The Terminator has spawned multiple sequels and prequels both in movie theaters and on
television, but as good as it is, it's far from a perfect film.
To learn how, among other things, a perfectly logical thinking machine acts like a moron,
keep watching for the dumb things everyone ignored in The Terminator.
Since he's governed by a ruthlessly calculating artificial intelligence, you might assume
that the Terminator would make purely logical choices.
Watch the movie, though, and one of the first things you'll notice is that his actions absolutely
do not reflect that.
For one thing, he can't even decide how quiet he needs to keep his time-travel murder mission.
As soon as he arrives in the '80s, for example, the Terminator makes an immediate effort to
get era-appropriate clothing that will allow him to blend in to 1984 or at least blend
in as much as an insanely jacked Austrian bodybuilder can, anyway.
"I think this guy’s a couple cans short of a six-pack."
"Your clothes.
give them to me, now."
And yet, throughout the movie, he draws plenty of attention to himself and never seems to
care.
He steals a pile of guns from a gun shop and murders the owner with a shotgun.
This is the loudest possible way he could do it, which will almost certainly draw the
attention of the police.
Even in what we see in the movie up to that point, it's obvious that he could totally
kill the owner with his bare hands, flip the "closed" sign over, and lock the door behind
him, giving him at a few least hours before anyone thinks to call the authorities.
Shortly afterward, he kills the first Sarah Connor he finds in the phone book.
He bothers to knock on the door and ask her name, then smashes the door open and shoots
her six times in a quiet residential neighborhood.
As with the gun shop, he could've done it all much more quietly.
And if he's not going to be quiet, why bother knocking on the door and asking her name?
Manners?
Every now and then, you come across a character in a movie who is so annoying and stupid that
you can't help but despise them as a viewer, while the comparatively intelligent protagonist
doesn't seem to thoroughly hate them as much as they should.
Such is the case of Nancy, the waitress who ranks among the most frustrating characters
in the history of film.
Sarah Connor is working at a diner when we meet her, and not only is her section is filled
with increasingly irate customers, a young boy takes the opportunity to drop a lump of
ice cream in her apron.
That's when Nancy comes up behind her and says that nobody's going to care in a hundred
years, which is the kind of contrived zinger that she would only say if she knew she was
in a movie where time traveling robots exterminated human civilization in the next century.
Then, she just bails, without even bothering to help her friend and co-worker clean up
the mess.
That might not seem that bad, but don't worry: Nancy goes completely off the rails a few
minutes later.
After the Terminator kills another woman named Sarah Connor and it makes the news, Nancy
grabs Sarah and pulls her into the break room to watch the report, giving her the most insane
reason ever spoken.
"You are not gonna believe this you’re gonna love this!"
Why would anyone love hearing about how someone with their name was violently murdered?
What is wrong with you, Nancy?
She's just lucky she didn't say this stuff to super buff T2 Sarah Connor, who would've
absolutely punched her lights out.
From what Kyle Reese says, he didn't have a lot of time to prepare for his trip into
the past.
After he's arrested, Reese tells the police psychologist that John Connor's forces found
a time machine in a lab complex they captured.
Reese was sent to the 20th century, and the lab complex was destroyed.
Even if they were hustling to get to the past, though which seems like a weird concern when
you have a time machine shouldn't John Connor have taken a couple of minutes to remind Reese
that it was probably going to be tough to protect his mom if she thought he was completely
insane?
The first conversation the two characters have after Reese storms into a nightclub blasting
at a gun-toting assailant, which to put it mildly is a pretty stressful situation, involves
Reese overloading Sarah with a flood of ridiculously precise information about the Terminator.
It's like he's reading the instruction manual, going on about its microprocessor-controlled
hyperalloy combat chassis.
That's not information that Sarah would care about or even understand in the best of times,
let alone when it's being shouted at her by a sweaty man with a shotgun.
Her initial reaction?
Once Reese pulls into a parking garage, Sarah understandably tries to escape, biting Reese's
hand hard enough to draw blood.
Can you blame her?
Reese is from a bleak, apocalyptic future filled with killer robots, so the world of
1984 is probably as weird to him as he is to Sarah, but someone definitely should've
given him some tips on how to start up a conversation with another human being.
And even if they didn't, Reese is a smart guy.
Starting off slow and then easing Sarah Connor into the world of the "hyperalloy combat chassis"
would seem like a pretty obvious strategy.
As you may already know, the Terminator is pretty difficult to destroy.
"It doesn't feel pity.
Or remorse, or fear.
And it absolutely will not stop, ever!"
For the most part, the best Kyle Reese can do is slow the Terminator down, but as the
film progresses, the cyborg shows more and more signs of battle damage.
Eventually he's completely stripped of all flesh, revealing his mechanical interior.
The first casualties of the Terminator's outward human disguise are his eyebrows, which are
burned off in an explosion after he attacks Sarah and Reese in the nightclub.
It makes sense that he'd lose them, too, since they'd naturally be singed off with that kind
of fire.
What doesn't make sense is that the eyebrows are all the Terminator loses in that fight.
That same exploding gas tank that engulfs his entire body and completely erases his
eyebrows has done absolutely nothing to the hair on his head, nor do his clothes seem
at all damaged by the flames.
You could maybe write off the clothes by assuming that the punk the Terminator stole his outfit
from invested in a fireproof wardrobe for some unexplained reason, but for the hair,
there's no excuse.
Even stranger, this scene happens right before Reese has a conversation with Sarah where
he explicitly tells her that this model of Terminator has fully organic skin and hair
covering up its metal skeleton.
If those eyebrows are going, Arnold's perfect coif should be dust, too.
After showing up in 1984 and eventually finding a pair of pants, Reese tries to explain the
future to Sarah as best as he can.
He covers the emergence of Skynet and the resulting nuclear holocaust, the rise of the
Terminators, and their grim plans for humanity.
He explains it all, but the audience is left with a mystery: how does Reese, or John Connor,
or anyone else in the future even know about Skynet or how their world came under the literal
iron fist of the machines?
Obviously, the survivors would know that the machines were in charge, but when you think
about it, it isn't quite so obvious to figure out how the human resistance ever learned
about the creation of Skynet.
From what Reese tells us, Skynet decided the fate of the human race "in a microsecond."
All of that presumably took place within the A.I.'s processors.
With the human race left scattered and without access to technology or the power to make
that technology work, how would anyone be able to access the data necessary to determine
how the world went sideways?
They don't necessarily need to know in order to fight back, but they certainly need a way
to discover it if they're going to go back in time and explain it to Sarah Connor.
The big twist of The Terminator is, of course, that it's all one big loop.
After traveling back in time at the request of John Connor, Reese and Sarah get it on,
and in the process, they conceive that same John Connor, humanity's savior, who wouldn't
exist if it wasn't for the mission that he ordered.
That's destiny, baby!
Even if you can get your head around all the time travel hijinx, though, the fact that
their brief affair even happens is just a little weird, if not majorly weird.
While they're on the run from the Terminator, Reese ends up confessing to Sarah that her
unborn son gave him a picture of her, which he kept and obsessed over for years.
He tells her that he fell in love with her because of that photo, without ever meeting
her or talking to her.
It's more than just a little creepy.
Sarah is obviously still reeling from being hunted by a killer cyborg from the future,
not to mention being on the run from the authorities and having her roommate murdered.
And yet, even with all that, learning that this sweaty weirdo became obsessed with her
thanks to a photograph that she hasn't even taken yet is the weirdest thing that's happened
to her.
Why doesn't she freak out even more?
Or, maybe she's into it?
We're not judging.
It just seems like most first dates that start off with, "I'm from the future," are already
going to be in enough jeopardy without adding, "And I used to just stare at your pictures
for hours on end."
When he's being interviewed by the condescending police psychologist, Reese says that things
in the future are actually starting to look up for the few remaining humans.
Under the leadership of John Connor, they had won the battle against Skynet, and smashed
the machine's defense grid.
Sending the Terminator back in time was a last ditch effort on the machines' part, made
out of desperation.
"Why this elaborate scheme with the terminator?"
"It had no choice.
Their defense grid was smashed.
We’d won."
That's good news for humanity, but from what little we see of the future, it's kind of
hard to believe.
In both scenes we see of the future first with Reese and his fellow soldiers being defeated
by a flying machine, and then with a Terminator infiltrating an underground bunker and killing
almost everyone in sight the humans seem absolutely hopeless.
Maybe that's just how things are on the front, but all of those piles of skulls aren't exactly
cheery, especially since Reese has to throw everything he can at the Terminator to barely
slow it down, and eventually dies in the process.
So how exactly does John Connor manage to defeat this unstoppable, self-replicating
enemy?
The humans have barely any resources, and we see them hunt rats for food.
The fact that they have any weaponry at all seems like at least a minor miracle.
It's hard to understand how they could possibly win, no matter how good John is at looking
through binoculars.
The Terminator ends with Sarah Connor in Mexico, on her way to becoming the hardened badass
we find in 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
She's got a new dog with her, presumably to detect any other Terminators who might travel
through time, and she's recording a sort of journal on tape as she travels, musing on
the question of whether or not she will tell her unborn son that Kyle Reese was his father.
Of all the things she could be telling someone, anyone, about the future, is the identity
of John's father really her biggest concern?
A time-traveling paternity test might make a pretty great episode for Maury Povich once
his show starts up in 1991, come on, Sarah.
Let's get our priorities straight here.
Of course, that's not to suggest Sarah should be yelling from the highest mountain that
everyone's going to die soon thanks to killer robots.
As we see in Terminator 2, that's exactly the sort of thing that lands her in a mental
institution.
It's just that in terms of what she should reveal about the future, she's rating "do
I tell my son about his dad?" over "do I tell people they should start building robot-proof
shelters?"
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