by XdarksparkX
Originally Written: May 8th 2010
[Images from AllMoviePhoto.com]
[Images from AllMoviePhoto.com]
Let this preface clearly state that James Cameron's Terminator films are awesome. Both films are heralded classics within the Sci-Fi/Action genre due to their deep lore and engrossing universe. However, there is one thing within the core of these movies that, when approached with basic logic, brings every possible suspension of disbelief crumbling to its knees:
JOHN CONNOR CANNOT EXIST.
Ladies and gentleman, courtesy of Kyle Reese, I give you The Savior Of The Human Race!
His prime directive: shouting “MEEEAAAAMMM!” every five minutes in an abhorrent screeching whine that will only be rivaled by Eric Cartman.
His prime directive: shouting “MEEEAAAAMMM!” every five minutes in an abhorrent screeching whine that will only be rivaled by Eric Cartman.
This slip is especially funny though, because T2 goes out of its way to drive the point home that: “there is no fate but what we make.” Yet that’s obviously flat-out bullshit because John Connor still turns into the bad-ass leader of the resistance with two completely different fathers!
Now, I’ve heard some people attempt to defend this by saying that you can’t ever find the beginning to a circle, and that’s why Kyle Reese being John’s father works. The problem is, time progression as we witness and experience it is linear. Okay, let me make my point simple. Think of time in the sense of a piece of string. Now, as pivotal / memorable events happen, you tie a knot at a certain point in that string. So eventually you’d have this piece of string with knots at various points. Now suppose you suppose you added a time-travel variant to this idea, and decided that at the tenth knot you wanted to go back to the fifth. If you go back, no matter how you alter it from then on, that knot still exists as it always had when it was originally formed. Someone had to be John Connor’s father before Kyle Reese made his trip back in time, because in the linear progression of events that the humans who witnessed the first resistance had to experience in order to get to the point where they send Kyle back in time, he was born chronologically after John. This whole ‘time as a loop’ thing doesn’t work within the basis of what needs to be accomplished in the narrative of the films.
Therefore, with this in mind we can only come to one conclusion: Edward Furlong’s whiney bitch of a character does not grow up to be the savior of the human race. The whine-box that sounds like nails on a chalkboard becomes the sorry son of a bitch that joins the Resistance and gets his ass blown up for being so goddamn annoying and attempting to blindly retreat without any cover fire what-so-ever. That’s the John Connor you have created Kyle Reese, LIVE WITH IT! The man we come to know as John Connor in Salvation and afterward has no connection. He was a wandering rogue, who had decided “enough of this Skynet/Cyberdyne bullshit” and started turning T-100’s into scrap metal with nothing but a handgun and a hunting knife like a total boss. Naturally, everyone who came in contact with him assumed that he was “the prophesized savior” and he was too devil-may-care to give a shit, especially since he couldn’t remember who he was and it was more convenient for people to address him with a painfully generic “normal” name like John Connor rather than his accepted code-name of Roguee McBadAss.
I honestly think when it came to T2, Cameron wanted to make an apocalyptic movie about us not knowing the power we wield and choosing our own fate by our actions in the present, and someone somewhere in the writing process came along and said “ya know, this would be a great sequel to Terminator.” Granted, this is nothing more than my own little conspiracy theory, but it at least gives credit to Cameron in saying that he’s not so blind to basic continuity that he would have the balls to have a line like “there is no fate but what we make” featured so prevalently in a movie when his protagonist is still set to be the future savior of mankind despite two different male parental figures (because if he wasn’t, Skynet damn sure wouldn’t waste the effort sending Terminators back in time to off him).
That brings up another logical fallacy, what the hell was up with Skynet going THE WRONG WAY when it’s assassination attempts on Connor were subsequently thwarted? Unless there's a bit of exposition I missed that tells me there’s some type of limit to the time-travel technology, there is no logical progression that a highly advanced network of computer intelligences would follow that would lead them to think that attempts LATER in John Connor’s life rather than EARLIER in the family lineage would be the more successful venture. That brings back another point, if Skynet initially had gone back and attempted to killed Sarah’s mother while she was pregnant with her, and Kyle went back to protect John’s grandma, then the whole “time is a loop” theory is thrown out the window into the horse manure.
I don’t want it to seem like I dislike these films, because I don't, but this was more of a pointing out that the original two films don't have as solid a narrative structure as a lot of people seem to believe they do. That doesn’t mean that these aren’t good films, or that their contribution to cinema is somehow diminished, it just means they possibly aren’t as deep in certain aspects of the plot as people would like to believe. And that’s okay. Cameron more than makes up for these logical fallacies with the elaborate and detailed timeline of Skynet’s rise to prominence, and if that’s where the primary focus was, then it’s a trade-off that I’m completely content with.
This man clearly has no relation to the child above. The discrepancy of Awesome between the two is far too great.
I honestly think when it came to T2, Cameron wanted to make an apocalyptic movie about us not knowing the power we wield and choosing our own fate by our actions in the present, and someone somewhere in the writing process came along and said “ya know, this would be a great sequel to Terminator.” Granted, this is nothing more than my own little conspiracy theory, but it at least gives credit to Cameron in saying that he’s not so blind to basic continuity that he would have the balls to have a line like “there is no fate but what we make” featured so prevalently in a movie when his protagonist is still set to be the future savior of mankind despite two different male parental figures (because if he wasn’t, Skynet damn sure wouldn’t waste the effort sending Terminators back in time to off him).
That brings up another logical fallacy, what the hell was up with Skynet going THE WRONG WAY when it’s assassination attempts on Connor were subsequently thwarted? Unless there's a bit of exposition I missed that tells me there’s some type of limit to the time-travel technology, there is no logical progression that a highly advanced network of computer intelligences would follow that would lead them to think that attempts LATER in John Connor’s life rather than EARLIER in the family lineage would be the more successful venture. That brings back another point, if Skynet initially had gone back and attempted to killed Sarah’s mother while she was pregnant with her, and Kyle went back to protect John’s grandma, then the whole “time is a loop” theory is thrown out the window into the horse manure.
I don’t want it to seem like I dislike these films, because I don't, but this was more of a pointing out that the original two films don't have as solid a narrative structure as a lot of people seem to believe they do. That doesn’t mean that these aren’t good films, or that their contribution to cinema is somehow diminished, it just means they possibly aren’t as deep in certain aspects of the plot as people would like to believe. And that’s okay. Cameron more than makes up for these logical fallacies with the elaborate and detailed timeline of Skynet’s rise to prominence, and if that’s where the primary focus was, then it’s a trade-off that I’m completely content with.
Posts
