“Terminator” creator James Cameron felt the story was done after two movies, but of course, where there’s money to be made, there are stories to tell. So then we had comics, novels, another movie, a TV series, and now the first post-Judgment Day movie … and plot holes you could pilot a Hunter-Killer through.
“Terminator Salvation” is a mostly entertaining movie that has the dour tone of “Sarah Connor Chronicles” (gone is the humor of the first three films), but less brooding. We all remember Kyle Reese’s bleak war flashbacks in the first “Terminator,” and that’s the tone this movie strives for and achieves. Visually, this is a rich portrait of the apocalypse.
And there’s action. There’s a good sequence involving a bridge, a wrecking-ball truck, a Terminator-cycle, a bunch of abandoned cars and a giant flying machine that snags humans and tosses them in its brig. It’s not as great as “Ahnuld vs. the T-X” from “T3,” but it’s good.
But here’s the problem with a franchise that doesn’t have a continuity editor. In Cameron’s films, there was no mention of Terminators running on nuclear cores. If this were the case, the T-800 could have just self-destructed when it came out of the time bubble in 1984, thus achieving its mission of killing Sarah Connor.
In “Salvation,” John enters a Skynet facility and finds nuclear cores as part of the robot assembly line — thus creating the question of why the T-800 didn’t just blow itself up in 1984. That’s not Cameron’s fault; it’s a problem imposed on “Terminator” by this continuation.
Furthermore, in the 2018-set “Salvation,” John is obsessed with finding and protecting Kyle Reese so he can send him back in a time machine in 2029 to 1984 so he can be born and grow up to lead the Resistance. But if you really think about it, John shouldn’t be so concerned with going through the motions of what’s supposed to happen. In the last movie, he saw Judgment Day move from 1997 to 2003, so he should know he’s already living and breathing in a new timeline.
It’s also odd that Skynet holds Kyle in a cell rather than killing him. We know Skynet sees Kyle as a key member of the Resistance (rightly or wrongly), so it should logically just kill him. There’s no point in keeping him alive as bait for John, because by killing Kyle, John would cease to exist (at least that’s what Skynet thinks).
A surprising — and perhaps apocryphal — addition to this movie is Marcus Wright, a Skynet prototype cyborg that goes miles beyond the T-800: It doesn’t just look human, it believes it is human. It’s programmed with the memories of the human Marcus Wright, who died pre-Judgment Day, and it behaves in a completely human manner, unlike the T-800 or Cameron (from the TV series), who reveal their machine natures through various awkward, funny moments.
John has two movies’ worth of experience seeing that there are good robots out there (the events of the TV series happened in a different timeline), but he’s immediately suspicious of Marcus, setting a tone for his troops that leads to a big, messy shoot-’em-up. But if you think about it, if Marcus really was a Skynet plant, John and everyone around him would already be dead.
Or would they? “Salvation” further contradicts established “Terminator” lore when a fully functioning T-600 walks past John and doesn’t notice him. It has been well established that Terminators hunt by heat signatures, so John should’ve been dead in that situation.
In other ways, Skynet is more advanced than we were led to believe in previous stories. In this movie, we see underwater eel-like Terminators (previously, water was one of the rare safe havens for the Resistance because the heavy Terminators would drop like stones), Terminators that can survive molten steel (the only thing that could destroy the T-800 in “T2”), plus the incredibly advanced Marcus cyborg. Logically, Skynet shouldn’t have developed things like this for at least 10 more years. I’m even a bit surprised that the T-800 was already going into production in 2018.
It seems like the writers of “Salvation” had a selective memory about “Terminator” continuity, and I’m beginning to see why James Cameron said the story was done after two movies — it’s just simpler that way.
But I have to admit something: I’m still engrossed by the “Terminator” mythos. “Sarah Connor Chronicles” was among the better shows of the past season and I’ve enjoyed the “Terminator” books by Timothy Zahn and Aaron Allston. The first two movies are classics, the third one is solid and this one certainly held my attention.
I’ll still be scratching my head, but I’ll be back for “Terminator 5.”
Will you be back, too, or will you say “Hasta la vista, baby” to this franchise?