favor of a more futuristic Mad Max inspired tone. The change wasn’t met with much love from fans of the franchise, and series star Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision not to reprise the title role didn’t help the movie's prospects with fans. But despite the apparent flaws of Terminator Salvation, could Helena Bonham Carter (of all people) have potentially saved the fourth film from flopping if the studio were more daring in their editing decisions?
Terminator Salvation originally featured a new antagonist in the form of Bonham Carter’s Serena Kogan, and the character would have made for a fascinating villain to the fourth film in the franchise. Unfortunately, the same studio executives who opted to make Salvation a lighter PG-13 movie (and excise a cameo from Terry Crews, too) also decided that the movie needed a more traditional villain in the form of the recurring faceless corporation Skynet. It’s unfortunate that the creators weren’t able to realize their original vision as, with more creative freedom, McG’s Salvation could have had the best Terminator villain since Robert Patrick’s unforgettably icy T-1000 of Judgement Day fame. It's a bold claim to make but one that fans of the franchise could have seen the proof in a more complete Terminator Salvation cut, so what would have made Serena such a particularly solid villainess for the franchise?
Well, semi-human anyway (spoilers, for McG’s unfinished director’s cut of Terminator Salvation). Although she may not stay this way for the entirety of the movie’s action, Serena would have been the first Terminator villain to at least start as a human, and her origin would have made for an interesting change to the series' norm. After all, a human villain with conscious thoughts and feelings could have provided a much-needed jolt of motivation that would have been more psychologically complex and deeper than the franchise’s typical unthinking Terminators. Serena is eventually revealed to be a human-Terminator hybrid who is in league with Skynet, unlike Arnie’s original Terminator and Judgement Day’s T-1000 who are entirely android creations and have no human components. Since Serena Kogan is still partially human she has much more emotional range than the franchise’s earlier iconic villains, meaning she could be motivated not by a simple command but instead by a complex combination of genuinely believing in the machine’s cause, personally benefiting from Skynet's questionable technological innovations, and being unable to say for certain what part of her is thinking freely and what part is being influenced by the pervasive technology.
And speaking of adding some more emotional range to the usually stoic and stone-faced eponymous enemies of the Terminator series, Serena’s tear-jerking backstory is enough to make anyone wonder whether Skynet is all bad. A cancer patient, she was at death’s door when Skynet’s technological advancements saved her life and offered her an opportunity to survive despite her apparent death sentence. It’s this deal with the devil that led her to become part-Terminator, fusing her body with Skynet's technology and her existence with the company's survival and creating the human-machine hybrid fans are introduced to in Terminator Salvation’s original cut.
It’s difficult to begrudge Serena’s use of Skynet tech to save her life when not only is it understandable from a human perspective, the movie’s hero John Connors uses the same technology to save his own skin in Terminator Salvation’s studio-mandated happy ending. There’s a fascinating question at play, with the movie asking when human-machine interface is considered acceptable and at what point humans need to divorce themselves from technology to avoid dependence, with Serena and John's stories leading viewers to wonder when is it not only necessary but good to utilize technology to save as much life and avoid as much pain as possible. As a complicated, morally ambiguous villain, Serena would have allowed the series to explore these questions in a depth that the Terminator movies have never attempted before or since.
Given how interesting her backstory is and how big a name the Fight Club star was at the time, you might reasonably be wondering why Terminator Salvation all but cut out Bonham Carter’s character in the film’s eventual theatrical cut. Excised during the movie’s reshoots, Serena does appear in the finished version of Terminator Salvation but it’s in a dramatically reduced role, and this could be because a human female villain would have been too much of a divergence from the franchise norm (even if she was a hybrid) or the studio’s aforementioned fear that fans would want Skynet to play a bigger role. Director McG was unhappy with the decision, as he has since hinted that there is a more complete director’s cut of Terminator Salvation which he prefers that would reinstate her role.
But there were also complaints that Bonham Carter played the role too "campy", an accusation which hardly seems like a problem given how over-the-top both Robert Patrick and Schwarzenegger’s iconic roles in the series are. Not only that, but much of Bonham Carter’s screen career has been defined by iconically campy and over-the-top roles such as her villainous turn as Bellatrix Lestrange, one of the more critically acclaimed elements of the uneven Harry Potter film adaptations, so it's hard to imagine what else the producers had in mind when they hired the iconically over-the-top actor. It’s unfortunate that the performance and the role were lost, as Bonham Carter’s would-be villain proves once again that Terminator Salvation could have been great if it weren’t for the studio’s interference and suffocating fear of backlash.
While anything is possible (particularly in a series centered around time travel and altering reality), the lackluster box office performance of the Terminator franchise’s most recent installment Dark Fate makes a sequel unlikely anytime soon. Meanwhile, the relative critical underperformance of Terminator Salvation means the creators are unlikely to revisit anything from the movie, much less an element that the producers opted to cut out for fear of a negative reaction. If McG’s director’s cut of Terminator Salvation ever sees the light of day, Terminator fans might get a chance to see this great villain in action, but after her role was cut once, it’s hard to imagine Helena Bonham Carter choosing to return to the role any time in the future and risk a repeat of the unfortunate decision.
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