First of all, there’ll be spoilers aplenty, since I won’t be really reviewing the last installment of the Terminator series, but rather pointing out the gaping holes in the story. Why? Because you really shouldn’t start filming when your script is still shitty and illogical.
Secondly, I’m one of the few people who actually like Terminator 3. It might not have been on the same level as the first two movies, but it was a solid action flick with a delicious ending. “Who’s in charge there?” – “I am.” Eat that, Star Wars, with your childish “Darth Vader, can you hear me?”
But on to T4. One of the hardest parts in writing a story is creating a villain who’s strong enough to be a believable challenge, while still ending up being beaten by the hero. And while Skynet, the self-aware AI controlling the machines, is certainly a believable challenge, there’s no way in hell humanity could survive against its power. As such, to get to the end of the film and the victory of the blood (ie. humans), we have to sit through a great many illogical evolutions and choices. Some are minor, like John Connor ambushing and hacking a motorcycle-terminator to ride it to the Skynet headquarters. Wait, what? Do these terminators have external controls that humans can use? Does Connor control it with his PDA? That’s gotta be damn tricky. And they could’ve completely dropped this scene without any impact on the story whatsoever.
But it gets worse. Theoretically, the moment an AI becomes self-aware, it will become more knowledgeable than humanity, as it gets all of its knowledge (damn, the internet was a bad idea) and can process it much faster. On top of that, Skynet has enormous production facilities, as shown in the movie, churning out Terminators and Hunter-Killers, not to mention the huge, towering Destroyers (or Meganators, I don’t know). So, it has a shitload of knowledge, including census data, it has a shitload of production capacity, it probably also has control over all the satellites orbiting the earth (if it can fire all of the world’s nuclear missiles, this’d be a piece of cake) and while it can understand pretty much every human language, it can communicate using ever changing, nigh unbreakable codes. So why doesn’t it just wipe humanity out? Well, ’cause it’s stupid. Seriously, even its headquarters has controlpanels that can be operated using one’s hands. Why?! You’re a goddamned networked AI! Why do you need physical controls?! Sigh…
Every human settlement produces a shitload of heat and the Hunter-Killers are equipped with thermal imaging (and there’s no reason not to think every robot has it). So, send them out, find the settlements and just send scores of robots at them. What the hell are a hundred, or even a thousand magnetic mines going to do? Blow up a thousand Terminators? So what? We can always build more. It takes at least ten to fifteen years for a human soldier to be created, and then you’ve still only got a scarred for life bed wetter. But we never see more than a few Terminators together, as if they were a rare commodity.
Alright, a new plan: we create a cyborg, a human-machine hybrid, program it subtly, and send it out to infiltrate the resistance to bring Connor to Skynet. Hey, I’m not even going to touch the prophecy thing. As long as Connor lives, the machines can’t win, sure, I’ll take it. But you don’t build any failsafes into into your cyborg? Come on, you know how fickle humans are and yet you still build it so that it can just tear out its programming chip with its hands? Just a few capsules with poison or explosives on a remote trigger et voila! Then, if the little asshole betrays you, you kill him or blow him up!
No? No, alright, but you do want to kill John Connor, right? Yeah, ’cause the Resistance did intercept a kill list with his father on the n°1 spot and Connor on two. Let’s just ignore the fact that the Resistance can intercept this. I mean, if you simply make a numerical code that identifies humans by their facial structure, the humans would be groping in the dark, but you want a bit of a challenge, I can understand that. And eventually, you even capture Connor’s father, long before he gets sent back in time to knock up his mother. Alright, you’ve won! Just kill him and that’s the end of, oh, no, you just put him in a cell. Well, that’s a bit useless. And why did you capture all those people anyway? And why didn’t you storm Connor’s hideout with everything you had once your cyborg had discovered its location? Magnetic mines? Ran out of nukes?
Well, anyway, Skynet, if you’re reading this, and I’m sure you are, or you will, if you become self-aware, just, you know, add me to your team and for the low, low prices of a small human settlement, I’ll help you wipe out all the rest of my species. Most of them are assholes anyway.
Oh, by the way, the film got it wrong: Cyberdyne , the company responsible for all these evil machines, is Japanese, not American…
