Tag: terminator

To infinity and beyond with Kyle Reese and John Connor

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Is it just me, or is the computerized Skynet system of the Terminator films and TV franchise just not up to snuff? Sure, it did effectively wipe out most of humanity in “Judgement Day” via nuclear war but since then it really hasn’t lived up to its potential.

Edward Furlong as John Connor in Terminator 2
Edward Furlong as John Connor in Terminator 2

Checkout the facts; over the last 30 years it’s had one goal in mind – to kill either Sarah or John Connor in its past (our present) in order to keep little John from growing up to be a big a genius military mind in Skynet’s time. But since then Skynet has failed at every turn. It failed to kill Sarah in Terminator, John in Terminator 2 and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (1992 and 2003) then failed to kill either of them over two seasons and 31 episodes on the Fox TV series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Which got me thinking, it seems like the whole Terminator franchise might be taking place in some big time loop that no one inside the loop knows about and neither Skynet nor John Connor has enough wherewithal to stop.

In the first Terminator, Skynet sends back a Terminator from 2029 to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor just as son John in the future is about to defeat and destroy Skynet. And quickly following the Terminator John sent back Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) to defend Sarah.

Nick Stahl as John Connor in Terminator 3
Nick Stahl as John Connor in Terminator 3

But (spoiler alert) not only do Sarah and Kyle stop the Terminator they also end up conceiving John as well. So, in effect, Skynet is the creator of its own doom by being the driving force in sending Kyle Reese back in time to become John Connor’s father.

Except this also means that for John to be there in the first place, to send Kyle back the first time, means that the events in Terminator must’ve happened before since the only way we get a John Connor conceived in 1984 is for Kyle to be sent there from 2029.

So it’s possible that the events of Terminator have been playing out again and again for all eternity. John Connor and his team attack Skynet in 2029 and Skynet sends back a Terminator to kill Sarah Connor. John sends Kyle Reese back in time to defend Sarah and John Connor is also conceived in the process.

And everything else that happens next, from Arnold back in Terminator 2 to the questionable story choices in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and the “be careful what Bert wishes for” all future-war of Terminator Salvation (2009) and the TV show too all lead to the point where John sends Kyle back in time to Terminator where we repeat everything over again, perhaps so many times it stretches out to infinity.

Christian Bale as John Connor in Terminator 4
Christian Bale as John Connor in Terminator 4

I guess the only real question of the Terminator movies is; how do we get John Connor in the first place? If John Connor’s dad is Kyle Reese and the only way Kyle gets sent back in time to meet Sarah is via John’s doing — how does Kyle get back in time the FIRST time to help conceive John and set everything in motion since John’s the one who sends him back and without Kyle in the past at least once there’s no John? (AGH!)

Perhaps there’s a first reality where some other military genius who ISN’T John Connor sends back Kyle Reese in time to protect his or her mother. Kyle fails and this first military genius is wiped from existence when the Terminator completes its mission. Except that at some point Kyle, now stuck in the 1980s, just happens to meet Sarah at some point and together they end up conceiving this first John who sets the wheels in motion for the first Terminator?

It might be interesting to see if shell-shocked future-war PTSD Kyle Reese would make a good dad or if John was better off being raised by a shell-shocked PTSD Sarah Connor and his foster family from Terminator 2 instead?

Hey, I think I just came up with the idea for another Terminator movie!

The latest Terminator movie, Terminator Genisys, is currently in theaters.

2015 Summer movie preview

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With three movies due out it seems as if Marvel Entertainment has bought and now owns the naming rights to summer. The first of which is The Avengers: Age of Ultron on May 1. Really The Avengers Part 2, or is it Iron Man Part 5…, Age of Ultron has the whole team back together again battling the robotic Ulton, one of the most iconic Avengers villains. Much like with the first Avengers flick, the fate of the very Earth will hang in the balance in this film!

Except since there are two more Marvel movies out this summer and a whole slew of Marvel films scheduled for theaters all the way up until 2019, I think the fate of the Earth has already been decided in a corporate board room.

mad_max_fury_road_ver2Mr. Road Warrior himself Mad Max returns to the hellish highways of the apocalypse on May 15 in Max Max: Fury Road. This fourth outing for the character, with Tom Hardy in the title role and co-starring Charlize Theron, has Max trying to rescue a group of fellow apocalyptic travelers from the clutches of a crazed outlaw gang of motorheads.

In other words: More merry Mad Max mayhem!

A remake of the family-scarer Poltergeist is out May 22. I’m interested in this one, if just because the original 1982 film about a girl vanished into the guts of a family’s haunted house gave me the heebie-jeebies as a youngster. I mean, Poltiergeist has one of the kids in the movie being practically eaten alive by a tree one minute and terrorized by a clown doll the next. C’MON!

It helps that this new Poltergeist is being produced by Evil Dead horror auteur Sam Raimi too.

A fourth Jurassic Park movie, Jurassic World, is set to bring a little chaos to theaters June 12. While this is being billed as a sequel to the first three films from 1993 to 2001, to me Jurassic World looks to be an reboot of the Jurassic Park franchise as a whole. The trailer for this one has a slew of people visiting Jurassic Park when something goes wrong that turns loose the dinosaurs to chomp on some unsuspecting folks. Or, it’s a bigger version of Jurassic Park sans the guiding hands of Steven Spielberg.

Terminator: Genesys, the fifth film of that franchise, will “be back” in theaters July 1 with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Due to the vagaries of time travel, this time he’s joined by a young Sarah Connor (now Emilia Clarke) as the two along with Reese (now Jai Courtney) fight off a bunch of different and deadly terminators out to put an end to the Connor timeline once and for all. Or at least until the next movie.

Marvel movie #2 is Ant-Man out July 17. There’s not too much known about this one other than it stars Paul Rudd in the title role of a superhero who can turn incredibly small. But if Ant-Man follows the Marvel Mold™ of late it’s no doubt that the fate of the planet will be in Ant-Man’s teeny-tiny hands.

poltergeist

A fifth Mission: Impossible movie, simply titled Mission: Impossible 5,  is out July 31. Even though I probably shouldn’t I’ve enjoyed the Mission: Impossible movies since the first one was released in ’96. Even if the missions the M:I teams have gone on over the years/sequels have gone from impossible to impossibler to “there’s no way in heck they’d be able to do any of this stuff whatsoever!”

The final Marvel movie out this summer, that’s really a Sony one, is Fantastic Four. A reboot of the Fantastic Four films from 2005 and ’07, this version looks to put a new, darker spin on the big four. Or, if it works it could be the dawn of a new age in the tone of comic book movies but if it doesn’t we might just have another Catwoman on our hands.

Premiering on TV screens before Mission: Impossible in 1964 was Man from U.N.C.L.E., the first series to take inspiration from the James Bond films to a TV series. Now a film version of U.N.C.L.E. is set to close the summer movie season August 14. This 1960s period piece seems to be equal parts Jason Bourne and Austin Powers.