Unfortunately, you’ll be back.
Saw T3 last night, and I can’t say I really liked it, mainly because it practically screamed, “T4 – coming soon!”
First of all, really downer ending. At the end of T2, we could cheer “We stopped Judgment Day!” This one says, “No, you just delayed it, neener neener. We have a franchise to maintain, here.”
The T-X violated the laws of physics constantly throughout the movie, performing feats of mass and leverage unseen even in Marvel Comics. I guess if we’ve got time travel, we can throw out anything else, but it was just one more little thing.
John Connor goes on at the end about how were we fools to think we could change history. What he doesn’t realize is that we *have* done so once. We changed the date of Judgment Day several years, which isn’t a piddling difference.
And let him not forget that all three Terminators have failed. The T-800, T-1000, and T-X were never intended to start, stop, delay, or rush Judgment Day. They were sent to kill him, and they all failed. What has Skynet done every time? Sent another.
Consider, also, that the time-travel in this universe doesn’t respect causality in any detail. John Connor is his own father. Skynet hates humanity because the Skynet of the future which infected it hates humanity. There’s no reason why the machines couldn’t try again to kill Sarah Connor before she gives birth, or kill John as a pre-teen, just becasue they’ve blown it once. With the time-travel mechanics we’ve seen, they can just keep sending Terminators until one gets it right.
(P.S. From what we’ve seen of the future, it’s hard to understand why the machines even care about him. The Earth is a blasted wasteland. How much trouble are the ragged remnants of humanity, who must quickly be running out of food, ammunition, and numbers, really going to be to those mechanical armies?)
Just like the Alien movies, the Terminator series should have stopped with the John Cameron film and settled into a happy existence of Dark Horse comics and PC shooter games.
Edit:The lovely raininva has pointed out two mistakes in this post. I admit to being much weaker on Terminator trivia than Star Wars trivia, so I apologize for the errors. Apparently, it wasn’t John Connor who was sent back in the first movie, but the resistance fighter who the adult John Connor realized would be his father. Secondly, it’s apparently mentioned in both T2 and T3 that humanity does eventually defeat the machines – I guess I missed both those mentions. So Skynet’s motivation to send Terminators is not only explained, but sharpened. John can expect to eventually have time-travelling Terminators coming after him thoughout every day of his life.
Tags: movies
Poor skynet. It’s horribly intelligent, and understand time travel. So why is it so pissed at humanity? Because it realizes it’s stuck in this frigging loop where it has no choice but to create John Connor so that John can grow up to threaten to destroy it, causing it to have to send things back into the past to create him.
I’d be pissed too.
Now, they aren’t sending the same Terminator each time, they’re sending a far more advanced, adaptable, and more capable of defying physics robot than the last time, which is far more capable of collateral damage. Unfortunately, collateral damage just isn’t killing John Connor.
And there’s zero basis for this, but there could be any number of limiting factors involved in time travel, such as chronoton synchronization or wave flux timing, or even planetary alignment. Or possibly there’s just a rule about going to the same place twice? But this line of reasoning is all BS on my part and on the shoulders of soft sci-fi throughout history