When Arnie orders a left turn, you don’t argue

Arnold Schwarzenegger keeps coming back. But next time, writes Rob Long, he'll be inside a different machine.

Arnold Schwarzenegger reprises his role as the Terminator in the fifth installment, "Terminator Genisys". (Melinda Sue Gordon/Paramount Pictures via AP)

When the next Star Wars movie is released sometime in December, the actor who plays Luke Skywalker, Mark Hamill, will be 64 years old.

That’s disconcerting to those of us who remember him as a young man on his way with the rebel forces to destroy the Death Star. When I first saw the original Star Wars – and we’re all going to pretend that the dreadful, inexcusably awful more recent episodes were never made – I was a mere sprite myself.

Now, Luke Skywalker and I both have flecks of grey in our beards. Now, in fact, we both have beards. Back when the first film was released, I was barely 11 years old. Growing a beard was a long way off.

Sitting in an airport lounge recently, I watched an advertisement for the latest instalment of The Terminator – it will be the fifth big-screen version of the basic killer-robot-from-the-future story – and I was struck by a realisation.

The new film Terminator Genisys features a new and younger cast of characters. But it also features a lengthy appearance from the original Terminator robot himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who will be 68 years old at the end of this month.

That’s a rather old piece of technology, when you really think about it. Most of us won’t keep a phone around if it’s more than a couple of years old. That’s the great thing about technology: it’s utterly disposable and constantly being upgraded.

Not in the universe of the Terminator films, apparently. In that world, for some reason, intelligent beings from a distant technology-controlled future continue to rely on a rather creaky and elderly (and probably bug-filled) Terminator for their terminating needs.

But in the airport lounge along with me, and also watching the advertisement for the new Terminator film, was a young father and his son. At a certain point in the trailer, Arnold Schwarzenegger utters his famous catchphrase: “I’ll be back.” The father and I both laughed aloud happily and exchanged a look. His son looked at the two of us, then back at the television, then back at us. “So, um,” he asked, “that thing he said? ‘I’ll be back?’ Is that, like, a thing?”

For a certain portion of the movie-going audience, catchphrases like “I’ll be back” are just not part of the collective memory. They don’t remember being young when Luke Skywalker was young. For them, all of these action heroes – Mark Hamill, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford – they’re all old men and they always have been. Put it this way: if you can remember sitting in a cinema watching Harrison Ford running around as Indiana Jones in the first Raiders of the Lost Ark picture, I have some bad news for you. You’re old, too.

The Terminator, though, is nothing if not a resourceful time traveller. Say this for Arnold Schwarzenegger: he knows how to keep his personal brand relevant. Two days after getting demographically disconnected in the airport lounge, I was driving to a meeting in Los Angeles using the navigation app, Waze.

Traffic in southern California is a chaotic and baffling thing, and figuring out the most efficient and least-clogged route to the next meeting often seems like a game of roulette. The Waze app sorts out the quickest and most efficient way to get you to your next stop, and it’s quickly become an obsession among traffic-stressed entertainment industry professionals. You just enter in your destination and the app guides you, with audio commands, through back roads and undiscovered shortcuts.

This time, though, when I plugged in my destination the app asked me a question. Would I like, it asked, to change the voice that gives the directions? How about, it suggested, if the directions were delivered by Arnold Schwarzenegger?

I’m not kidding. You can have the Terminator tell you how to get to your next meeting simply by selecting it on the app.

Of course I immediately selected just that. And it really was like having the Terminator himself – or, I suppose, the former governor of California, depending on which part of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s CV appeals to you the most – order you around town. “Turn left now!” he barked at me. “Stay to the right,” he commanded me. All in that unmistakable Terminator accent. I have to say: I know it’s a cheesy and cheap publicity stunt for the release of the movie, but it’s also really cool.

And it’s also the only way these old guys – who are, let’s face it, getting up there in age – are going to stay relevant and in the public eye.

Once you hit 70, it’s awfully hard to pull off the action hero act. The audience gets younger, the bones get more brittle – the world keeps sending the message that it’s time to retire. But if Arnold’s voice can give you driving directions, why can’t Luke Skywalker’s? Why can’t Harrison Ford’s voice guide you through your online tax preparation? Why isn’t Sylvester Stallone’s voice being used for Google Translate?

The Terminator is right. He will be back. But not in a movie. Next time, he’ll be back in an app.

Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl