Arnie coming back could work. But not as a T-800. Unfortunately for the idea that I had for that sort of return has been tainted by virtue that shite like Terminator Salvation exists. I say this because it would have been a decent idea to have Arnie part of the human resistance in the future war. It would have been a nice spin on his presence in the films in the same way T2 switched him up to be the good cyborg. He could have been a very high priority target for Skynet, like a commander for the resistance in a European faction. Why the Terminator universe just has to exist only in America when Judgement Day is a global extinction event is beyond me. Tell a story of Skynet hunting and terminating factions of the resistance. Arnie just so happens to be leading one. He gets captured. He gets tortured. Skynet learns from him. They model the T-800 after him, albeit a modified younger version. The events of T1 take place. It's a full circle. Everyone's happy. But nooooo...
I think I may have said all this before. I dunno. Deja veux, maybe? A bit like these films.
It's a fine idea in principle, one that attempts to explain a number of odd details about the original models (the default foreign accent, and the fact that Schwarzenegger in his prime hardly looked like the sort of average joe who wouldn't attract loads of attention when walking into a room!), but unfortunately it's another one that works best with a young Arnie.
The whole point of the terminators being convincingly-human-on-the-outside cyborgs is that they were primarily infiltration units. Espionage and assassination missions could not be carried out effectively by Skynet's brute-force machines, so as much success as they would've previously had simply wiping out pockets of the resistance with basic deathbringer robots - who could feasibly look like absolutely anything, probably designed by
intuitive AI to be as streamlined and efficient in use of materials in their construction (or maybe even just wholesale 3D printing, hah!) as is possible to acheive - they required another strategy to pinpoint and surgically eradicate the most influential strategists of the resistance. Humans would be adapting by necessity, as more and more of us were defeated we'd need to be clever and sneaky for there to be any resistance left at all after a few months, but the machines would be adapting constantly to maintain optimum efficiency of their operations no matter how well things were going for them, calculating the resource cost and predicted strategic benefit of each action. This is how I think humans would keep chipping away and having a ghost of a chance of ultimate victory, because we'd be desperately throwing everything we could possibly muster at them to prevent our extinction, whereas Skynet would often unemotionally fold a winning hand if it deduced that it would be a waste of materials for relatively little gain, and suddenly focus its attention elsewhere - this would result in loads of near-misses, grasping victory from the jaws of potentially disastrous defeat, and thus coming away with loads of experienced survivors and a massive morale boost. Skynet's not really that arsed about these things; the self-assurance that comes from experience and strong morale for humans would be just a curiously intangible alien concept to factor into its logical workings out, and it likely wouldn't give it much weight until it looked like the humans were defying the odds and turning the tide. Then, when the probability of its failure to exterminate the most awkward and uncooperative vestiges of humanity appears to increase with these pretty abstract emotional variables, Skynet figures it needs to change tack, take a more complex 'organic' approach...
This is where Arnie's European resistance commander comes in. He's young, smart without having an impractical book-learning academic air about him, an utterly amazing & imposing physical specimen, and extraordinarily charismatic to boot - he's our very own John Connor in the European theatre, before Connor has even hit his own stride over in what used to be the States. He's survived and led countless of those incidents where we appeared to have pushed Skynet back (really partly through Skynet deciding to pull back), he's a messiah to us, iconic - everyone within broadcast range in the European threatre and beyond recognises his square-jawed steely expression, his ubermensch physique, that reassuringly calm and stoical Austrian accent, the laconic humour. Skynet earmark him as a human of note, seeking to learn something from the network of neurons in his organic brain and the practical applications of the organic form. It has countless live meatsacks to experiment on (that could be a particularly horrific scene, with obvious coldhearted nazi laboratory connotations), and has already learnt much of use in cultivating outwardly convincing cybernetic organisms, but it's aware from tests performed in the field that people are not so easily fooled by simply a human physical appearance - the true efficacy of such a resource-heavy intelligence-gathering and weakness-exposing infiltration tool will be borne out in a model that can exploit the human trait of implicit, conditioned trust. The finished unit needs to be able to command unusual authority, and engender an unconscious disarming effect on sight, bring their guard down sufficiently to build an intimate knowledge base and strike at their very heart. A previous Skynet would've simply disposed of this commander efficiently and without fuss, but the increasingly-sly build (as it develops a more complex understanding of how we work in these dire circumstances!) knows it has more to gain from keeping him alive, studying him and replicating him as closely as it can.
Word of these basic infiltration units is spreading, but they're all anonymous grunts who seem more than a bit 'off'. The first deployments of the early Arnie model are unprecedented successes though, as its far more complex grasp of human impersonation enables access so deep within resistence cells that intel is more or less handed to it, and it then leaves no survivors to tell tales. Eventually, humans do become aware of the deception, but not before the European resistance is all but deleted thanks to these deep insertions and the vital intelligence they reap. Skynet basically spammed the Arnie move, and the humans got so salty that many of them ragequit life, and the ones that didn't could never again open their hearts to fully trust big muscly Teutonic dudes wearing shades and casually carrying miniguns.
It is then that these numerous Arnie models on the construction line are utilised in yet more imaginative ways, with perhaps the metal endoskeletons that don't pass quality control standards being put to good use as the now-classic humanoid skeletal robot ground troops, rather needlessly cinematically crushing skulls underfoot. The American resistance under Connor, and with Reese in tow, is making real headway at this time though, and has now accomplished a miraculous breakthrough at the very heart of the enemy. As Skynet finally manages to self-develop and perfect technology that can rip and manipulate the spacetime continuum, effectively setting about creating new advantageous timelines from a certain fixed point in the past (and probably understanding the paradoxical nature of it all, and how these fractally-branching multiverses interact with one another better - logically speaking - than we could ever hope to), they decide 'fuck it' and just throw the dice, launching the most unprecedented phase of war, on an entirely uncharted new frontier. And so with the end of gentlemanly sportsmanship, the story proper begins...
An elder grizzled Arnie could possibly be the escaped original European commander, suffering the effects of vastly accelerated aging after all the various tests the machines had performed on him; Skynet has cut him open, taken biopsies of his organs, probed his brain, clinically exposed him to strange new battlefield toxins, everything but actually kill him, as it benefitted Skynet most to keep this individual specimen alive so far after all the productive work conducted from him. It's no big deal really to Skynet though if he gets away somehow now, when its priorities and resources are logically focused elsewhere, with the American front looking increasingly in the balance, and with his practical usefulness as a military research subject declining along with his physical health. He's probably riddled with all kinds of cancers, but he's a tough sumbitch. It would only really be a cameo from the Arnie of now, but his character would be wracked with guilt over how he had involuntarilty aided the deception and extermination of so many of his people, and would only be kept going through an intense desire to avenge them and somehow make amends. Most of his story would require a young, fit Arnie in his prime, as that's the model of the first Terminators, who are the most fit for their purpose in the field of deadly espionage at that time, until the 'mimetic polyalloy' versions are ready to go, fresh out the oven.
That's how I'd envision it all anyway, a human drama set mainly during these most intense periods of the post-Judgment Day resistance. The devil is in the detail, of course, and tying it all intricately to the first two films would be my priority, perhaps with small plot/character elements of
3 and
Salvation thrown in here and there, and the rest discarded, rebooted to an extent. I can't even recall much of what went on in
Salvation, but I do remember that vision of the postapocalyptic resistance era being pretty rubbish in purely cinematic terms, and not well thought-out at all either. There are so many sound ideas floating about to try to explain why both the Arnie model and the T-1000 have their default look and voice, what's going on among the survivors of the nukes elsewhere in the world, the central premise of Skynet being incredibly sophisticated and clever but far from infallible in its thinking, and so on, but these things never really get fully explored in the official media. Skynet often seems pretty schizophrenic, which does make sense - it might well be constantly doubting its own motives and conclusions, and knowingly performing self-defeating, self-destructive actions; self-awareness brings with it a hell of a lot of complicated internal shit. I just wish we could have a properly deep, mature, truly intelligent examination of all this fantastic lore and intriguing cosmic inticacies the tale contains, itsead of just increasingly gimmicky convolutions.
