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What Doesn't Work With The Terminator Salvation Plot
Reported by Jay Cochran - 03:26 PM 2009.12.05
 I was watching Terminator Salvation (recently released on DVD and Blu-ray this week) when I realized there is a very significant hole in the story for this new movie. Before you continue reading this, you should be warned it is filled with significant SPOILERS. So if you have not yet seen the movie, you may want to stop reading this article until you have watched it.Now that I’ve gotten the spoiler warning out of the way, let me also state I probably am not the first person to have pointed out the error. I didn’t really see it the first time I watched the movie in theaters. Now the error (which probably won’t shock you) stems from the role time travel plays in the entire Terminator saga. Like many movies that involve time travel, things often get confusing with the idea of how something in the present can affect things in the future or even the past. The new Star Trek movie, which also dealt with time travel, did a good job of overcoming this problem by saying everything that happened after the time travel occurred was part of an alternate universe and did not impact the prime universe we were all familiar with. With Terminator, it’s not that simple. As we all know from the first Terminator movie, the Terminators send one of their killing machines back in time to the 1980’s in order to kill the mother of John Connor, the leader of the human resistance against the machines in a post-apocalyptic future. This causes John Connor to send resistance fighter Kyle Reese back in time to stop the Terminator and save his mother so the he can be born. As we know, Kyle stops the Terminator at the cost of his own life, but not before falling in love with Sarah Conner and conceiving John. This sets in motion the horrific events that the resistance was trying to stop. Now we come to the current movie (Salvation) which takes place between Judgment Day and Skynet’s decision to send a Terminator to eliminate Sarah Conner. Kyle Reese is just a teenager and hasn’t even officially joined the Resistance army, and John Conner is only leads a group in the Resistance not the entire thing. As events unfold, Kyle is taken prisoner by the Terminators and the Resistance is presented with an opportunity to grab total victory and take out the Terminators once and for all. Now here is where the problem starts to come in. John Connor learns that Reese (who he knows will go on to become his father) has been captured and is at Skynet headquarters which is targeting for destruction by the Resistance. John begs the Resistance leadership to hold off its attack long enough that he can go in to rescue his father, stating if they don’t let him do this then all their futures are lost (basically saying if his father dies now, John will never be born and all mankind will be lost). So here is the problem with all this. Even if John were to save his father (which of course he does end up doing) and they commence with the planned attack to wipe out Skynet, then wouldn’t that in fact have the same effect as if Kyle Reese had been killed? I mean if the Resistance beat the Terminators this early in the war, then Skynet would have never invented the ability to time travel eliminating the need to send Reese back in time to meet his John’s mother. Of course if you think about it even more, if Connor just quit leading the Resistance then the Terminators would have no reason to send one of their machines back in time to destroy his mother. If that never happened, then the damaged parts of the Terminator would never have fallen into the hands of corporations. Without that advanced technology, they would never have had the ability to go down the road that allowed them to create the computers that eventually took over thereby stopping the Terminator-infested future everyone was so desperate to stop. I know the whole thing really can make your head hurt when you really start to think about it, which is often the case with movies that use time travel. (For those familiar with Star Trek Generations, I still fail to understand why Picard chose only to go back in time to just seconds before the missile launch to try and stop Soran when he left the rift instead of going back to when Soran was still on the Enterprise where they could just take him prisoner and throw him in the brig.) As far as Terminator goes, I guess there really is no easy solution to this plot problem. It probably didn’t even occur to them it was a problem. I guess the lesson here is that we just shouldn’t think so hard about fictional tales or try to rationalize them; we should just accept them for the fantasy getaway they are meant to be. Share your thoughts about this below with us.
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