Aftermath

As a box-office draw, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s best years were from the late 1980s through the mid 1990s. That overlaps significantly with his biggest years as an action hero, from 1984’s The Terminator to 1994’s True Lies.

If you’ve been ignoring Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movies since he returned to acting after seven years as the Governor of California, you’ve been missing out on some of the most interesting roles of his career. Though Schwarzenegger’s comeback kicked off with old-school action schtick like The Last Stand and The Expendables sequels, his recent output has seen him shift into darker, sadder territory. In the new movie Aftermath, he plays a man whose entire family is killed in a plane crash. There are no terrorists, no hijacking; a simple human error causes a tragic mid-air collision. The airline tries to buy off his silence, but Schwarzenegger’s Roman cannot let the tragedy go. He wants an apology for what happened, and no one will give it. And so he becomes fixated on the air traffic controller (played by Scoot McNairy) who was responsible for the fatal accident.

There have been a lot of rumors swirling in recent weeks about the state of The Terminator franchise. First there was word that Paramount had removed a possible sixth Terminator (and a direct sequel to 2015’s Terminator Genisys) from its schedule. Then the head of Skydance, who holds the rights to the characters, said in an interview that a major announcement about the series’ future was coming some time this year. So what’s the truth?

If there’s anyone you don’t want to piss off, it’s Arnold Schwarzenegger. If your delivering pizza to his house, don’t forget the bread sticks. If there’s one parking space left at the mall, you better give it to Arnold. And if you’re the air traffic controller in charge of making sure a plane holding his wife and kid lands safely, you better not screw up. Too bad Scoot McNairy didn’t get the memo.