I saw Terminator Salvation on Saturday. What can I say? I had time to kill. Anyway, here are a few things I really need to get off my chest. Don’t read anything else if you’re planning to watch this pile of poo:
- If you are about to coordinate an assault on the enemy, don’t blab the plans out on unscrambled longwave radio.
- If SkyNet is so great at taking normal human beings and turning them into Terminators, why spend all that time and energy building hoofing great big Terminators that all look like Arnold Schwarzenegger? As an infiltration device, Marcus Wright is a much better tool than Arnie will ever be. He’s a better actor, for one thing.
- Why, in 2018, does SkyNet give a flying monkey’s about either John Connor or Kyle Reese? How does it know that Connor is going to become a great leader at that stage? How does it know that Kyle Reese is going to be his father?
- Why are those Terminator bike things designed so that humans can ride them?
- Why, if Connor clearly has this messiah thing going on, do the resistance keep him on the front line? And how does this messiah thing start in the first place – does he go around bragging about being the future leader of mankind?
- Why does SkyNet – a computer – feel the need to explain all its plans in detail to Marcus Wright? Why does Marcus get repaired? Why is he allowed to escape? Why not just wipe his memory?
- Why, at the end of the film, does Kate Brewster cold bloodedly kill Marcus Wright by removing his heart and giving it to John Connor? In what way is that ethically defensible? How does she even know it will be compatible? Since when can vets perform open heart surgery on humans anyway?
There was at least one other major plot hole that really annoyed me but thankfully it is all starting to fade.
UPDATE: Slow on the uptake I know but it has just occurred to me: why does Marcus Wright need a heart anyway? All his other organs have been replaced by machinery so why does he need a circulation system and why does he die (albeit temporarily) when the T-800 punches his heart?
Nice points James. Though I have to say my main problems lie not with the plot inconsistencies, but simply with how utterly shit the film was. All I knew about “McG” was that he made Charlie’s Angels and everyone hates him, but surely giving someone loads of money and Christian Bale in order to make a film about the war against the machines had to be a golden egg? I wasn’t expecting Shakespeare, just a good summer action film. Didn’t even get that though did we? I was willing to let so much drop (including points like yours above), provided I just got to see around 2 hours of Christian Bale engaged in vicious warfare with some cool robots. In the end I didn’t even get to see some caterpillar tracks rolling over a pile of post-nuclear apocalypse human skulls. And why wasn’t there, at any point, a shot of a massive army of, say, 100,000 Terminators? Skynet and its army wasn’t even scary. Like you say, it even feels the need to explain its actions. In the form of Helena Bonham Carter…
I hate McG so much.
Paul (you’ll know me from New Humanist, though it’s safer to say this comment is left purely in a personal capacity)
@Paul Sims
Safe to say (not safer), that is…