People who have never seen any of the Terminator movies will probably have a lot of fun watching Terminator: Salvation. Because, let’s be honest, it’s a fun movie with great visuals and (just barely) enough action to keep us on a post-apocalyptic thrill ride. But hard core Terminator fans won’t be able to avoid the fact that there are more holes in this movie than a hunk of Swiss cheese. Spoiler alert!
Source: Warner Bros. Pictures
7. The Terminators aren’t good at terminating people.
Source: Warner Bros. Pictures
Why is it that every time a Terminator gets its hands on someone (especially John Connor), it gives him or her a hundred chances to escape, fight back or just not die in general? It seems as if the first course of action for an unarmed Terminator would be to snap, strangle, or crush whatever it gets its hands on.
Instead they use the ol’ toss-‘em-till-they-die routine which, if the movie is any indication, has a very low percentage of success. Maybe the machines get smarter in the future, because it doesn’t take Arnold’s T-800 very long to kill people when he gets down to business. I can’t remember a single Terminator from Salvation successfully taking out a human with its bare hands.
Oh, yeah -- and why can’t any of these killing machines aim better than a little league pitcher? With Terminators this incompetent it seems like the resistance could’ve just sent an email with a virus to Skynet and ended the war years ago.
6. John Connor communicates via FM radio.
Source: Warner Bros. Pictures
Most humans who’ve survived Judgment Day are clever enough to live underground, inside crumbled buildings, and pretty much live like quiet little hermits. The machines have become so pervasive that the drop of a pin brings them to your neighborhood.
So why does John Connor use FM radio as his way of communicating with the rest of the world? Does Skynet just really, really hate top 40 radio? They’re able to hone in on just about every other noise or movement humans make, but they’re unable to track or jam up FM radio? Seems like it’d be pretty easy to find where humans were hiding out by simply tracking every place FM radio signals were being received -- or, if nothing else, the place from which they were being sent (i.e., John Connor’s base). I guess that’s a little too advanced for machines that send flesh-covered robots back in time.
5. Marcus Wright is given free will and thus programmed to side with the humans.
Source: Warner Bros. Pictures
Somehow Marcus is able to find Kyle Reese in a desolate, war-ravaged Los Angeles inhabited by no more than, apparently, two humans. But he finds him. Unfortunately for the machines, they were clever enough to put together a contraption good enough to fool people into thinking he was human, but they weren’t clever enough to make him fulfill his purpose: to kill humans!
Why would Skynet program Marcus to have free will – or, worse yet, side with the humans? To infiltrate the resistance and bring Reese and John Connor to Skynet, right, I get that. But why? So that Skynet can do a little victory dance in front of their faces before terminating them? Because if Skynet is in the business of killing humans -- Reese and Connor more specifically -- then it seems like they might have saved a lot of steps if they’d just programmed Marcus to kill humans!
Furthermore, if Marcus gave his body to Skynet in 2003, then how is it even possible Skynet could have premeditated the conversion of his mind/soul/whatever into a resistance infiltrator? And why is he recognized by Skynet as a friendly machine, but earlier in the movie other Terminators don’t recognize him and actively try to kill him (but are unable to, due to their terrible aim)?
The main character of Salvation is one of its biggest loopholes.
