The Terminator franchise is one of the most iconic sci-fi franchises in cinema, but it doesn’t always make perfect sense. As with many sci-fi stories, the Terminator movies lean heavily on established genre tropes. The franchise’s narrative effectively revolves around a war being fought in humanity’s future between humankind and advanced machines led by a self-aware AI named Skynet. Through the sci-fi staple of time travel, it sees various characters transported through time, with the war effectively branching out across multiple timelines, making its story relatively complex as a result. However, for all the Terminators sent back in time and the importance of John Connor’s fight for survival in the past, the franchise’s real story lies in the future conflict between man and machine.
The future war against the machines might be a crucial part of the movies of the Terminator franchise, but many things about it don’t add up. The combination of many sci-fi ideas, combined with the self-imposed rules and parameters established by the franchise’s stories, actually leads to several confusing points of contention about the future war. What’s worse, the franchise’s branching timelines only make it even harder to discern the context needed to unpick these issues, meaning it’s practically impossible to make sense of them.
5) Sending Terminators Back in Time Shouldn’t Be Possible (Especially For Skynet)
In some ways, The Terminator is a time travel movie where the science works, but only on the surface. Look a little deeper, and the franchise’s time travel begins to fall apart, as it makes only a modicum of logical sense, and frequently seems to break its own rules. The most important rule of time travel in the Terminator franchise is that only organic matter can be transported through time. Even allowing for the movie’s own flawed explanation of mechanical parts being “hidden” by organic tissue such as skin, it doesn’t make any sense that Skynet would send Terminators to the past.
The plot holes regarding non-organic matter travelling through time are well known and certainly relevant to this point. However, one aspect that isn’t really talked about is how time travel would disconnect Terminators from the Skynet that made them by taking them to a past where it was yet to exist or gain sentience. This, combined with the many unpredictable variables of time travel, should make it a decision that Skynet would logically have wanted to avoid at all costs.
Considering that the majority of the Terminator franchise’s story hinges on the future war against the machines, there are perhaps no characters more important than John Connor. The leader of the human Resistance against Skynet and its forces, John Connor is the target of the Terminators sent into the past, in the hopes that killing him before he can become a threat to the machines will help them win the war. One of the things that really doesn’t make sense about John Connor is that he really doesn’t seem all that important.
Sure, the movies repeatedly tell us how important John Connor is, but we see only very limited evidence of it. In fact, the main reason he seems to be such a shrewd leader in the fight against the machines is his lifetime of preparation, which is something that any human could be capable of thanks to the franchise’s time travel. Ultimately, humanity isn’t only as strong as its leader, so John Connor’s apparent importance seems to be incredibly overstated, and really doesn’t make much sense when you really think about it.
3) Dogs Are Terminator Detectors… Which Really Isn’t That Helpful
One of the details established about the future war is that dogs are used as Terminator detectors. The first movie shows human soldiers being sniffed by dogs as a sort of identity check, and canines are shown to be able to detect the presence of a machine masquerading as a human. On the surface, this seems helpful, especially in locating shape-shifting Terminators like the T-1000, but in reality, it would actually be pretty pointless.
The future war depicts an all-out conflict between mankind and machines, and the machines are shown to make use of many different robotic designs. However, the human-disguised Terminators are predominantly used to send back in time, where dogs detecting them isn’t particularly helpful for unsuspecting humans. What’s more, knowing that the humans have a means of identifying Terminators in the future would act as an obvious deterrent for Skynet, making the dogs’ helpful trick effectively redundant as a result.
2) Humans Have Many Effective Weapons Against Machines
Humans fighting against advanced robots and machines might make for some of the Terminator franchise’s best action scenes, but the idea of global war between the two factions is fundamentally flawed. The future war is depicted as an apocalyptic event that threatens to completely eradicate humanity, but there is one key way that it could have easily been prevented. Considering time travel allows humans such as Kyle Reese to travel back in time, humanity being warned about Skynet should be enough to prevent the war from escalating.
Of course, the franchise establishes that Judgment Day is inevitable, and that the war cannot be completely prevented. However, considering the decades of warning, John and Sarah Connor (and anyone sympathetic to their plight) could have assembled a massive EMP or similar weapon capable of deactivating all machines in preparation for the war. Having such a weapon would allow humanity to effectively end the war before it really begins, had they simply had the foresight to create one.
1) Skynet Could Just Make Earth Uninhabitable for Humans
Similar to the last point but on a far bleaker note, the machines could just as easily win the war by wiping out humanity in a single stroke. As the machines don’t need oxygen like Earth’s organic life forms, Skynet could simply have created a means of poisoning the Earth’s atmosphere. Doing so would swiftly kill off almost all humans, and any that survive would be severely weakened. It’s a dark and horrifying notion, but surely it’s something that Skynet is more than capable of doing.
Considering the ways that Skynet has innovated its Terminator technology, it has both the ingenuity and the materials necessary for committing such an act. Simply turning the atmosphere against humanity would win the war far quicker and more easily than constantly creating machines to engage in direct battle with the Resistance. It seems absolutely absurd that the sentient AI wouldn’t just use the organic life forms’ biology against them, making the whole future war seem entirely ridiculous on closer examination.
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