5 Reasons The Terminator Franchise Makes No Goddamn Sense
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With the release of Terminator Salvation (aka Terminator With Batman and Transformers!) we'd like to take a closer look at the franchise that has explored such pressing issues as our dependence on machines, what it means to be human and how utterly incredible it would be if Robert Patrick could turn his arm into a fucking knife. However, in our exploration of this series, we have come across a few gaps in logic, which we felt compelled to share with you. Why? Because we don't feel pity, or remorse, or fear, and we absolutely will not stop, ever, until every movie you have ever loved is ruined. #5.
Daddy Issues and Paradoxes
If you've found your way to this article, odds are you remember The Terminator, but let's refresh some key plot points. In the mysterious and distant future--1997, to be exact--Skynet, a highly-advanced artificial intelligence, is introduced to the world. Humans decide to hand over all military control to this system because in the Terminator universe the people have not seen The Terminator. Decades later, the humans are at war with the robots and a brave warrior named John Connor takes charge and turns the tide. The machines strike back by sending the Governor of California back to the 80s to kill Connor's mom before he's born. The humans send Michael Biehn back to protect her.
Along the way, he makes it part of his mission to protect her vagina from not having his penis in it. And that, readers, is where everything in the space-time continuum gets "iffy." As it turns out, when Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton sleep together, they conceive John Connor. And, as we learn in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, when the Terminator is destroyed in the first film, the microchip in its skull survives, falls into the hands of computer company Cyberdyne Systems, and allows for the creation of Skynet in the first place. Therefore, the only reason either John Connor or the machines exist is because the Terminator went back in time, and the only reason the Terminator went back in time is because the machines and John Connor exist. Get it?
Oh, and John Connor and our heroes spend the last act of the second movie trying to prevent said war, meaning John Connor is trying to prevent his own existence, by eliminating the reason for his dad to travel back in time to conceive him. And, if he does prevent his own existence, well, he certainly won't be around to prevent the war thus prevent his existence and... Well, you get the idea. #4.
If At First You Don't Succeed...
So, we've established that the first Terminator failed and was in fact killed by a waitress. Consider how embarrassing that must have been for it. But neither Skynet or Hollywood give up on good ideas, they merely try them again when the technology improves. Hence Terminator 2, in which a highly-advanced liquid metal Terminator is sent back again, only this time it's the 90s and the target, being young John Connor, can barely tie his shoes.
Luckily, the original T-800, his balls now safely removed, is sent back to protect John after being reprogrammed by him in the future. They meet up with Linda Hamilton and once again, our heroes thwart the bad guy, despite his obvious technological advantage. Did we mention he can turn his arm into a knife? C'mon. The third time around, Skynet throws a little something called the T-X John Connor's way. The T-X has a liquid metal substance for skin, futuristic weapons built into its endoskeleton, and can make its breasts grow at will. Yet, once again an outdated T-800, Nick Stahl and Claire Danes defeat this wonderful creation. Is your disbelief still suspended?
If so, answer this for us: Can't Skynet just keep on trying until it gets John Connor? We highly doubt that the time machine has an "only three assassination attempts per user" rule. And anyway, why do they keep on trying to attack John Connor at different periods in his existence anyway? Couldn't they send the T-X back to the 80s to deal with Linda Hamilton again? Or even earlier? After all, why lose the element of surprise by traveling to a time when the targets know what they're up against? It'd make a lot more sense to send the Terminators to earlier in the character's lives, when they were still oblivious to the threat. Get Sarah Connor as an infant, damnit. Hell, even if it was just one day earlier than the first movie, it would still make all the difference in the world. Honestly, who programmed this shit? #3.
Breaking the Law (Their Own)
The Terminator series really only establishes two rules for its futuristic technology: 1. The robots cannot show emotion; 2. The time machine can't transport non-living matter. First, the emotion thing. This one seems pretty easy to nail down, right (they're fucking robots)? And it's stated right in the second movie when Arnold says, "I know now why you cry, but it's something I can never do" (though some students of the franchise speculate that was just Schwarzenegger thinking out loud on the set and the microphone happened to be on). So why then, at the end of that very film, does the T-1000 give us the world's greatest "oh shit" face just moments before his destruction:
And he's not the only one. When the T-X discovers that she is on the trail of her main target John Connor, she displays an odd mix of excitement and what appears to be arousal, because hunting down the savior of mankind must be so damn hot.
Come on, lady, your one job in this movie was to not act. And then there's the non-living matter time machine issue. As Kyle Reese explains in the first film, no advanced weaponry can be brought back from the future because the time machine can only transmit living tissue. That's why we had to tolerate naked Schwarzenegger ass for two films before somebody finally remembered to put a hot woman in the role. Now, technically, the first Terminator is a machine with living tissue layered over its endoskeleton, so it gets a pass, we guess. Enter the T-1000, the second film's liquid metal Terminator that can take nearly any shape and recover from nearly any wound. Oh, and it can turn its arm into a knife. The problem is, this Terminator is composed entirely of liquid metal. No living tissue, no flesh, just 100% mimetic-poly alloy (thank you, James Cameron). That means, according to the rules clearly established in the first movie, it cannot travel back in time.
But, it does. Same goes for the T-X in the third movie. That Terminator is liquid metal on top of a heavily armored endoskeleton. It shouldn't be able to venture to the past either. Now, the whole point of adding that rule in the first movie was that it closed the "why don't they just send back a nuclear bomb?" plot hole. Fine. But just to further piss all over that logic, we find out in the third film that, in fact, the T-800 has the equivalent of little nukes stored in its abdomen. That's how he ultimately defeats the lady Terminator. So... why didn't he use those against Sarah Connor in the first movie? |
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Yeah, except that its the CHIP that they use, not the hand. Oh and the article mentions this, did you just leap right to the comments section?
Another paradox I don´t think anybody´s mentioned is the fact that skynet wouldn´t even exist if they didn´t have the terminator hand that was retroengineered to make terminators in the first place. So they had to already know that their mission was a failure! Am I wrong? I can´t believe I just wasted mental resources on this.
Terminator Salvation would have made more sense if it had ended with John connor sending Kyle Reese back in time. I hope those Hollywood assholes didn't leave that undone so they could make Terminator 5.
If SKYNET was so smart, it should have accepted THE LAW OF CAUSALITY.
CAUSALITY says that things that have happened, happened, and cannot be undone. Therefore, any attempt to change history, i.e. - killing John or Sarah Connor - would be IMPOSSIBLE because the Terminators have already been sent back into time and have already failed. This would imply that Skynet had to happen and couldn't have been prevented from being produced.
What really bothers me is that in Terminator 4, the T800's grab people (like John) and throw them around RATHER THAN JUST CRUSHING HIS GODDAMNED SPINE AND THEN BASHING HIS HEAD IN. Robots are about efficiency afterall.
And why is it that in Terminator 4, Kyle Reese is on the TERMINATION LIST, but the bots take him hostage?
And why is it that the machines, who've mastered hydrogen fuel cell technology, don't simply tip their weapons with hydrogen bombs and launch them like tactical nukes?
You're spot on about how the T1000 and TX shouldn't have been able to time travel - unless the producers claim that they can manipulate their molecules to be like carbon based organisms... but, if the terminators were smart, they wouldn't constantly charge after John Connor. Just act calmly, walk right up to him and then cut his head off.
The worst part of the series at all has to be # 4 but taken in a different way. Anyone else notice how the Terminators all get steadily less badass as the trilogy goes on? Arnold Schwarzenegger was the bad guy in the first Terminator. Damn badass.
Then T-1000 comes along and honestly he looks like he'll lose a boxing match to Ponyboy from The Outsiders who looks like he'll lose a boxing match to Hannah Montana.
Then TX and she's a woman. Not a badass uber-wench woman like May Day, a woman who supposed to be an unstoppable force of fathomable mechanic evil. Boo!
5 and 1: The future can be changed. But the things they tried to change ended up happening anyway, for entirely different reasons. In T2, they did change the future in that they prevented Dyson from creating Skynet. They however didn't change the fact that Skynet was created. They COULD'VE, but they didn't. As for the "causing your own birth" thing, Skynet actions in the past affected the future. Had they done things differently and actually killed Sarah Connor, they could have changed the future. What I'm trying to get at is Skynet could have changed the future, but fucked it up.
4 and 3: Yeah, that's pretty damned stupid.
2: My guess is the Sarah Connor chroniclesd are (a) another reality or (b) non-canonized.
When Terminator 3 came out, I had high hopes that I would be as impressed as I was with T2. I never thought I would be rooting for the end of human life before the first five minutes. The John Conner character was the definition of "LOSER" who might have made a good man-b***h in a prison. I immediately when home, shoved an icepick into my brain, wiggled it around so it would get good and scrambled, grabbed some sam adams and hid in a closet for a month.
Somebody much later told me that T3 was based on a TV series. I'd rather watch re-runs of Zena.
Skynet has some fucked-up tactics. Its stated goal is to eliminate humans. It goes about this by launching nukes at the cities they're already targeting.
Cities which, while admittedly contain lots of people, also contain virtually all the manufacturing plants, raw materials processing, and power-generation infrastructure that a race of machines would need. Screw it, we'll just blow it all up, just because.
(Likely just because there was a good bit of nuke-fear going around back in the 80's, and explosions are cool)
What the machines don't need, is food and potable water. If Skynet is smart enough to invent time travel, couldn't it figure out how to poison the water supply? Especially if it controls every weapon in the US arsenal (which undoubtedly includes a pretty good supply of various poisons and nerve agents).
Of course, Judgment Day climaxing with a bunch of barrels sinking to the bottom of a bunch of lakes doesn't have the same impact that a good nuke does.
Hey nerds...they're just movies. Sheesh.
One element that really bugged me about "Rise of the Machines" (well, aside from the movie kinda overall sucking) was the Rube Goldberg complexity of the plan to eliminate John Connor, when Skynet shouldn't even know or care about John Connor. I thought the whole premise of the franchise was John leads the dregs of humanity to the awesome-of-awesome's final victory and only THEN does Skynet go "Oh, s**t, this guy's the real deal! Better invent a time machine so we can whack his mom before she becomes a surprisingly effective campaign worker for Mondale, because if Reagan loses, we'll never be built, and, uh, before she can get preggers."
I think we can reasonably attribute the handover of the military to Skynet to the greatest of corporate fallbacks, downsizing. (Also know as "Go f**k yourself, prole. Entry-level Ferraris and jobless mistresses don't pay for themselves, so no-one in a tailored suit is taking a pay cut.) And I recall that the military was having trouble recruiting back in the 90's. What they did manage to scrape up was right around Pvt. Pyle territory.
The technology is here. I can, for instance, set up my laptop to boot up at a certain time and my incomplete torrents will magically (or scientastically!) start themselves. So next week when I go to Malaysia, a Muslim country whose laws regarding the possession and distribution of pornography I am completely ignorant of, I may have my own "Judgement Day" to deal with.
Um, I have to go do a bit of research and change my computer settings now.
So they can't send a nuke back in time because there's no skin around it? Couldn't they have put some of that cloned skin of the T-800 on a nuke and call it a day? Or implanted it into an obese human?
Seriously, if the machines would uprise, we'd be proper f&%"ed.
Chicoboy sucks.
Take T3 out of the whole damn thing, and you've got at least MORE continuity and less rule breaking.
Once doing that, then things make more sense ...
1. IN T1, they say that once they did their time travelin's, they smash the time equipment. Sooooo, only a couple of time travelers—the two terminators sent by Skynet, and the man and terminator sent by the resistance came through. And then BAM!, smash the equipment so no more. (T3 disregards this, of course—thanks a lot, Johnnie Mastow)
2. The needs-skin-to-time-travel stuff: I don't know, a dude who's arm can change into a knife is COOL, so let's find a way...... I'll say that the T-1000's bio mimetic poly poop stuff can mimic the skin's magnetic field properties. It's explained in T1 by Reese to Silverman why skin is needed. The T-1000 can mimic this, because it makes for one badass movie.
(If I were Skynet, I would sew a plasma rifle (in the 40kHz range) into the body some guy's body—drug-cartel-style.)
What's been bugging me for a while is that at the end of Terminator 2, I swear the T-800's arm is left behind in that factory somewhere (it gets torn off by some gear mechanism), which would have been the perfect way to continue the plot into 3 - yet even more rehashing with another company developing the Skynet technology from Arnie's arm.
But there's no mention of the arm in Rise of the Machines. Am I wrong? Did the T-800 take his arm into the molten steel pit with him? I'm not sure.
I see a lot of people asking why Skynet (there is no hyphen BTW Chicoboy) didn't send a Terminator back to kill Sarah Connor as a baby or a day before the first Terminator was sent, etc. Did everyone miss where it's explain in 'The Terminator' that Skynet only had very limited information about Sarah Connor? That all it had was a name and a location during a certain time period? How is a CPU going to know where to send a Terminator if it doesn't have the information for it? That's why the first Terminator had to go through the phone book and kill all of those other women with the same name.
It stands to reason that with movie #2 that the same situation occurred. A name and an area during a certain time period. T-1000 is sent back with the limited information and has to track John down.
T-3: The TX wasn't even sent back for John. It's primary mission was to kill John's cohorts. John simply happened to cross paths with the TX.
So, there you go.
After seeing the 4th film I conclude that it does and doesn't make any sense...
why it makes sense?.. The reason why Marcus Wright exist in T4 is because he was the first endo-skeletal prototype, living tissue over metal, problem was Cyberdyne Systems Corporation left in his brain and his heart making him the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Terminator mixed all into one... CSC, at the time still ran by humans, decided to take all the info they learned from studying the 1st T-800's arm and CPU from the first film, therefore creating the first cyborg, leaving in a brain... and the heart... That totally brings all 4 films together....
Why it makes deosn't make sence, becuase the time paradox is in a cycle, going around over and over again, why hasn't Skynet figured that out by now?.. The more times they sent Terminators back thru time, they were just f*****g s**t up for themselves... And why doesn't John Connor alter his own present future, like "hey, you know, I don't feel like killing machines today, I think I would rather take a s**t"...
Skynet's purpose wasn't to kill the Conners, it was to seed technology to bring about its own existence.
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how did he get her pregnant. do they have like robo c*m built in. its futtin crazy