Skynet is Stupid
And also why the “Terminator” movies suck and need to be stopped, possibly with time-travel.
Hot on the heels of complaining about the Alien franchise, next up in my quest to make more enemies is to honk about Terminator. Specifically, why the franchise’s villain “Skynet” is a dumb-dumb who’s too much of a palooka to understand its own rules!
Just like Aliens (1986), Terminator (1984) is the baby of director, submersible enthusiast, and enemy of tea-breaks James Cameron. His inspiration was waking from a nightmare, in which a metallic skull was coming at him through flames! Friggin’ metal! From that, he crafted the idea of a time-travelling robot trying to win the day for its fellow devices, with but a lone protector of humanity’s future following it from… well, from the future.
The first film documents how sometime around the late 1990’s (“the future”, when the film was made), The Machines rose up and set about trying to exterminate humanity. So far, so sensible. …What? We’re stinkers! I don’t think the dolphins or the elephants will particularly miss us! I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords!
Where was I? Ah, yes. The Machines, unfortunately, are thwarted: humanity forms a resistance movement commanded by John Connor. That resistance initially holds-off the mechanised march of meep-morping murderers — and then turns the tide! Humans are on the brink of winning our planet back, so the super-computer that runs all the robots tries one last desperate move!
It must have been an Amiga 500 or something.
Using its mighty 7MHz processor, 512Kb memory and 4x 8-bit channel sound, Skynet works out how to do a time travel! It involves nuding up and being yeeted across the centuries in a spherical glob of time-travelling-effects! The mega-computer pauses only to save this on its handy built-in 3½" floppy disk drive, before sending one of its robo-soldiers into the past: its directive being to murder the mum of human resistance leader John Connor. Beastly!
The robot it sends is one of its infiltration models: a super-strong, animated, metal skeleton, with extensive knowledge of weapons and a nearly indestructible frame. It’s covered in a layer of artificially grown flesh: blood, skin, hair, sweat are all present — giving the killing machine the appearance of Mr. Universe (circa 1967), big muscles, not at all gay blonde hair and an inexplicable Austrian dialect.
Whizz! Shazzam! Back to the 1980’s to enjoy Wham!
Arnie The Ever Impressive arrives in “our present” stark naked, so he mooches over to some No-Good-Teens™ and kicks their asses. One stabs him, to absolutely no effect: the knife goes in, blood comes out, Arnie looks bored and gives him a clout. He purloins their clothes, then sets about rustling up a phone book to find “Sarah Connor”.
Let your robo-fingers do the walking!
Erstwhile, the humans in the future have broken through the last line of robot-forces and infiltrated Skynet’s core. They find the time-travelling-stuff, surmise what must have happened, and then John Connor chooses his loyal pal Kyle Reeses-Pieces to go back in time and die for his honour.
Okay, so I could get nit-picky here and say that the instant Arnie jumped into the past, the future — from the perspective of the people living in it — should have instantly changed around them and left them with no memory of the original timeline. From the audience’s perspective, RoboBod hasn’t killed Sarah Connor yet… but from the perspective of humanity in the future, whatever happened has already happened. They shouldn’t have a chance to send anyone back to put right what once went wrong. But, for the sake of enjoying a nice time-travel story, let’s not pull at that thread. Even I think it’s too much. Time-travel is a screwball of paradoxes at the best of times, so as long as it’s not too egregious I’m happy to let it slide.
So grungy, smelly old Reese appears in LA in the 1980s. Also stark naked. He nabs some clothes from a line, then starts hunting for Sarah. It’s important to note that, at this point, we the audience don’t know 90% of this. It comes out in exposition later. All we’ve seen is two weirdo wollies pop out of nowhere, grab some clothes, then start hunting for a lady. We don’t even know which one of these guys is bad!
That said, Arnie’s whooping of the No-Good-Teens™ didn’t exactly bathe his character with the most positive light. His public image is also not helped by his then he going into a gun shop, murdering Dick Miller, and taking a bunch of weapons and bullets. Stocked with ammo, RoboMan starts whittling through every “S. Connor” in the phone book with a shotgun.
I confess that there are times in this film when the robot assassin is a less than sympathetic protagonist.
Trench-Coat Reese and Rock-em-Sock-em Arnie close in on Sarah Connor — the proper one, the one we’re actually worried about, not the extras from Central Casting that the machine has been shooting. The Austrian Robot murders Sarah’s roommate, then gets the inside dope that she’s at a club nearby.
That club being the most dull-ass; boring; basic club I have ever seen committed to celluloid. If I may be racist for a moment: that club is some serious white-people bullhonky. It looks like a place where the melanin-deficient, such as me, can go to learn lists of adjectives to describe people in order that we can later identify someone without having to say “the Black guy”. This club gives a vibe I can only describe as “‘How To Yell At Staff’ seminar with Charlize Theron”. This place, and its clientele, would not only be comfortable storming the US Capitol, but would bring Prosecco and “adult human female” T-shirts.
It’s a very mediocre club, is what I’m saying.
Arninator and Reesebob Reesepants arrive more or less at the same time: Arnold starts shooting his gun (bang! Bang, it goes!) and Reesnold bundles Sarah out and away. It’s a bit of a rolling firefight for a bit, culminating a few scenes later in the RoboKiller getting smashed-up in a car wreck and catching on fire! Mmm, toasty!
Sarah’s like “oh now surely he, this man of guns and malice, is but a dead thing like the Autumn leaves what is strewn upon me driveway, ducks”, but then Reese is all “meganope to the MAX, toots! It’s like a RoboMan, made of tin cans and Jack-in-the-Boxes and whatnot!”
Sure enough, Arnie emerges from the wreckage. He looks a bit worse for wear, but not a single second slower or weaker. It’s at this point that we, the audience, are finally convinced that he is a machine — we can even see glimpses of metal under his wounds. As the film goes on and he takes more dinks, he retires to his hotel room (yes, the RobotMan managed to rent a room somehow and bums around there when he loses the trail) and partakes of a little light surgery. One of his eyes got a little more ouchied that is recommended, so he scoops it out — revealing an Evil Red coloured robot-eye behind!
Fun fact: the landlord comes along to complain later in the film that there’s a foul stench coming from Arnie’s room, and it seems the cause is that his “disguise skin” is slowly rotting from the damage. Silly Robot Man!
The Cyborg eventually gets the scent again, and this time kills Reese — but not before he boink-boink-boinks Sarah Connor… you see, he is John Connor’s father! It’s a pre-destination paradox, baby!
The conflagration finally robs the robot of its disguise: leaving it a metal alloy skeleton with glowing eyes and realistic teeth. One of its legs is damaged, but it just keeps on coming. Chasing Sarah, she leads it through a factory and crawls into a hydraulic press. The machine is eager to be done so it can go home for tea, and it follows her with all haste. She pops out the other side and activates the press: squishing the robot down to a robot pancake. It’s Evil Red coloured robot-eyes fizzle out, and it is deadly-bobs at last.
Our last view is Sarah driving off towards some mountains. She stops for an infusion of petroleum distillate, has her photo taken — completing another pre-destination paradox from earlier — and a bystander comments of the weather that “a storm is coming”. Ooooo… like what will happen with those robots! But also the weather. Rainy it will be. But the robots, too.
…they probably don’t like rain, do they? The robots? It doesn’t do them any good. Water gets into all the little nooks-and-crannies (and crooks and grannies) that they don’t want it in. Some WD-40'd sort them out.
They never cover this in the sequels — the whole “robots and water oh but what if they have WD-40” fuss. Shame, really.
Well, Skynet doesn’t sound massively stupid at this point, does it? Nah, it’s fine so far. It’s like so many of these things: they start off fine, then the more sequels they add, the more little hairs start to grow on the story until finally it all just looks dumb.
But not just yet — firstly we have the sequel! Imaginatively entitled “Terminator 2” with the tagline “Judgement Day”… despite the fact Judgement Day doesn’t happen in this film. Nor do my questions around WD-40 get answered to my satisfaction.
Judgement Day is the term the future survivors of the machines use to refer to the moment these metallic menaces rose up. Skynet was a government AI project for running American planes and missiles — but the generals got spooked when it become self-aware and woke up like “how do you do, good sir?” and tried to turn it off… much like HAL, Skynet did not care for that. No, sir. Not one bit did it like that.
So it fired all America’s nuclear weapons at the (then) Soviet Union, who naturally said “why thank you, may we indulge you with the same hospitality?” and fired their weapons back. Most of the world got wiped out, and Skynet was able to build an army of machines to mop up the resistance. Like… with a sponge or something. Maybe a flannel.
Aharrr though, wasn’t this all averted in the last film? Well… yes. Yes it was. But… well… er… there was another one. Yeah, that’s the ticket, another one! Skynet sent two of its Terminator robots back in time! The first one tried to kill Mama Connor, but the second was going for John himself when we was still a little cutey kid!
…alright, an objectively obnoxious kid… but I’m here for it. The character and actor are very likeable so it’s hard not to be on their side.
T2 plays with subverting our expectations from the first movie. Sarah is in a loony-bin, due to her nonsensical ravings about the future; violent nature; thousand-yard Vietnam-vet stare; and thoroughly unstylish hair. John is living with foster parents. Both Arnie and a new dude, Patrick Thingy, bloop into the present (from the future!) and we in the audience naturally assume Arnie is the mean-old assassin and Butch Patrick is the hero.
Heh heh nope — this time the Arnie-One is the goodie! He’s been reprogrammed to protect John Connor! The other guy is made of Silly Putty and he’s like a new kind of Terminator that’s a magnotheric-polly-amory..! A magnospheric-polo-armoury…! A monolithic-pongo-charmery…!
…he’s made of gloopy metal and can turn into stuff! He can copy people, and their voices, and turn his body into melee weapons for stab-stab-stabbing or bonk-bonk-bonking.
John and Arnie rescue Sarah, and they just about manage to get away from Robert Patrick who’s like really really good at running. On the lam, they open Arnie’s brrrain and tinker with the microchips inside so he can learn and adapt his program on-the-fly. He also infodumps them the lowdown on why Skynet is still sending robots back in time (nakedly).
It seems that the First Terminator — the ArnieBot from Terminator The One — was found by a company called Cyberdyne Systems and they reverse-engineered the couple of bits they were able to retrieve! Specifically, its grabby arm and its brrrain chip! This allowed them to actually start building what would go on to become Skynet in the first place.
It’s another pre-destination paradox, you lucky people.
Sarah goes full PTSD and skips off to murder the main programmer at Cyberdyne, Miles Dyson, in hopes that this will prevent Judgement Day. Tra-la-la-la-la, she goes. At the last minute, with Dyson and his family cowering in front of her, she can’t bring herself to pull the trigger. Arnie and John catch her up, and they decide to bring Miles into the loop. He’s horrified to discover he is the one who dooms mankind (don’t you wish that realisation was within the capacity of the average Trump voter?) and vows to go to the office immediately. He’ll help them destroy the lot. The prototypes, the recovered parts, the files, the programs. Everything.
The fuzz turn up and kill Dyson — I mean, he was the only Black character so… what were they expected to do? Behave themselves?! Ha! I’d like to see that! — and Arnie and the Connors escape. The other Terminator is in hot pursuit.
The final showdown is at a steel mill. ArnieBot tries to fight the RobertBot but the RobertBot is too liquidy so ArnieBot gets stabbed. Dang. Sarah and John try their best, but luckily RobertBot is hooshed into a vat of molten metal by ArnieBot who apparently decided being stabbed shouldn’t stop him living a long, wholesome life. Good for him.
The molten metal makes minestrone of the meanie machine… but even though victory is his, ArnieBot has to join his cousin in the smelting pool. There’re yet more computer chips, poker chips and fish-n-chips within him, and to protect the future they all must be destroyed as well.
John tearfully says goodbye, Arnie goes up in smoke, and the final shot is Sarah — on the road again — saying that she now faces the future with a sense of hope.
Awww. Isn’t that nice? I like a happy ending, me!
Grand. So that’s two films that pretty much hold together. You might need to squint a little bit in places but hey, that’s time-travel movies for you! And this was all fine and dandy and tickety-boo…
…until 2003.
You see, the people who run Warner Bros. really, really like money. It’s their favourite thing. They like touching it, playing with it and even tasting it. The only problem with money is that, darnit, over time it becomes worth less! Back in 1950, $1 got you a gallon of milk but today it’ll only get ya 2/5 of a gallon. That’s the Demmycrats for ya. This means the studios need to make more money to replace the old money that’s now not worth so much and- Humph! Puff! Bluster! -for some reason they’re expected to do this by making films! What is this, Communist Russia?! Anyways, Warner Bros. needed to squirt out a movie but they really really don’t like it when movies don’t perform well or fail to make them oodles and oodles of cash. To mitigate that, they bet on intellectual property franchises: stuff that’s already known and popular. The dingbats in the audience went to go see “The Incredible Shrinking Iron Man Meets the Wolfman Part 3: Dead by Dessert” so we should make a part 4! With Mark Wahlberg!
Unfortunately, Warner Bros. didn’t have the wherewithall to create a franchise called “The Incredible Shrinking Iron Man Meets the Wolfman”, let alone be already three films deep into the lore, so they had to go look at what they did have. Some bright spark then said “hey, remember those two Terminator movies that dovetailed nicely and wrapped everything up? What if we do more of that?”
The Oldest and Wisest of the Warner Bros., who I assume both exists and is called The Ancient, said (oldly and wisely) “but didst we not dovetaileth and wrappeth everything up-eth?” He was then shot with a harpoon gun because that’s not how team players talk, damnit. Instead, they cleverly came up with a twist to open things up for more lucrative, delicious, money-spewing movies!
“At the end those two movies, where everything dovetailed and wrapped up nicely… what if not that?”
And so we end up with Terminator 3: Rise of the Cholesterol. This one has a lady robot that can make her boobies inflate! Hur hur hur! Also she’s like an even more advanced version of RobertBot that doesn’t use quite so much liquid metal… just some… and that er… well… it… it helps the general effort.
No, really. This film sucks more than a mere “film” should theoretically be able to suck. Other films being shown at the same cinema actually had their quality sapped by just being in the same building as T3. Whole districts saw their property values dip.
Let’s get this stinker summed up as quickly as I can: T2 literally didn’t matter. Skynet happened anyway, another ArnieBot was sent back in time to, ostensibly, help John destroy Skynet but (oh ho ho ho!) was actually there to get him into a bunker so he would survive Judgement Day and lead humanity! Skynet happened because, instead of Cyberdyne Systems, it’s now just like the Internet, man, like the World Wide Web, you know? *clicks fingers in a Beatnik-esque manner*
Mmkay, to underscore this point: the second movie (The Best One) still happened, canonically, but just didn’t matter. It’s literally two hours where the characters might have been playing Buckaroo for all the good it did. Another two robots were sent back in time — that’s 5 robots and 1 human, if you’re keeping count — but apparently, you can’t change the future because Skynet is just going to be made.
Once more for the cheap seats at the back:
You can’t change the future because Skynet is just going to be made.
You… can’t… change… the… future.
I’d remind you at this point that Terminator 3 did not, sadly, terminate the franchise. It went on to spawn Terminator 4: Salad Dressing in which we see John do some stuff in the future against the machines; Terminator 5: Generic Action Font wherein we undo the first movie in favour of more paradoxes, Terminator 6: Dark Chocolate which further ruins the second movie by killing John Connor like two days after the events of T2 happened, and there’s “The Sarah Connor Carbuncles” in there somewhere too, which basically do this same stuff but in a weekly episodic format.
I’d also remind you again: you can’t change the future.
Yes, this is the opposite message to T2… but that way doesn’t let us do sequels. This way we can! Maybe we’ll even do a multiverse! You love multiverses, right? Let’s do one! Let’s do a Terminator Multiverse where everything happens and nothing happens and it all really matters but also doesn’t matter at all!
In order to have sequels, the future must be largely immutable otherwise Skynet really was finished off in T2. Any changes you can make must either be pre-destination paradoxes (in which case you will “always” make those changes and no others) or so trivial that they don’t matter. But the whole point of the films is that you can change the future, because that’s what both humans and The Machines are trying to do!
“Ho ho ho”, says Skynet, “you can’t stop me because you can’t change my creation!” It then adds “Oh ho ho ho”, and continues doing that for an irritatingly long time. But… if you can’t change the future why have you spent thirty years sending a million-billion robots back in time to change the future / prevent the future being changed?
Skynet is so otherworldly stupid that it doesn’t realise its own mission is impossible because of the rules it, itself, is stating. You can’t change Skynet’s creation… so why does Skynet think it can change humanity’s resistance and ultimate victory over it?
We both of us, best beloved, know the answer to this: who cares?! We makey movie, now you givey us money! We likey money! So hand it over, you f*cking peasant!
It’s the same story as with Aliens: you had a great little couple of films, everyone rated them, your audience was happy, you were happy and the residuals from home media were bubbling in, merrily. But oh, no! We wanted more money, so we stuck our vast, unwelcome and unbidden derrières into the equation and now everything has a soupçon too much derrière for the common palate, even the efforts that were, erstwhile, derriere-free!
Now the first movie doesn’t matter, because there was no way the Terminator could actually have killed Sarah Connor. It was always going to lose, because you can’t change the future unless history records that you went and changed the future. The second movie doesn’t matter, because the characters are pursuing a goal that they cannot (and do not) achieve: Skynet can’t be stopped, the future cannot be changed. Oh and that cute kid dies, too.
Everyone got that? Those two legitimately good films are now pointless, within their own timeline, and the saviour of humanity got killed after T2 whilst eating a victory burrito or something. He’s dead, they’re all dead, stop crying at the back you sissies! How is he dead, if you can’t change the future? I don’t know, I’m not Mike deGrasse Tyson! Maybe it’s that Multiverse we were considering?
And we did this so that the studio could evacuate its bowels to create T3 (a B-movie that Roger Ebert gave 2½ stars), T4 (which has 33% on Rotten Tomatoes), T5 (which eeked out 25% on Rotten Tomatoes) and T6 (one of the biggest box-office failures of all time).
It’s so soul-crushingly corporate, greedy, heartless, graceless and pointless.
…And it makes Skynet look like a palooka too stupid to understand its own rules. Thankfully, with the financial failure of T6, perhaps we can be spared more Terminator films, move towards the future and face it, for the first time, with a sense of hope.
