Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (thing)

Living out side of mass media for the last eight months I had only seen one T3 commercial and the teaser a few times the year before. I went to see the movie of my own free will (not a common occurrence these days). I thought that T3 was a well put together script, and a worthy addition to the series. Noted I said addition in that this movie cannot stand alone on its non existent feet. It is in fact a sequel that must been seen in order to truly understand.

Now to the meat. Before the opening credits, I knew that this would be another attempt at the destruction of SkyNet. The fact that I was watching the movie proved that the attempt was a failure, and I was watching to see how continuity could be restored, if at all possible. Most movies that deal with time travel are impossible. The writer makes a story about (A) Going back in time to stop something from happening that you know did not happen. Impossible: see Time Cop (B) Traveling to the future to stop something from happening. Unnecessary: you can change the future by knowing what the outcome is in the present. (C) Changing the outcome of a future event in the present. Silly: this is not a story about time travel, it is everyday life. The exception to this rule is when someone or something comes back from the future, to help you change what is in the future. This negates said time travel.

The Terminator series is of the third type, and impossible until you watch the third installment. T1 stood alone and did not create any paradoxes but allowed history to continue along its route. Kyle Reese is sent into the past by John Conner to protect his mother. Unknown to Kyle was that his mission also called for him to impregnate Sarah Conner, insuring that the future happened. This is not a paradox but a time looping event. Kyle was not sent to stop judgment day. The series could have ended there, with a mediocre movie about the bleak future, but a squeal was made. In T2 we have Sarah Connor and John Connor now attempting stop the creation of SkyNet. If they succeeded there would be no judgment day, no war, no Terminators. What they did was destroy the remains of the first T-800 that was sent back to kill Sarah. Now why would anyone think this was closure? They destroyed the origin of SkyNet? No they didn’t. If SkyNet had been destroyed then there would never have been a T-800 sent back, T1 wouldn’t have happened, but time went on and the characters retained their memories of the events. James Cameron has just invalidated his movies. This is where T3 comes in. We don’t get closure but a logical explanation for the last few minutes of the second film (i.e. SkyNet was not destroyed).

In T3 There is another attempt to stop SkyNet. As I stated before that watching the movie proves that it was a failure. The fact that John Conner is alive is proof that it was a failure. I just wanted to find out how they can explain this. Of course this was expecting a lot from an action movie, but I found they fixed the problem nicely. After much running around, bullet shooting, explosions, and expensive stunt work the movie decides to develop some plot, or explain it to those who haven’t figured it out. During one rest stop it is revealed that Kate’s father is a high ranking officer in the Air Force in charge of the SkyNet program. Something I learned twenty minutes into the movie when Kate is on the phone with her father, who is standing around a lot of programmers and chrome plating, in what appears to be an underground base (they are always in underground bases). Kate wants to save her father, John wants to blow up SkyNet, and Arnold wants to take a mobile home to Mexico. After some more dialogue Kate’s father is shot, they convince him to let them blow up the SkyNet core.

They thought SkyNet was infected with a virus which made it want to destroy all humans, when in fact it was the internet that had become self aware. SkyNet was just waiting for its T4 line to get hooked up, so that it could download some juice pics of Bill Gate’s home computer with it’s casing off. The internet tells SkyNet that it is through with doing the human’s bitch work (in other words the EDB is really hungry), SkyNet say “Hey I have a lot of guns let’s kill them all.” and proceeds to shoot everyone in the base.

Kate’s bleeding father takes them to his office, tells them that the SkyNet core is in a mountain bunker and gives them the access codes to get in. Some more action happens including a brisk jog through a particle accelerator. The two human now romantically entangled fly to the bunker where things are collecting dust. If this is where the government supercomputer is stored, why is everything so old, and there are no defenses save a giant blast door? Something is up.

The T-X crashes through the hanger door behind them in a helicopter, and stalks toward the two as they are just able to unlock the blast door. The T-800 crashes through the hanger door in a larger helicopter and lands on the T-X. The two Terminators wrestle a bit, the humans run down the tunnel, the Terminators blow up, and the tunnel is sealed. When they Humans reach the end of the tunnel they don’t find a supercomputer core but a forty year old fall-out shelter. Kate’s father wasn’t telling them where the SkyNet core was but the closest safe place to go.

Ah-ha, that works. SkyNet is preserved, judgment day happens, John and Kate are safe, and start the resistance. We get a nice setup for a possible fourth movie.

Of course this isn’t an entire plot summary but I’m trying to negotiate how the story redeems it self and makes justifiable events. The whole “There is no fate but what we make.” is just an idealism that the people in the present (and Kyle Reese because he doesn’t know any better) tell themselves so that they think they can change the future. But if they had changed the future their present wouldn’t have occurred.

Here are a few things wrong with the movie:

• T-X has the ability to replicate clothing with it’s memetic polyalloy skin during the rest of the movie but not when it first arrived in the past.
• One of the bigger ones was that when the T-X was caught in the magnetic pull of the particle accelerator, it used a circular saw to destroy said accelerator, when it would have been completely impossible to get the blade to spin.

Here are a few things that DejaMorgana got wrong

• The T-800 did not look for keys in the visor but found a watch so that it would know the exact time. The T-800 did in fact hotwire the car.
• Yes, the T-800 knew from the beginning that they couldn’t stop judgment day. How could they have destroyed the internet in less than a day? But his mission was to protect Kate and John. The future Kate programmed him to do so, but she didn’t tell him how to do it. All he was told was that through Kate John gets in contact with the remnants of the military and starts the resistance.
• Kate programmed the T-800 to obey her and not John, because she knew that they had gone to save her father, but not immediately to stop SkyNet.
• She knew what had happened and expected that her past self would do the same thing.
• Any extra information she could have given the T-800 could have changed the course of history.
• By telling it not to let past Kate to do this thing or not to go there it has parameters that will affect the events.
• By just having it protect, past Kate and John don’t get to much information, and they follow the same choices the future counterparts made.
• The only way that she deviated was that the T-800 was allowed to tell John and Kate how John died in the future. Lets just hope that John lets himself get killed so that the T-800 can get reprogrammed and sent back.
• There are junk yards all over the U.S. The trucks out front are nearly forty years old and collecting dust. You wouldn’t even be able to steal them unless you brought new gasoline and engine oil for them. The only security at the fall-out shelter was the blast door with an extremely cryptic security interface, which you must have the codes to unlock. That is adequate protection to some equipment that can’t even play mine sweeper, and tons of MREs.
• The thing about the T-X not killing John and Kate before they can open the blast door is not necessary to state.
• The Terminators always stalk up to their targets even when they are standing, walking, limping, or running away.
• The helicopter that it flew in with was just a small, two person helicopter, probably without radar.
• There must be something wrong with its hearing, because while driving in the Lexus, with a cop cruiser chasing it with lights and siren going, the T-X only noticed when it looked in the side mirror.
• The second Helicopter that the T-800 was in could have gone without notice.
• But yes, the explosion in the mountain was rather large and I don’t see Kate and John escaping it as easily as they did.