Unwelcome Dental Advice

As an author/writer, I’ve discovered I have the ability to look beyond the surface of a medium and really understand what another writer was thinking with their thought process (I should say, I have this ability to a degree – sometimes a medium is so poorly written that scholars can’t even figure out what the writer was thinking). Last night, my wife and I watched The Terminator for the first time in a long time, and it made me realize some of the more brilliant writing behind a lot of the latter films.

Let me preface this by saying that Terminator 3 and Terminator: Genysis were dumpster fires of movies. They were blatant cash-grabs written by people with almost no love for the genre or original films. The first Terminator movie is arguably a masterpiece of science fiction storytelling. Cameron did his best to cover up any potential plot holes the movie could have by given apt descriptions of certain events. For instance, the question arises about future weaponry. Why couldn’t Kyle Reese bring any “death rays” back from the future to fight off the terminator? Because nothing dead could go back. The terminator is covered in living tissue and thus considered alive for the purposes of time travel.

Or, when he’s questioned about why the terminator didn’t know which Sarah Connor was the right one and was using a phonebook to pursue all of them, Reese replies that most of the prewar records of John Connor and his parentage were purged. Simple things like this go a long way toward covering up potential plot holes. But then I started noticing different little nuances. At the beginning of the movie, after Reese arrives in the past, he’s sawing the stock of the shotgun off to better conceal it in his jacket. If you blink, you miss the fact that he’s tied a rope around it and has the rope looped around his shoulder.

In another scene, Kyle is describing the future to Sarah, and mentions that other iterations of the “infiltration unit” (which is what Arnold’s character is classified as) appeared early in the war, and they had rubber skin, but were easy to spot.  Later in the movie, near the very end, Reese and Sarah are in a factory with automated machines, and Kyle turns them all on to “confuse the terminator’s targeting” capabilities.

Where have I seen these things before?

Fast forward to 2009. This is six years after the abomination called Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines has come out. A lower-budget entry into the franchise written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris (noted for having written the psychological thriller The Game) and directed by Joseph McGinty (who calls himself “McG”) releases. It stars Christian Bale as John Connor, Bryce Dallas Howard as Connor’s wife, Aton Yelchin (Rest in Peace, you gentle soul) as a young Kyle Reese, and Sam Worthington as the earliest iteration of the infiltration unit of terminator. It’s called Terminator: Salvation.

While I can agree, to an extent, that the acting could have been better (which is most of what the negative reviews were complaining about), you have to realize, it’s a sci-fi action film, and these aren’t notorious for Oscar-worthy films. Many of the other complaints were that the soldiers were still using what we consider “modern equipment” today, despite it being years into the future. But I think it’s a good segue movie that takes place between Judgment Day and “the future war.” And personally, I think Christian Bale was the best John Connor we’ve ever had (sorry, Edward Furlong).

Back to the point I was making.

Those three instances I described earlier (the shotgun loop, the rubber-suited terminators, and the turning on of all the equipment to confuse terminator targeting) were addressed and elaborated upon in Terminator: Salvation. The writers and director took time to review the source material and pull out minor details – those “blink and you miss them moments” – and made them into extremely important aspects of their movie. To me, that’s how you can tell the true fans of something from the money-grabbing asshats.

Fast forward again to 2019. This time, it’s not a movie, it’s a video game called Terminator: Resistance. This game takes place entirely during the “future war” described by Kyle Reese. The writers and producers of this game are, like the writers and directors of Salvation, very clearly huge fans of the source material. They crafted a story that takes place solely during the dark times of the war, where the machines have the humans on the run. They’ve just completed building the infiltration units with real flesh and skin, and your character, a private in the army named Jacob Rivers, is one of the top people marked for termination.

As the story unfolds, you find that you’re being helped by a mysterious stranger, given information of the utmost importance, as if the stranger were John Connor himself. You eventually run into Kyle Reese and his ragtag band of Tech-Com soldiers, and you go on missions were you run into old, decommissioned rubber-suited terminators, and a factory making terminators with the likeness of one of the soldiers in your squad.

You guessed it, he’s a hulking, muscular man with a similar likeness to Arnold. After that, you witness the events that lead to that soldier’s death, and the death of the woman that gets shot down by an HK tank. These are the events of Kyle Reese’s dream sequence in the first Terminator movie, when he’s outside of a construction site and has the dream where he drives off in a car with a gunner and gets taken out by an HK aerial unit. That character on the gun is supposed to be the human Arnold, and the model for the 101-infiltrator unit.

Such wonderful attention to detail is difficult to ignore. But it doesn’t stop there.

The last mission in the game has you and a squad of soldiers breaking through Skynet lines (or, as Kyle Reese calls it, “smashing their defense grid” – a term used in the game as well). At the end, before you shut down the central core, effectively “turning off” Skynet, and saving the day, your intel guys tell you that they’ve sent three terminators back in time. The game comes full circle back to Terminator and T2. The first terminator sent back is the one from Terminator. The second one is the liquid metal (T1000) sent back in T2. The last is the infiltrator sent back that hunts your character in the game you’re playing.

Earlier in the game, you kill that infiltrator and reprogram his chip. Guess who gets sent back to the 90s to protect a teenage John Connor? You guessed it, the guy you killed five missions back. And it gets better. You volunteer to go back to the beginning of the game and shadow yourself to help you get through the early stages of the game. You are the stranger who has been following and helping yourself get through the future war.

That, my friends, is a labor of love and not a blatant cash grab or fan service. I wish more writers understood this concept.