5 Reasons The Terminator Franchise Makes No Goddamn Sense
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#2.
Alternate Timelines
As if the time travel paradoxes weren't complicated enough, the narrow thread of continuity holding this franchise together frays into two completely different--but equally disappointing--directions after the second movie. According to the third movie, once Terminator 2 ends, Sarah Connor dies, John Connor becomes a migrant worker, and mankind gets blown to smithereens in 2004. Terminator Salvation will follow from this course of events, with Batman, new Chekov and the blind girl from The Village fighting off the machines of Skynet in a bleak, post apocalyptic landscape without sweet laser guns.
Alright, we can live with that. If we need to see a continuation of this series, might as well be with Christian Bale taking charge. But then there's a television series out there. According to The Sarah Connor Chronicles, our heroes stay on the run after Terminator 2. Sarah Connor is sick, but she ain't dead yet (and is surprisingly badass for someone who's supposed to be on her way out). More Terminators have been sent back to kill John and inexplicably fail at something a barely competent hitman should have no problem with. Summer Glau, another reprogrammed Terminator, has been sent back to protect him.
According to this timeline, Judgment Day doesn't happen in 2004, although odds are it will strike in 2011. So... the two futures are obviously incompatible (the different Judgment Day dates completely change all subsequent developments, from the war to the resistance to the invention of time travel itself). So is this all in an alternate reality, like the new Star Trek movie? Does it mean that one course of events is legitimate, and the other isn't? Or does it mean that none of the outcomes really matter, since no matter what happens, there is invariably some other alternate timeline where the opposite has occurred? Is there some timeline where the machines are friendly? Where the Terminator is a sassy black kid? Where the human sent to protect mankind is Zach Braff? #1.
No Fate But What We Make Up As We Go Along
Huge sci-fi franchises often revolve around a central philosophical conundrum. For instance, The Matrix ponders existential questions like "what is reality?" and "should the sequels exist?" For the Terminator franchise, it has always been the question of determinism: Can the future be changed, or is it set in stone? Luckily for viewers, it's one of the very few franchises that has the balls to have an advanced machine from the future objectively answer the film's central question. Unluckily, it's also the only one with the balls to have the exact same machine give the exact opposite answer later on. At first glance, the fact that the Terminators are sent back in time to kill John Connor would suggest that clearly the machines think they can alter the course of history so that they won't have to deal with his crap once they take over the world. A major theme of the second film is that the apocalypse can be avoided, that there is indeed "no fate but what we make."
By the end of that movie, it seems clear that Judgment Day has been avoided, and we can all rest easy, knowing that at least one pressing question from the franchise has been cleared up. And then Terminator 3 rolls around... Arnold shows up again to protect John Connor, who insists that he and his mom prevented the destruction of mankind in the last film. Arnold clarifies things for the little twerp by confirming that Judgment Day cannot be prevented, only postponed. In his words, it is "inevitable." Which is kind of funny, since he said the exact opposite in the second movie. You might remember the scene. Linda Hamilton has just woken up from the collective subconscious nightmare of every Cold War kid on earth...
...and is dead set on killing the guy responsible for creating Skynet, hoping that his death will prevent the nuclear war. Little John Connor flips out annoyingly as is his tendency, at which point Arnold tells him that killing Dyson might actually prevent Judgment Day. Got that? The objective, all-knowing machine just gave two different answers to the question "can we stop the end of the world?" So... if Judgment Day can't be prevented, then the war and mankind's ultimate victory of the machines can't be prevented either, right? If fate can only be nudged a couple of years in one direction or another, then nothing any character does at any point in any of the movies makes any motherfucking difference at all.
Enjoy Terminator Salvation, kids! Before you go dismissing the franchise, just remember that it could come true, as evidenced by the movies in 7 Completely Unrealistic Movie Plots (That Came True). Or check out some more mind-boggling bad guy schemes, in The 6 Most Pointlessly Elaborate Movie Murder Plots. And go to our Top Picks if you want to live. |
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how did he get her pregnant. do they have like robo c*m built in. its futtin crazy
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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letmein - Kyle is not a robot, he is human. Duh.. did you even read, much less watch the first movie?
Some possible answers to some of the comments in the article.
Re: The whole Daddy/paradox thing...
Perhaps John Connor was going to exist anyways, and they only changed who his father was by sending Kyle back in time. The person could still be the same, but possibly just different because his father was changed. Not necessarily plausible, but that was what i had suspected the first few times i saw the first movie back in the 80's. Or, perhaps Connor sent his father back into the past because he already knew that it had already happened. Sounds completely friggin looney, but yanno some writers don't totally think the entire plot through before the whole thing is put into action.
Also, due to human technological advances, it's possible that Skynet was built without the information from the first terminator the first time through, only it just became, as it was made evident in the second movie, much more advanced due to the interference from the terminators sent back through time.
This was hinted at in the latest movie when Skynet had already known that 3 attempts against Connor had failed, even though, in the terminator universe, none of those attempts had been made yet.
Re: The whole not-flesh cannot travel through time
It is conceivable that somehow, after the first attempt failed that they (skynet) discovered a way to create a terminator out of metal that somehow fooled the time travel machine into thinking it was a flesh-based entity. Not sure how that could have been carried out, but if i recall correctly Kyle indicated in the first movie that the time machine thing had been destroyed after he went through, which means that they would have had to have built a new one, and presumably better, or that the humans may not have fully understood the rules correctly or that Kyle, being just a grunt type, didn't have all the information.
Re: Repeated Attempts at different points in time
I'm guessing, that since the resistance kept sending someone back after the terminator was sent back that they continued to destroy the time machines once that had been done. If so, Skynet would have to be selective and target specific points where the Connor clan was easily located and could be eradicated. The fact that they didn't go back and wipe out Sarah when she was a child could simply be the fact that it may have been difficult or impossible for them to pinpoint a location for her during her early years, being that it was well before the computer age, and they can't exactly send someone to a precise date, from what they had indicated in the first and second movies.
Re: Robots showing emotions
Remember that Terminators were specifically designed, once they started putting skin on them and making them as human looking as possible, to blend in with humans undetected to destroy the leaders and anyone else they could find at the time they were present. In order to do that, some emotions may be programmed into them to show specific facial expressions, though perhaps because crying involves the actual feeling of emotion, they did not program it in because it would be a more complex series of commands than simply smiling, sneering, showing surprise, or some of the other base emotions that the terminators did show facially. One would think that, if the robots were smart, they would have to set up certain emotions that almost everyone expresses at some point into the more advanced units to help them blend in the best, as a robot that shows more emotions, one would assume, would be harder to detect than something that say.. gets it's arm blown the f**k off and just looks at it like it was assessing how much damage was done.
Re: The whole using a nuke to kill Sarah Connor thing when the terminator is using it as a power cell
There are a couple of reason they may not have used that whole scenario.
1) The first time around, it is possible that the power cells were different. Otherwise, would not the first terminator have set off a nuclear charge when the power cell was damaged when it was crushed in the machine the first time around?
2) If they would have nuked everything the first time around, Skynet could have eliminated it's existence to begin with, since none of the technology had even been contemplated seriously at that stage, though it could possibly have been done in the second film, however, i can list about half a dozen reasons, including that skynet was not created and not self-aware at that time, as well.
Not that it helps make the whole thing make any more sense, but there are possible reasons why things were set up the way they were... plotholes, possibly, if there had been even a little more explanation, we may not be asking these particular questions.