Cybernetic organisms that time travel to change the course of history is old hat to some for science fiction. Back in 1984, the idea of artificial intelligence overthrowing humanity wasn’t so antiquated. A killer robot from the year 2029 disguised as a broad-shouldered man with a foreign accent was and still is terrifying. Using a phone book (a technology obsolete to said killer robot) to find his target was also quaint yet clever at the time. Arnold Schwarzenegger was built for The Terminator thanks to James Cameron and his career-launching decision to cast him. With a B-movie-sized budget from friends of Roger Corman and inspiration from John Carpenter’s Halloween, The Terminator marked another watershed moment for the genre.
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The phenomenon of the first film gave way to one of the best sequels ever made, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Ground-breaking computer animation showed off Cameron’s want for a liquid metal Terminator. As technology caught up to his vision, so did the interest for a trilogy. Cameron didn’t want to make a third film, believing he told his story despite famously and regrettably selling the rights to the android assassin for one dollar. The advancement did come with a detraction in the form of a convoluted series. If only the T-800 could stop Cameron from selling his rights to movie executives, maybe the franchise wouldn’t be so confusing or continuous.
Alternate Timelines
Paramount Pictures
Time travel is a head-scratcher enough as it is. In science fiction, the focus is on the plausibility of time travel, not so much the hard science behind it. Back to the Future has a charming consequence, and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure has a fun-loving innocence when it comes to time travel. The Terminator series, for all intents and purposes, has an inevitability to its timelines. In one timeline, the world is taken over by AI known as Skynet. In another, the Resistance fights the machines to free humanity. One butterfly effect could undo any timeline, creating these alternate timelines. Terminator: Genisys rebooted the franchise, ignoring its predecessors and taking the lead of the original film. The whole if-then business grows to be a tiresome do-over when it should be unexpected and fresh.
Causality Loops
Warner Bros. Pictures
Similar to the sabotage efforts of Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, Skynet retaliates in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines with a search and destroy mission for future members of the Resistance. Meanwhile, to ensure the future of the Resistance, the reprogrammed T-800 is pressed for time while protecting John Connor. John learns from the cyborg that a nuclear holocaust will be the end of the world in three hours. He understandably wants no part of this Resistance after hiding for so long. John threatens to end his life, which would develop another alternate timeline, but John and the timeline are spared for the future’s sake. Entrapment mixed with destiny binds cause and effect. It’s only in later installments that the series ironically neglects and embraces the paradox to create new, if not irksome, causality loops.
Revisionist History
The age-old question of “what would happen if” gets answered in serendipitous and convenient ways yet again when Cameron returned to his beloved franchise. Coming on the heels of Terminator 2, Dark Fate had the luxury of replacing Skynet with another AI called Legion, ignoring again the previous sequels. It used to be that time travel took intervals of time between voyages. The Terminator made it feel like sending an android assassin was costly and rare. In Genisys and Terminator: Dark Fate, it’s as commonplace as a parlor trick. Endless histories are being redacted, replaced, retcon, or revised to serve the series with no end in sight.
Family Matters
Orion Pictures
Without Sarah Connor, there is no John Connor. Without John Connor, there is no Resistance. No Resistance means no humans. The Connor family has the weight of three billion lives on its back and the fate of the future in their hands. The importance of the Connors and family in general seems to be the crux and crutch of The Terminator series. Out of all possibilities, what’s stopping the T-800 (besides programming) from pursuing another family to save humanity? He had a touching moment with young John before one of the greatest endings in a science fiction film. A self-aware AI that can process emotions should have a directive to improvise if need be.
Good Arnold, Bad Arnold
Reverse engineering the Terminator from cold assassin to buddy bot was a good plot twist. Kyle Reese didn’t just destroy Terminators; he used the machines against Skynet. His technical prowess is more advanced in his time versus the eighties. He went to a lot of trouble going back to the past. Kyle could’ve given the Connors a programming chip that would change the future all together, removing the need for a resistance movement and turning Skynet into a benevolent system.
Kyle Reese and the Resistance
Kyle Reese fell in love with Sarah Connor, John Connor’s mother, based on a photograph John, the leader of the Resistance, presented to him. Kyle travels from the future in 2029 to the year 1984 to protect Sarah and help the Resistance defeat the Skynet army of machines. Kyle shares his affection with Sarah and they both have sex, leading to Sarah conceiving John. That makes Kyle the father of John and husband of Sarah. How would Kyle and John not be aware that they’re family and that their wife and mother is the same woman in the photograph? Did they forget, after all this time being at war? Since Kyle dies in The Terminator, how does John’s birth bring back Kyle later in the future for John to share the photograph with him? This wormhole has a plot hole that complicates the entire series. Unless it’s, as Kyle put it, “one possible future” out of many, or a future that can revert to its original, normal timeline. Where’s Marty McFly saying “This is heavy” when you need him? Probably in the future.
Skynet
Skynet is a self-aware, synthetic intelligence that inhabits all cyberspace. It controls every device and can replicate itself without human input. Skynet is a genocidal kill switch built by men, the engineers of their own doom. One irony leads to another: with humans gone and robots the only sentient beings on Earth, what’s next? Do they fight each other like Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots or establish Robot City where they invent things?
Too Many Terminators
Time travel and killer robots are the future’s version of life insurance. A contingency plan like this always ends poorly. The amount of multiverses being created and destroyed over and over again no longer matters. Only the current or last thread of existence that doesn’t get changed by time travel and killer robots will survive until some other unexplainable phenomena disrupts the natural order of the world. Cameron should have kept the rights and kept his story simple, but only time will tell what the year 2029 will bring.
