I rewatched The Terminator last night having not seen it for about twenty years, first thoughts are that it stands up fine as a story and movie but Linda Hamilton’s acting is really quite poor and the Terminator is quite unterminatorlike in some respects compared to the later installments in the series.
Mainly he doesn’t have the slow, deliberate, stompiness suggesting a quite heavy metal endoskeleton underneath his fleshy exterior, at one point he does a cute little hop and skip from the road onto the pavement!
But thats only being picky, what I came in to ask is is there any indication of how Judgement Day affected the rest of the world outside America? We know there was a strategic exchange between the superpowers and that Skynet launched a campaign to exterminate the surviving humans. But from this we can surmise that if people survived in America they survived elsewhere, of course including places that weren’t heavily targeted or untargeted.
Was Skynet able to extend its reach outside the continental US?
In a rather horrifying flashback scene Kyle Reese describes the extermination camps run by Skynet and that humanity very nearly went extinct, though this is the words of a traumatised individual who grew up in the devastated post-exchange world and we can assume he, like everyone else, doesn’t really know whats going on in the rest of the world.
If Skynet had succeeded in wiping out the American resistance it can certainly be assumed it would have widened its campaign but as it stands do we know if it had any further reach and impact beyond the initial strikes?