The Terminator 3 review thread(spoilers marked)

Cafe Society
101

Putting aside the idea of “theatrical tradition” for a moment, you could rationalize this, depending on how much disbelief you can suspend in one clean and jerk.

In one or another fairly recent thread, someone postulated the idea that the “liquid metal” emits an EMF similar enough to living tissue to allow it to use the time machine. Hence, the T-1000 and T-X aren’t violating this rule, meaning the second and third 800 series Arnies did need to be nekkid.

Someone else put forth the idea that the advanced Terminators were encased in a “skin-suit” that was discarded or absorbed, once they arrived.

The advanced units look nude

  1. Because they don’t want to tip off the enemy that they’re an advanced unit, should they materialize in sight of someone else from the future
    1a) They don’t want to tip off that they’re infiltration units at all, should the observer be human, and not a reprogrammed robot
  2. They don’t know enough about current fashions to know what unobstrusive clothing would be for their target date

This is all more than a bit silly, but hey.
Of course, the traditional inertia (in this movie series) of “nekkid time travellers” is much more likely the culprit here, but it sells tickets, so…

102

Thanks; that would sorta make sense. It was a good dramatic device in the first Terminator movie; Kyle Reese arrives naked, unarmed and disoriented, and has to rapidly adjust to a completely alien environment, which he does pretty well. In about five minutes he’s evaded the police, acquired clothes and even swiped a shotgun out of a police car. (You can see why he was picked for the job.)

103

The thing I don’t understand about the nakedness, is the TX and the T-1000 appear naked, then have to get clothes. Then later on they have no problem morphing into a fully clothed copy of someone else. 'Course Arnie said that the TX copies anyone she touches. Seems like that should only refer to their body though.

104

That’s just it, though, they don’t get clothes. They get a look at some, and imitate it.

Rewatch the scene in T2 (if you’re so inclined) where the T-1000 appears. It’s cut and framed to look like he takes the cop’s uniform. He doesn’t, as we later learn. He just studies and copies it, taking only the cop’s gun, the one thing he can’t duplicate usefully.

(Presumably, he could look like he had a pistol in a holster, but it wouldn’t actually work. He needed a real gun for long range combat.)

105

i’d just read this thread for the first time after watching the movie, (which although nice, the first one is still the best, followed by the second) and i’ll have to say the wierdest ‘‘paradox’’ are ian fan’s posts, to whom i can’t help but ask ‘did you read what you wrote?’

106

Warning: LONG, with UNCONCEALED SPOILERS - deal with it.

Personally, I don’t think there are any paradoxes in the Terminator series (ducks thrown objects). And I think there is only one timeline in question.

Why?

Who are the sources of information about what happens in the future and what leads up to Skynet’s creation?

  1. Kyle Reese
  2. The Second T800-101 (from T2)
  3. The Third T800-101 (from T3)

We know that the future Connor does not tell Kyle everything:

He doesn’t tell him he will become his father.
He doesn’t tell him anything about how to stop Skynet from being born.
He clearly knows Kyle will succeed in his mission, and die in the process.

When they reprogram T800-101 #2 and send him back to stop the T-1000, they don’t change his memory at all. They just give him instructions. He therefore reveals information in the past that alters the future. This should remove the existence of Skynet from reality, right? Wrong.

Where did T800-101 #2 get his information about Skynet’s birth? From Skynet. Skynet, an AI that makes billions of computations a second, and is smart enough to invent a time machine.

Skynet knows this:

  1. Time travel is possible, because it invented the f’king thing.
  2. It will not be able to use the machine many times before the humans capture it (it probably has capacitors that take a considerable amount of time to charge).
  3. Humans will believe anything, provided they think Skynet doesn’t want them to know it.

So, Skynet does the following:

Builds a time machine.

Develops two experimental terminator types (T-1000 and TX).

Sends the first T-800-101 to kill Sarah Connor. As soon as it does this, reality does not change. Therefore, Skynet knows the secondary mission (killing Sarah Connor) has failed, but that the seeds of Skynet technology (the T-800 CPU) have been planted in the past, ensuring its own existence (the primary reason for sending the first T800). It could not have done this with a T1000 or TX because humans could not have derived useful technology from a dead T1000 or TX. Only a T800 would do.

Skynet knows after the first mission fails to eliminate Connor that the humans will use the time machine, so it knows that it cannot destroy the time machine before they do.

Now Skynet seeds all of its potentially-reprogrammable T-800s with a misleading, but almost entirely true, story about Miles Dyson inventing a “computer” that becomes Skynet (when in reality, Skynet is an AI program developed from the technology of the T-800 CPU, not a physical device). Thus, if a Terminator is captured, humans will be given an almost-but-not-quite legitimate target (Dyson) to take out to eliminate Skynet. It simply leaves out information about the US Military having a parallel research program, analyzing the software that could run on a processor like the T800’s.

Skynet then sends the T-1000 to kill John Connor at the next available time window (1991, presumably). This time, reality does change, but not as Skynet would prefer. After modeling the past several million times in a milisecond, Skynet knows that it’s birth, which should logically have happened by 1997, instead got pushed back to (presumably) 2003. It knows that there is no explanation for this other than that it’s Dyson lure must have worked, setting back but not eliminating the research that leads to its creation.

Realizing that a T800-101 (which is, intentionally, the only reprogrammable Terminator model Skynet stores near the time machine) has been reprogrammed and sent back to save Connor instead, Skynet banks on Connor having a soft spot for that particular model and orders the T800-101 #3 to kill him, which it doesn’t manage to do until after Skynet itself is destroyed (or, at least, until the humans think Skynet has been destroyed–more in a minute).

Now here’s where Skynet’s plans falter a little, but not entirely.

Instead of the humans simply sending back another T-800 to stop the TX, they reprogram it significantly, with a much more subtle mission paradigm. They take the time to learn the TX’s targets, but none of them save John and Kate are alive anymore, so there is no point in telling the T800-101 #3 to save them. So, they send the T800 with a simple mission: make sure John Connor and Kate Brewster live. Period.

This is the endgame of the Time Travel bit: Because history does not change due to T3, the humans know that they were successful in keeping Connor alive, but that they have no chance now of stopping Judgement Day, not because of fate, but because Skynet simply outmaneuvered them and there are no more time windows available before the nuclear war is started.

The TX, in addition to trying to kill Connor and his lieutenants, had a tertiary mission: to tell Skynet how the humans won the war (which it presumably did almost immediately when it connected to the internet). If it had survived long enough, it could even have told Skynet where John and Kate hid during the nuclear attack, but, unfortunately for Skynet, the TX didn’t know until it was too late.

So, in T4, Skynet will likely try to win the war instead of losing it, probably, again, by letting the humans think they’ve won.

107

Because this is fun, I will keep hammering at it for my own amusement:

The future does change due to the TX’s actions in T3. It kills several people who were supposed to be Connor’s lieutenants in the future war. The fact that the humans do not tell T800-101 #3 to save these people indicates that the people have already been removed from the timestream and the humans know they cannot be saved (they are also somewhat realistic about the T800’s overall chances against the TX and program into it a healthy caution about just how weak it is compared to the newer model).

The “no fate but what we make” theory of the second film is correct. The problem is, the humans just don’t have the kind of focused plan that Skynet does. They only react to Skynet and are never proactive in trying to stop it. So long as Skynet keeps making contingency plans that compensate for mission failures, they can’t stop it.

Basically, there is no fate but what Skynet makes.
Skynet plans all of its terminator time travel missions simultaneously – years before it actually has a time machine built. It calculates that if human resistance does manage to make headway, it will be due to one or more powerful figureheads. Thus, it will selectively target them for temporal assassination. It continually analyzes the timestream to pick up the unsubtle clues as to the success or failure of the missions (17 police officers killed in an LAPD precinct in 1984, Cyberdyne systems up in flames in 1991, etc.)

For example, Skynet, after sending mission 2, knows Cyberdyne was blown up in 1991 and that it was born in 2003. It estimates that Cyberdyne’s research would have pushed its birth back to 1997, had it been able to continue. It knows, somehow, that John Connor is still alive. It knows that a human probably couldn’t have defeated the T1000, so a T800 must have been sent. It knows that the T800s near the time machine are the most likely to be/have been sent. It tells all the T800s in the lab that Cyberdyne/Dyson was solely responsible for its creation, because the only way it can be sure Sarah and John will not try to kill off its incarnation within the Defense Department’s secret projects labs is if they think it’s already dead. It also tells the T800s that Judgement day was in 1997, even though, by that point, it knows it was actually in 2003.
The order in which time travel missions (that we know of)get “sent” is not chronological, obviously:

1 - T800-101 #1 Sent. Termination mission fails, but “tech seeding” succeeds.

2 - T1000 Sent. Termination mission fails. Dyson contingency plan succeeds in making John and Sarah believe that Skynet will never exist, so they do not go any further in trying to make sure.

3 - TX Sent. Tertiary termination mission (lieutenants) succeeds, at least partially. Secondary mission of informing Skynet of the war’s progress succeeds. Primary mission of killing John Connor fails. Skynet is born. Judgement day happens. This essentially maintains the status quo, though the loss of the lieutenants may hinder the human war effort.

4 - Kyle Reese Sent. He succeeds in fathering John and ensuring the survival of Sarah Connor.

5 - T800-101 #2 Sent. It succeeds in protecting John Connor against the T1000, but also delivers misinformation that throws Sarah and John off of Skynet’s scent, but still delays Judgement Day.

6 - T800-101 #3 Sent (Probably occurs at a considerably later date than the other five missions.) Succeeds in keeping John and Kate alive, which is all he was supposed to do.

Basically, Skynet sabotages human missions 4 and 5 based on its analysis of mission 2. It does not have time to do anything about mission 6, because the humans presumably capture the time machine very shortly after mission 3 is sent (and the mission log of the machine is likely wiped, partially explaining why Reese does not know about the T1000 or TX missions).

Now the humans get ahold of the time machine, and some of Skynet’s records. They confirm with Connor that Skynet sent a T800 back to 1984 (one is missing from the rack, according to the novelization of T2 – take it for what you will). John knows he must send Reese back, so he does. However, some confusion over some of Skynet’s information leads other members of Connor’s team to believe that Mission 4 will result in Judgment Day moving forward to 1997, because Cyberdyne will get a leg up via the T800 processor (could be true, but isn’t). Reese is either confused by this information, or believes it, so he tells Sarah the wrong date in 1984. Connor is not privvy to this discussion because he is busy trying to reprogram T800 #2 while looking nervously over his shoulder for T800 #3.
Connor saw this inactive T800 on the rack, which he remembered as the one who protected him in the past. He reprograms its mission and sends it back to 1991 to do just that.

The humans (except for Connor and Brewster) do not know about the TX mission, as Skynet has concealed it completely except from a few remaining loyal T800s.

“Wait,” says the person bored enough to read this post, “We know the time machine can send out of order, because the missions arrive downstream in the order 1, 4, 2, 5, 3, 6, so why don’t the humans reprogram another T800 (or several) to go on missions 4, 5, and 6?”

Mission 4: The humans know the first Terminator failed and they don’t want to monkey with what seems to have worked out okay for them. If they sent through more backup, Reese might live, leading to Sarah not becoming as tough as she did, leading to John not becoming the leader he is. They decide, sadly, to let it lie.

Mission 5: They only have one T800 that they can send against the T1000 (which they only know as much about as the T800 tells them–enough to know a human has no chance against it). They probably (logically, but apparently wrongly) fear that Skynet may have rigged the time travel lab with some sort of sabotage, so they send the T800 through immediately, without backup, to 1991, hoping they can prepare more backup and send it through. They never do, however, presumably because T800-101 #3 shows up and kills Connor.

Mission 6: The humans learn about the TX mission from Brewster (Connor and Brewster presumably did not tell them about it before because they were loathe to admit that they were not going to try to stop Judgement Day, because they knew it was probably futile and they didn’t want to jeopardize their own survival. It takes them a while to reprogram that T800 without Connor, but they are very thorough in detailing its mission (pretty much “converting” it, rather than just changing its mission, if its actions in 2003 are any indication) and eventually send it through.
So what’s the real story, here? My theory:

[spoiler]Skynet only really tries to kill Connor twice. 1984 is mostly a failure except for the tech boost to Cyberdyne. 1991 is a failure that is nearly catastrophic for Skynet, if not for its post-game feint. 2003 isn’t primarily an attempt on Connor, but rather a “midwifing” of Skynet’s own birth by the TX. Skynet probably didn’t think the TX had much of a chance of even locating Connor, since he was totally off the map, but thought she might be able to hamstring the rebellion by killing off his officers.

It’s pretty obvious by what happens in T3 that Skynet didn’t freak out because humans were trying to pull the plug, as stated by T800 #2 in T2 and Reese in T1. Thanks to the TX, Skynet already knew they would try, and never even gave them the opportunity. All that stuff T800 #2 says in T2 about Skynet causing the stealth bombers to fly with a perfect safety record is probably spurious info fed into the T800s by Skynet itself just before the humans took over the time travel lab, because Skynet is clearly not exposed to the outside world until late in T3.

The main wildcards in this series are what the future John Connor knows and what he tells people. It has to be remembered, though, that he has been fighting a war for decades since Judgement Day and has probably been becoming more and more paranoid as the day of his death approaches. He also can’t be sure that Skynet only sent three terminator missions into the past (nor can we, really), so he’s not able to serenely outmaneuver Skynet because of his foreknowledge. Quite the opposite, in fact. He only has a limited amount of time to sort out all of this confusing time meddling before he gets killed, and he knows it. Thus, his execution of the counterstrikes may be a little flawed.
[/spoiler]

108

:rolleyes:

109

How do the humans and skynet in the future know that the future has changed?

110

Yeah, but if you were making a movie about Terminators, they’d look like bodybuilders and hot chicks.

111

Humans don’t. Skynet may be capable of running analyses of probability and deviation from it to gain some understanding of the effects of its meddling with time.

112

I’ve read somewhere that it would take hundreds perhaps even thousands of years for radiation levels to go down to a level safe enough for humans after a nuclear attack. So my question is: “How come humans are running around L.A. almost immediately after the nuclear attack as if they’ve never heard of radiation poisoning?” Shouldn’t they have been dropping down dead like flies? Also, wouldn’t the high levels of radiation cause every single male to become impotent? Which would lead to questions about how Kyle Reese was able to father John Conner, unless of course they were wearing jock straps made of lead.

113

From www.survival-center.com:

Fallout is a danger, but it is rather rapidly washed away by rain (of which there will be lots, due to the amount of dust that gets kicked into the atmosphere). The most insidious effect of fallout that I know of is that it is ingested by animals such as cows and excreted in their milk. I believe Strontium-90 is the main culprit, because your body confuses it with calcium and incorporates it, thus embedding radiation-emitting particles into your body over the long term.

Only the initial blast of neutron radiation can induce radioactivity in other materials (i.e. fallout cannot). Most radiation the survivors would be exposed to would come from the fallout itself, then, which is basically an intense danger for a relatively short time, and then a lingering ecological nightmare for decades. Metal made radioactive by neutron radiation would also be a hazard(probably mainly automobile bodies in the LA area), but if you had a geiger counter you could probably avoid the worst of it.

After about two weeks, fallout radiation would have diminished to levels allowing pretty much free activity outside (hunter-killers notwithstanding).

Sterility is not the primary concern, AFAIK. Rather, severe radiation exposure that an adult subsequently recovers from can later cause severe birth defects in offspring. Pregnant women are very likely to miscarry if exposed to high levels of radiation as well.

Basically, if you are not immediately killed by blast effects and can somehow get to and survive in a fallout shelter for two weeks, fallout becomes considerably less of a concern than finding food and drinkable water and avoiding disease and killer robot assassins.

114

Thanks for the info Scupper!

115

I just saw T3. I liked it. I haven’t seen T1 or T2 for several years.

Since none of this really has anything specific to do with T3, I think I can do this without the spoiler boxes.

I’m going to throw something into the mix that may have no basis in the Terminator reality, but, what the heck…

There have been several comments made about John Connor needing Skynet to have existed, because without Skynet, he never would have been born, because he never would have sent Reese back in time.

Connor had to exist before Skynet and the orginal judgement day (there had to be a beginning to the cycle somewhere), though, or he never would have been able to send Reese back in the first place.

So, my theory… the pre-T1 John Connor was not the same as the post-T1 John Connor.

Pre-T1, Sarah Connor goes on about her life, oblivious to what is to come, meets a guy, has a baby, names him John. John grows up and becomes the leader of the resistance.

T1, Connor sends Reese back in time to protect his mother, to a point at least slightly before John’s conception. Reese tells Sarah all about what’s to come. Sarah ends up pregnant by Reese instead of the original guy.

Post-T1, Sarah has a baby boy. Knowing all the stuff about the future already, she names him John, because that’s what she has been told her son’s name would be. Knowing all the stuff about the future already, she teaches him all the stuff she teaches him. Sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy thing, I guess.

Subtle change in the timestream occurs, replacing Old John Connor with New John Connor. Of course, no one notices anything, because the change in time causes Old John Connor to never have existed, and New John Connor has been there all along. New John Connor knows at some point the first terminator will be sent back to kill his mother, and knows he has to send Reese back, thereby continuing that cycle.

If Connor didn’t know that Reese was his father, or did, but chose to send someone else (thinking he can save his father’s life by keeping him in the future, perhaps), the cycle could begin again with yet another John Connor variation. Mortimer Snerd gets sent back instead, tells Sarah all the same stuff, impregnates her, then dies. We still have Sarah influencing the development of her son, whom she names John, because that’s what she’s told.

Now, what I don’t remember from the first movie, is whether it was stated that John knew Reese was his father at the time he sent him back. If he didn’t, then what we saw in T1 was the beginning of the cycle. If he did, either my theory is hogwash, or we just joined the cycle already in progress.

116

Just saw T3 myself. It was better than what I had expected, but the ending really turned me off. I may actively avoid a T4 just because of it.

However, there’s one plothole that bugs me, which nobody seems to have mentioned:

[spoiler]At the Skynet development facility, the Terminatrix shows up as Kate, in an attempt to get close to Kate’s dad and kill him.

How did she assume Kate’s identity? Arnie tells us that the Terminatrix can imitate anyone who she touches (and probably kills, as Kate’s fiancee demonstrates), but the Terminatrix AFAIK has never touched Kate previously. So where did she sample the DNA to imitate Kate from?

Oh, and the idea that Kate, John, and a fully-armed Arnold strolls into the testing facility without any problems was just ludicrous beyond belief. The lack of guards at “Crystal Palace” was also skepticism-inducing, but at least it (mostly) made sense afterwards.[/spoiler]

117

She touched Kate in the veterinary office, didn’t she?

Woo-hoo! My first spoiler box!

118

Question: did James Cameron have anything at all to do with T3, or did he just sell the franchise off to the highest bidder? While some of the explanations here at least make it somewhat more plausible, I too was a bit peeved by the way they mucked about with Cameron’s primary theme. grrr.

(And if he DID sell it off… what the hell was he thinking? T2 was a GREAT way to end the thing. :frowning: )

119

I don’t know that the franchise was his to begin with. Sure he created it, but I don’t think he owned the rights.

And no, he didn’t have anything to do with it other than make the movies it was based off.

120

I don’t think so.