Time travel has got to be one of the tougher story elements to write,
cause and effect dancing your characters close to the edge of paradox
is tricky stuff, but filmmakers still line up to give it a shot with
some doing excellent takes on this trope while others don’t even give it
as much thought as Mister Peabody or his boy Sherman ever did. In 1895
H.G. Wells gave us the classic story
The Time Machine, but he
really was writing a story about society and where man was going, the
mechanics of the device were not all that important to him, and his hero
only really went forward in time thus eliminating the dangers of
paradox. Since then hundreds of writers have dabbled in time travel, and
almost as many filmmakers, but today we are going to jump into the
Wayback Machine and look at
The Terminator franchise to see how they handled it.
With a 6.4 million dollar budget
James Cameron, a graduate of the Roger Corman School of low budget filmmaking, brought the world an iconic character and made
Arnold Schwarzenegger a star with
The Terminator.
The story is practically perfect; in the future a computer system named
Skynet has almost wiped out mankind but one human freedom fighter, John
Connor, has rallied the survivors and is now slowly winning the war,
Skynet decides to send one of its robot killing machines back in time to
kill the heroes mother, Sarah Connor (
Linda Hamilton), before he is even born. Because turnabout is fair play John Connor sends Kyle Reese (
Michael Biehn)
back to thwart this Terminator and in the process of doing this Sarah
and Reese fall in love resulting in Reese leaving a bun in the oven that
will one day become John Connor savior of mankind. Though the
Terminator is defeated its remains will lead to the creation of Skynet.
This is beautiful closed loop; Skynet’s plan created their destroyer, as
well as ensured their own creation, which would eventually lead them to
their downfall. This story does not lend itself well to a sequel.
Because
The Terminator became this huge sleeper hit Cameron was given keys to the kingdom this time around with a budget of $102 million dollars. A
slight
increase over the last one. Question is how do you follow up a story
that had a perfect circular structure? Answer, you cheat. In the first
movie Reese explained to Sarah that once he was sent through time to
stop the Terminator John Connor and company would destroy the time
complex, “
Nobody goes home. Nobody comes through. It’s just him and me.”
So it seems things didn’t go according to plan.
John Connor discovers that a second and more advanced Terminator has
been sent back in time to kill his teen self, so he runs down the hall
to a room full of the T-800 series (That’s the Arnie model for those not
in the know), reprograms it to protect his younger self and sends it
back in time. So right out of the gate the wheels are starting to get a
bit wobbly. If John Connor had time to reprogram a Terminator, and had
full use of the time portal, why in the hell not send a reprogrammed
T-800 to go back and assist Reese? And why not send two Arnie models to
take on the T-1000 liquid metal Terminator? Cameron dodges these issues
by having these scenes cut from the script and we just get a brief
expository moment from Arnold giving a brief explanation as to what
happened in the future. Because this movie is a balls to the wall action
filled funfest the audience either won’t think of these plot
inconsistencies or if they do they won’t care. $520 million dollar box
office lends one to believe he was right.
“As improbable as it seems, I’ll be back.”
The time travel element that I question the most in this film has to
do with the very ending; the chip from the first Terminator is tossed
into molten metal, Arnie is then lowered in to be melted down as well,
after which Sarah and young John drive off into the uncertain future.
Now with Skynet erased from the timeline shouldn’t the events of the
first movie no longer have taken place? Once both chips are destroyed
the movie should have faded to black and then faded up to reveal Sarah
Connor back working as a waitress at Big Boys with no memory of Skynet
or Terminators. I will admit this wouldn’t be a very satisfy ending for
most viewers, even if it makes more sense, so I understand Cameron’s
reasoning here. The next film does try to patch it up a bit with a
little metaphysical stucco.
The third installment no longer has James Cameron at the helm,
Jonathan Mostow is in the directors chair, and here we find adult John Connor (
Nick Stahl)
tooling around America on his bike, all alone because Sarah has since
passed away from cancer. Judgement Day August 29th 1997 never happened
but John is still leery of Skynet sending more robots to kill him so
he’s been living off the grid. As he should be as it seems Skynet only
has one arrow in their quiver and they’ll keep using it again and again
and again. Unable to locate John Connor Skynet has opted on the plan of
killing his future wife and lieutenants, so a third Terminator is sent
back in time this one a T-X which has the morphing ability of the T-1000
but also can form complex weapons to blow shit up. What happened to
only living organics can travel through time? Both the T-1000 and T-X
can camouflage their appearance to look human but how does that fool the
intrinsic principle of the time machine? In
Terminator 2
we are told the T-1000 can only make bladed weapons, nothing as complex
as a bomb or gun, but apparently this new prototype does not have that
limitation. This is a clear case of making up shit as you go along
without a care for series continuity.
“I have a full array of awesome weapons, also breasts.”
The interesting thing this movie does is make time itself a sort of
thinking being, it will not be messed with, whatever we puny humans do
certain events will bloody well happen. John is injured in a bike
accident and ends up in the veterinary clinic where Kate Brewster works (
Claire Danes) to steal some meds, turns out they briefly knew each other before the events of
Terminator 2.
If the T-1000’s battle with Arnie had never taken place those two kids
would have hooked up, gotten married, and when the robot apocalypse
happened would have eventually become the leaders of resistance, but
because John had to go on the run with his mother after the battle at
Cyberdyne that didn’t happen. So time fixes this by throwing them
together years later. John, Kate and another Arnie Terminator do battle
with the T-X (
Kristanna Loken)
while also trying to prevent Skynet from going online and initiating
Judgement Day. Kate’s father, head of the military complex that has
taken up the torch that Cyberdyne dropped, sends John and Kate to what
they believe to be the facility that houses the system core for Skynet.
Turns out it’s just a nuclear fallout shelter and Kate’s father sent
them there so they could survive the coming Armageddon which he knew at
this point could not be stopped.
“Bombs bursting in air!”
This is one of the coolest elements of
The Terminator
franchise, the idea that Judgement Day was going to happen no matter
what humans or Skynet did. That all the time traveling done by robots
and humans were basically wounding the time stream which time, or forces
unknown, does its best to heal. This kind of flies in the face of
Sarah’s declaration “There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.”
Because it seems destiny is a bitch and some things are fated to be
whether you like it or not.
This chapter is set in 2018 and is the first movie to take place post
Judgement Day and deals with the ongoing battle between the human race
and Skynet. It’s also a pretty stupid movie. We are introduced to Marcus
Wright (
Sam Worthington),
who was on death row before Judgement Day, and who volunteered for some
rather radical medical experiments which are later revealed to be
cyborg related. Marcus wakes up in the ruins of a Skynet facility to
find himself in a bleak war torn world with no idea what has happened,
and worse he discovers he is no longer human but a robot with a
partially artificial cerebral cortex.
“I am not a robot, I am just a boring actor.”
Marcus was created by Skynet to lure John to their main facility so
they can finally end the Connor threat. I call bullshit! In this film
John Connor (
Christian Bale)
is only a low level mission leader, not yet the resistance leader that
is going to bring down Skynet, how do they know he is a future threat?
We even find out that Skynet has been looking for Kyle Reese (
Anton Yelchin) who is just a kid at this point. Is Skynet getting emails from their future selves, “
Dear us, look out for these two, they’re going to be trouble in a few years, thanks.”
Wanted for future crimes against Skynet.
We see no evidence of time travel in this movie so the only way
Skynet could know to watch out for Connor and Reese is if they had a
cyber-scrying pool or maybe robotic oracles. Either way it makes no
sense whatsoever. The film’s original ending had John die and Marcus
grafting Connor’s skin onto his cyborg body thus allowing him to
continue to lead the resistance, this was a ballsy ending and clever way
to explain how a human became such a threat to the machines, but the
script got leaked and so they changed it so Marcus just gives his heart
to the wounded Connor. That is a weak sauce way to end your franchise.
Thanks
McG.
The first
Terminator movie is brilliant and one of
my all-time faves, the second is an amazing action flick that though
kind of mucks up the continuity a little it is still a lot of fun, the
third gets major points for dealing with the immutable nature of time
but loses some for the stupidity of the T-X, and the fourth installment
is just best forgotten. Only the original nailed the time travel plot
elements beautifully while all of the sequels muddied the waters to a
certain degree, but we still got some badass action out of them.
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