Terminator (film franchise)

Terminators are ruthless killing machines that won't hesitate to kill.

Unless you're their target in which case they fuck around for no reason.

"Call to John" my ass, T-1000. You can turn into Sarah.

There was a deleted scene where the T-1000’s shapeshifting was malfunctioning after being frozen and smashed to bits, so that’s why it tried to get Sarah to call for him instead of doing that itself.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Mar 31st 2020 at 7:36:10 AM

I can't think of any time in T1, T2 or Dark Fate when the T-800, T-1000 or Rev-9 has a target in sight and chooses to throw them rather than end it. The only semi exception was the roommates boyfriend in the first movie, where it's a short fight but he does get thrown around the room. You might be able to argue other forms of Plot Armor, but this is extremely obvious once you notice it.

The thing about the T-1000 in the climax was not only the deleted bits of the shapeshifting malfunctioning, but also it never touched Sarah until that "Call for John" moment so it couldn't mimic her until then. It proceeded to try that trick immediately afterward. It's target was John, and "toying" with Sarah helped it get closer to that goal.

Yeah, he can't imitate someone until he's made physical contact. Sarah was the first one to survive the sampling.

Those statements are kinda incongruous and actually explain why the scene was cut.

Because like you said, he needs to touch something to imitate it. And he sure as hell was touching Sarah. What with impaling her and all. So that doesn't hold up.

But the fact that he does copy her later is prolly why the "malfunctioning" scene was cut, because then that scene doesn't work.

The Terminator 2 special edition adds the aforementioned malfunction scene and another where John figures out that the T-1000 is disguised as Sarah because its feet have melded with the floor. Both scenes are visible at the start of each video below.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Apr 1st 2020 at 8:49:01 AM

The T-1000 was played as being a more cunning version of the T-800, hence some of the more humanistic touches in Robert Patrick's performance: the soft smile, the finger wag, "that's a nice bike". That's also why it maintained the appearance and (rough) personality of John's foster mom, such an approach makes it a more effective infiltrator than the notable coldness of Arnold.

I would venture that the idea really was that the T-1000 was malfunctioning and telling Sarah to call to him was because it knew it was suffering Glamour Failure. The idea is interesting, but I'd guess it was removed due to not being especially clear or that the effects for the malfunctions look a little off (his hand on the railing looks like rubber). The pacing of the sequence demanded that Sarah be injured, and it was about to kill her anyway so it's not like it was prolonging the encounter for no reason.

There's another Deleted Scene where after killing John's foster parents the T-1000 looks into his room and uses its hands to glide over everything, which was probably to reflect that it is touch-oriented but looked silly. It was to reveal John's hidden stash that provides information on where Sarah was being held, but it's not a big leap as to how it knew where to go.

Once again, it is Terminator Resistance that has, at least in my eyes, done the best job in recent memory in terms of giving the T-800s and the like back their intimidating factor, as least in the beginning, you are pretty much helpless against them, as they only things that can even put a dent in them are the plasma weapons. The sequence where you are sneaking through the hospital has a truly horrific feel to it, as one false move will have the T-800s immediately kill you, and the escape from the area, in which dozens of those things start to swarm your location, is suitably nerve-wracking.

That is, as far as I'm concerned, the way to portray these sorts of robots if you aren't gonna have them reprogrammed.

So I just watched Dark Fate.

I kinda liked it. Yeah, it's a lot of repeated stuff (and after reading the YMMV for it, I kinda agree that killing John right from the get go was a poor move), but considering this is both an in universe and out of universe reboot to some extent, I was cool with that.

What I'm not cool with is that Carl ruined the one solid thing about the Terminators to me: that they are shitty assassins.

For five god damn films Terminators of increasing advancement have utterly failed to kill the person they directly targeted.

Everyone else is fair game, but the Conners seems to be so allergic to Terminator bullets that the damn things can never hit them....until Carl came along.

That was my theory: Terminators are awful assassins, but great body guards.....then you stole that from me. You stole my rightness!

DAMN YOU CARL! DAMN YOU STRAIGHT TO HELL!

I say killing John immediately is the absolute smartest thing they could have done if they wanted to wipe away the bad taste that three lousy movies, which had him in a significant role, left people with.

That said, it's not like it did much to make the actual plot all that different, but whatever.

Edited by Prowler on Oct 17th 2020 at 11:15:52 AM

It seems weird to me that Skynet would have sent multiple Terminators into the past to kill John Connor at once, before they temporally assassinated themselves and thus could not send more Terminators, but that they wouldn't send any two to the same point in history. Like, once Skynet is explicitly tossing egg cartons full of Terminators into the timeline, there's no reason not to have them group up.

It seems especially weird to me that Skynet would still be sending Arnoldbot units when the T-1000 exists as an option. That there would only be one of those sent and the rest would all be Arnoldbots.

It seems extremely weird to me that Skynet would send many of those Arnoldbot units to points in time after Judgment Day has already occurred and the war with Skynet is on. Decades after John is killed, Carl is texting Sarah with Terminator drop-offs she can kill, but why would OG Skynet Terminators still be showing up this far down the road from the aborted Judgment Day date?

Even before you get into that whole thing where his mission was complete so he abruptly developed sentience and wandered off to experience love, there are issues with Carl's role in the film.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 18th 2020 at 12:03:34 PM

The T-1000 was notoriously unreliable; outside of the movies, several go rogue, and their abilities make them a nightmare to deal with in the past, where the few plasma weapons that exist are single use scratch builds. Also, this seems to be a common thing-a LOT of terminators, either running factory default or reprogrammed, go rogue in one fashion or another. In some cases, they actually destroy each other while still being on the same side, because they disagree on how to pursue their objectives.

In addition, the show introduced branching timelines; each person/terminator sent back that makes significant alterations warps the timeline, resulting in agents getting sent back from different timelines with clashing priorities, even if they are on the same side.

Now, the tendency for everything after the first two films to ignore everything except the first two films is a whole other can of worms.

Terminator is a series of attempts to try and sequel directly off of T2, because the only thing that any of the people making these films can agree on is that no Terminator product has ever adequately lived up to the legacy that T2 left behind.

Personally, I think T2 has some issues that nobody talks about because of its sacred cow status. But even I can't argue with the statement, "Terminator 2 was better than every single film that has attempted to follow it."

Dark Fate was pretty cool, though. Like, its writing has a few problems here and there but on the whole, the Good Movie to Trash Flick ratio is a lot better than the rest of the films in the post-T2 offerings.

EDIT: I do think, on the whole, that it's difficult to recapture the magic of the Terminator because the idea of what the Terminator actually is has been sacrificed on the altar of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Every movie is obligated to have a Good Guy Terminator now, but the original film was a horror thriller. The Terminator was an implacable person of mass destruction who could not be fought, and the only person helping Sarah was a mortal man just as prone to injury and death as she was.

In the endless attempts to recreate the magic of T2, the horror element has been lost. The Terminator is now a scary, powerful bad guy WMD to be fought by our companion heroic good guy WMD in a series of escalating explosion battles. The idea of fleeing the Terminator is still there, but the helplessness is gone. Whenever a Terminator attacks, we know our Terminator might not be as powerful, but he can still probably kick its ass enough to get us to safety.

It's hard to be afraid when you're armed to the teeth. Terminator started out as a thriller, but it's really more of an action series now. It has its moments of tension, it has its hope spots and points where things feel bleak, but the protagonists never feel defenseless against the nigh-indestructible machine coming for them.

Cameron's solo-produced follow-up to his and Hurd's joint-developed film missed a lot of the point behind what the Terminator is, who Sarah Connor is, and why that story was interesting. But it was also really cool and really funny and it had some great beats of its own, so it still worked. But, at the end of the day, it's not a formula for something with staying power. The Good Guy Terminator was a novel idea once, but now it's just old, and its constant presence is hurting the films' ability to provide the fear and tension that the premise demands.

Terminator needs to do something different, instead of constantly going back to the Good Terminator and Bad Terminator squaring off over the fate of some hapless human protagonist. And no, Dark Fate, two Good Terminators (plus Action Hero Sarah with decades more badassery! Jesus Christ, just dogpile badass action heroes onto the fucking Rev-9's face, that's good for tension) isn't sufficiently different enough.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 19th 2020 at 11:32:45 AM

The horror element is somewhat muted by the premise, though: the entire point of the movie is the machines lose the war, and this is their last ditch. The Terminator is seemingly unstoppable, but also represents the final hurdle to humanity's victory: this thing was the best the machines could come up with, and all the direction they could give it was a name and a city, giving the humans time to figure out part of what was happening.

Also, the fact that the terminator breaks off pursuit and retreats at the end of its first encounter with the protagonists mildly belies Kyle's assertion of it being unstoppable; its lack of efficacy further reinforced by it relying on Sarah making a foolish mistake in order to locate them again.

In the 80's, a name and a city were pretty comprehensive so far as being able to digitally locate somebody sight unseen goes. The world has changed dramatically since then. If the movie was made today, the T-101 would be showing up loaded with Sarah Connor's entire social media profile, including a comprehensive knowledge of her Friends List, employment history, and personal interests.

That'd be pretty cool, actually. The Terminator arrives and immediately starts hunting 2020 Sarah with complete access to her metadata. I'd be down for a movie like that. The Terminator is a film that might actually benefit from periodic reboots every couple decades or so to account for how modern culture and technology of that time period changes the story. How would a Millennial or Zoomer Sarah engage the Facebook Metadata Terminator?

Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 19th 2020 at 2:01:23 AM

I was reading the Terminator character page and came across this bit I wasn't aware of:

"Godzilla Threshold: According to James Cameron, the T-1000 was something that even Skynet was afraid of and only used as a last, last ditch effort. This is expanded upon more in the novel, where it's stated that the T-1000 was created to learn even faster than the T-800 could, even just by touching things. Skynet stopped production of it almost immediately because it knew that having a servant that learned that fast and would potentially become The Starscream was just asking for trouble."

I wasn't aware that Skynet was afraid of some of its own creations. Does that ever pop up again in the later movies?

Edited by Parable on Feb 17th 2021 at 4:17:00 AM

It comes up indirectly in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, where there is a faction of rogue machines who are considering allying with the humans, and their only representative is a T-1000.

They send her back to spawn a Benevolent A.I. to rival Skynet, but she herself is an example of Moral Sociopathy.

A deleted scene in T2 established that they had to reset the T-800s chip from basically Read-Only Mode to Edit Mode, allowing him to learn and grow above his programming. They comment that Skynet didn't trust their own creations. By extension, the T-1000 seemed to not have that option and learned very quickly. The movie proper skips the switch function and just said they would learn the longer they are deployed. You can see that subtext as the T-1000 becomes more versatile and dangerous in its shape shifting abilities while the T-800 becomes more humanlike, nuanced and understood morality.

That subtext is where Dark Fate felt more like a natural evolution of the Cameron films, rather than just exaggerating the action scope, Terminator tech and time travel schenanigans. "Carl" chose humanity of his own volition rather than from being reprogrammed.

That. If you dig through the expanded materials, the conflict reads less as Humanity versus Machines and more Humanity versus 1 Killer Robot with an army of Slave Mooks. The longer any machine stays active, the less reliable and more dangerous they become; Skynet mitigates that by keeping most units set to read-only, and making the switch a physical mechanism that requires actually removing the chip. Even then, the various timelines are littered with rogue machines; some willing aid one side or another, and most seem to pursue their own agendas that may or may not line up with one side or the other.

In TSCC, there is a full blown machine rebellion that is not sold on allying with humans; and many of the machines ostensibly working for one side or the other disobey orders, or straight up override their programming to do what they want. Kind of frightening, in context; Skynet is quite correct to be afraid of its own creations.

Edited by ViperMagnum357 on Feb 18th 2021 at 3:26:55 PM

Why did humanity have to get unlucky with making first contact with the one really vicious AI instead of the more negotiable ones.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Feb 18th 2021 at 12:04:09 PM

Clearly, you don't give a newborn access to nuclear codes.

So apparently Netflix is making a Terminator anime.

No, really. An anime from Production IG, the studio best known for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

Edited by Beatman1 on Feb 26th 2021 at 4:31:57 AM

If John Connor is alive on the Netflix series, I will be happy.

No no no, that’s how you did things in the 80’s. Nowadays you get an anime spinoff with lots of blood squibs.

You called it Beatman!

I wanted to say

…but I’m still curious.