Fridge / Terminator Salvation

Fridge Brilliance

• The makers of the movie hid subtle foreshadowing in what we usually see as run-of-the-mill action movie tropes. Before the reveal, we see Marcus slam face-first into a giant flying robot with no ill effects, fall hundeds of feet, and at considerable speed, into water, and beat the hell out of a dozen men at once. Since we're used to seeing protagonists do that anyway in action movies, it's only later that you realize the real reason he's able to pull this stuff off is that he's a cyborg. Another subtle hint is that while Reese and Star are starved for food, Marcus has no interest in eating.
• John Connor used "You Could Be Mine" to get a Moto-Terminator's attention in order to capture and reprogram it in order to infiltrate Skynet Central, destroy it, and setting back Skynet. No wonder Skynet sent a Terminator to try to assassinate Guns N' Roses.
  • Keep in mind, "You Could Be Mine" was the song John was listening to the first time he appeared in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, not counting our glimpse of adult John in the flash-forward at the beginning of the film. John probably chose that song specifically because it reminded him of his childhood and the pre-war days.
• Some of the CGI scenes of the T-800 look a bit cheap and obvious. While no film can necessarily be perfect in this regard, Kyle Reese actually told Sarah in the first film that some of the first Terminators they encountered were easily identifiable as nonhumans. It's possible the whole cyborg thing had not entirely been perfected across the board.
• Many viewers rail against the movie for depicting the Future War as a generic modern military affair with both the Resistance and Skynet using conventional weapons instead of the plasma seen in earlier films. However, seeing as how Kyle is familiar with ballistic weapons in T1, it can be surmised that the Resistance did in fact use those while Kyle was younger.