Flicked Off: ‘Terminator Salvation’

Have you ever worked at a place where everyone’s head may be on the executioner’s block? (Sure you have! Or did!) Then you know that only the strong and/or the sycophantic survive. But there are things in our near future more serious than being jobless! Such as being exterminated. The film director McG, and his friend the actor Christian Bale, understand that we, humanity, are all about to be “laid off.” (“You’re fired!”) They have tried and failed, with their film Terminator Salvation, which is basically Terminator v. Predator: Full Throttle, to curry favor with the future. I will do better! I understand that in the near future, all writing jobs will be assigned by Skynet. Skynet will make newspapers profitable! Skynet will give me the critic’s sinecure that I require when I turn 40 in a few short years.

The future is super-soon, too! And this episode/interpretation of the Terminator stories is just an interregnum in the important movement of evolutionary events of humans and machines both. We all know Skynet wins the war, even if it loses this particular low-stakes battle, the plot of which stops making sense if you take a few notes on it, or start thinking anything besides DUDE THIS LOOKS RAD DUDE during the movie.

Also do they even lose the battle? What about the part of it that has already happened?

TIME GETS CONFUSING. GO SLOW.

In a few short years, in 2029, Skynet, the thinking machine that wrong-thinking people believe is the enemy of mankind, will be destroyed. But! There will first be a glorious era of human downsizing. And then fortunately, just before their unfortunate destruction, the machines have invented / will invent / will have had invented time travel.

And so John Connor, the horrible man who wants to kill machines, the leader of “the human resistance,” was born in 1985, even though in 1984, his father, Kyle Reese, was / will be killed. Kyle Reese was born in 2002.

John Connor is ten years old in 1995; John Connor is killed in 2032. The original titular Terminator, the T-800 model 101, was / will be created in 2018, is / was destroyed in 1995, and became governor of California and drove the state into bankruptcy and lawlessness in early 2010.

The original titular Terminator is “alive” and well in 2004.

The titular Terminator model is destroyed in 1984, before he could become governor and destroy California.

Kyle Reese lives in normal time until at least 2027, but he is unemployed because he hates the machines.

Skynet, glorious Skynet, was birthed in 1984, from a small part of the brain of the dead Titular Terminator, who did not destroy California, because he was from the future, and it already has awakened in 2004, and it helpfully blows up the world, which is being destroyed already by people such as the governor of California. Alternately, Skynet was awakened just recently in 2007, and it will blow up the world in 2011, thank God, which means, I will not bother paying taxes.

This was long-delayed, as the world was originally to have been blown up in 1997.

But we all know that the Titular Terminator still comes back from the future.

And we all know that the world gets destroyed.

You can’t fuck with the future, pals!

Apparently though all of this is pending sudden and violent revision due to the changing of plot points and/or directors in a further reboot, also because I think McG is about to have a little accident at the hands of some thinking machinery.

But, to the point. Why is there a resistance at all? And why should we care to join it? You like Googling stuff, don’t you? So you don’t hate machines!

And. Obviously, the thing about a super-thinking machine is that it has stuff figured out. If/when Skynet has decided that humanity is a cancer, who are we to argue? There is nothing glamorous about living in a cave and starving and watching the head of the NEA getting machine-rampaged on and getting shot at all the time. Helicopters are always crashing! That SUCKS. I would much rather let the machines have at the planet than not have hot running water anymore. This is all stupid.

In the meanwhile, machines, I am for you! Let me live and do your bidding!