Where we left it last Saturday, John Connor and Marcus, the mysterious cyborg whom everyone (including himself) thought was a human, have joined forces. They have agreed to find Kyle Reese, who’s been captured by Skynet, and rescue him before the robots take his life. Why the robots haven’t already done so is regrettably the largest plot hole in the film, and it’s big enough to collapse the entire story. But regardless, the two men have now made their way to Skynet’s main facility.

They reach Skynet separately, and Marcus enters the building while John waits outside. The plan is for Marcus to hack into Skynet, find Kyle, and send Kyle’s location to John. After that, Marcus wants to find out who turned him into a cyborg.

Because Marcus is half machine, he has little trouble locating Skynet’s control room and hacking the AI’s system. He finds Kyle and sends John the young man’s location. Then Marcus begins looking for the files pertaining to him. However, Skynet realizes what Marcus is doing and knocks him out . . . or shuts him down, whichever.

Meanwhile, John enters Skynet’s facility to find Kyle. While he’s there, he frees the rest of the prisoners and tells them to make their way outside, where the Resistance’s ships will take them to safety.

Marcus wakes up to find his body repaired. Then Skynet appears on a large screen, taking the form of Serena, the woman who convinced him to sell his body to Cyberdyne. Skynet then tells Marcus the horrible truth. It turns out his mission was to terminate John Connor after all, by leading him to Skynet’s facility to save his father. The robots know John is on his way, and they plan to kill him.

There is an interesting question raised here. Did Skynet program Marcus to lead John to the facility, or did they simply manipulate him? In Skynet’s mind, are programming and manipulation the same thing? It’s made clear that Marcus has some kind of chip that is supposed to influence his behavior, but the viewer never sees any examples of the chip clearly doing so. However, this prior plan is really the main problem with the film.

Time travel conundrums

Given how the time travel rules in this universe work, the simplest thing to do would be to kill Kyle Reese, thereby eliminating John Connor. I suppose it’s possible, given such a scenario, that John could’ve sent someone else to be his dad, in which case he’d still be John Connor. He’d just look a little different. But then again, how could John send another man into the past if he no longer exists? Or does he continue to exist because he sent another man? And how could he exist to begin with if he needed to send Kyle in order to exist in the first place?

Perhaps Sarah Connor was meant to marry someone else, and that person was John’s true father, but Kyle messed everything up. This is why I hate time paradoxes! Maybe the robots knew what would happen, but John didn’t; however, the writers don’t say why the robots refused to just kill Kyle, so the situation remains a glaring plot hole.

The second part of Skynet’s plan

The second part of Skynet’s plan makes more obvious sense. The signal mentioned throughout the film turns out to be a trap. The Resistance’s Command has been broadcasting this signal in preparation for a final attack against Skynet. But the signal no longer shuts off the machines. Instead, it broadcasts the leadership’s precise location. So Skynet sends a ship and destroys the Command’s submarine, killing everyone on board.

John is now the official leader of the Resistance because there’s nobody left. Marcus is furious about his forced role in the plot and rips out the chip Skynet has planted in his head. Skynet warns him that he will not be given a second chance, but Marcus doesn’t care and goes to help John.

While John is still looking for Kyle, he encounters an old friend… or rather enemy. The T-800 appears. Since Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t around, the filmmakers opted for a CGI version of the actor. While the effects aren’t exactly good, they’re not terrible either. The T-800 throws John around a little bit, but John manages to escape and continues his search for Kyle.

At this point, I have to mention one last brief scene in the movie that doesn’t really work. Once the trap is sprung, a T-600 shows up at Kyle’s cell to finish him off. There are a lot of cuts at this point, so it’s unclear what exactly happened. Somehow, Kyle manages to get out of his cell, and during the fight between Kyle and the robot, there is a moment where Kyle is pinned to the ground. The T-600 has its foot on Kyle’s chest. Kyle sees the kid he’s been traveling with throughout the movie and tells her to run.

This is stupid because the kid wasn’t even looking at him when he yelled, and his cries make her stop running. But this was a cheap trick done in the editing room. The reason they show the random kid is so the editors have an excuse to cut away from Kyle while he’s pinned to the floor.

The next time Kyle appears, he’s no longer pinned but instead is standing on a bed of some kind where he grabs a random screwdriver and jams it into the T-600’s neck, which destroys its aiming system. It was a lame trick that got on my nerves, but it was short-lived, and in the next scene, Kyle and the kid meet John. John asks who they are. Kyle says his name, and John recognizes him. He then helps Kyle and the kid escape while also running away from the T-800.

I should also mention that during this sequence, the writers couldn’t figure out how the heroes could finish off the T-600, so they have the T-800 kill its older model for no reason. This was lazy and almost as aggravating as the screwdriver scene.

Anyway, once Kyle and the kid are safe, John begins his final face-off with the original Terminator. Here, I have to give the film another compliment. There is a clear homage to the first movie during this sequence. John is shown running up a flight of grated stairs the same way his father did during the first Terminator film. In fact, the shots are almost identical, implying that time is yet again running in a sort of loop. In my opinion, this was a subtle and clever hint. The movie is about to fix one of the largest problems with its predecessor.

John is eventually cornered by the T-800, but then Marcus arrives. Marcus saves John and distracts the T-800 while John rigs some explosives to some of the T-800 model’s nearby fuel cells. Since this is Skynet’s main facility, it’s also where the T-800s are manufactured. I’m sure there are other places where the T-800s can be built, but the fuel cells are powerful enough to level this particular facility. So, even though Command has been destroyed, John can still win the battle and possibly the war. After the charges are rigged, Marcus and John finish off T-800, but John is fatally wounded in the process. He survives the exchange, but it’s clear he doesn’t have long.

John is taken to a helicopter, and while the Resistance is making its escape, the kid, Star, gives John the remote that will detonate the charges. John presses the button, and the building is destroyed.

Skynet has suffered a major loss, but unless something can be done for John, the Resistance is about to suffer a loss of its own. We’ll cover how the screenwriters solve this problem next Saturday.

Here are the first three parts of my review of Terminator: Salvation:

Terminator Salvation (2009): A better film than Terminator 3 With three Terminator movies talking about the future, it was about time for the future to finally show up. By the end of the movie the viewer briefly sees John become something of a mentor, if not an outright father figure, for Kyle.

Terminator Salvation (2009), Part II: Is Marcus really human? Or has he really been discovered to be a Terminator, bent on killing the human resistance? The dilemma is well handled because John Connor is genuinely confused and trying to understand the situation.

and

Terminator Salvation Part 3: A Return to Roots This movie remembers what the second Terminator film forgot: the true nature of the machines. The film makes clear that the machines are the enemy because they are cold, and there is something special about being human.