Last Saturday, we saw that Resistance leader John Connor had captured a human, Marcus, who turned out to be a cyborg. John didn’t know what to make of the situation, but before he had a chance to think things through, Williams, the woman who led Marcus to the Resistance, helped the potential Terminator escape. John rushes to a helicopter to try and stop them.

Things don’t go very well for Williams. She’s wounded during the shootout and provides a distraction for Marcus so he can continue to flee, but John soon catches up to him. He shoots Marcus from a helicopter and drops bombs on the area to make sure the robot is dead. Then the helicopter hovers over a river to make sure Marcus didn’t avoid the bombs by jumping into the water.

However, robotic snakes jump out of the river and bring down the helicopter. It crashes into the water as the robo-snakes continue the attack. The timing of these mechanical serpents was annoying, but anyway. John’s pilot is killed, and John tries to make it back to shore.

He does a good job fighting off the snakes, but when he’s down to his handgun, Marcus jumps out of the water and kills the last robot for him. This was another small thing that I appreciated. I grow tired of seeing the hero on the verge of death only to have some random character save him or her at the last moment. It was nice to see John was still in the fight, even when Marcus arrived to help.

But John is still not convinced that Marcus is on his side, so the two make a deal. Marcus will infiltrate Skynet and tell John where Kyle Reese is so that he can rescue him. John lets Marcus go and tells the Resistance that the cyborg is gone.

Catching up with Kyle Reese

Meanwhile, Kyle Reese has been herded into Skynet’s facility alongside a bunch of other prisoners. So far, Skynet has not realized who they’ve captured, but a machine soon identifies him, and Skynet takes Kyle to his own cell.

This is where the movie fell apart. I say that because this is the film’s largest plot hole, and it’s a big one: The writers have made it clear that Skynet has a kill list, and Kyle is the number one target on that list. If Skynet kills Kyle, then John Connor will never come into being.

First of all, it’s unclear how the machines learned that Kyle Reese was John’s father. I’m not sure how Skynet could’ve figured it out. Perhaps Sarah Connor listed Kyle as the father on John’s birth certificate, but given what Sarah knows about Skynet, why would she do that? Furthermore, Skynet would’ve killed Kyle the second the robots found him. The fact that Skynet took Kyle prisoner makes no sense, unless Skynet is particularly malicious and wants to kill John out of spite, but why would an AI feel something like bitterness?

It’s a shame because most of this movie is great. There are a few contrivances here and there, like Marcus surviving the explosion at the beginning of the film and the convenient arrival of the robot snakes. But while such contrivances can be aggravating, they are issues that simply lack sufficient explanation rather than turns that destroy the plot. However, this one plot hole makes the entire narrative collapse. I suspect that this bit of lazy writing created an issue that was large enough for most audiences to notice, and it’s probably one of the reasons why the movie didn’t do well at the box office.

Anyway, not long after Kyle is taken to his own cell, John receives a call from Command. Earlier in the film, the Resistance had found a signal that could shut down the machines, and since John has tested and confirmed that the signal works, Command is ready to launch its final attack.

However, there’s a problem. Command wants to bomb Skynet’s main facility, even though they’re aware of the prisoners inside the building. John — knowing that Kyle is one of those prisoners — objects on moral grounds and doesn’t want to proceed with the plan. So Command removes his rank. Of course, none of John’s men acknowledge this, and John counters his leadership by giving an impassioned speech to the rest of the Resistance over the radio.

While speaking to the Resistance, John says, “Command wants us to fight like machines; they want us to make cold, calculated decisions. But we are not machines, and if we fight like them, then what is the point in winning?”

This is one of the best scenes in the entire franchise because it remembers what I believe the first and second movies forgot. The first Terminator film (1984) treated the machines as a menace. Their cold, calculating nature was something to fear. The second film, for all its merits, humanized the Terminator. It turned the machine into a surrogate father figure for John. That was funny and endearing, but on some level it undermined the threat that Skynet represented. And there was also a strange impulse on the part of the writers for the second and third films to treat the Terminator as a joke. The second film is good, a classic, but it’s also campy, going out of its way to mock the very monster James Cameron created. The third film suffered from the same issues, and it wasn’t as good to boot.

Thus, to me, this speech, and Terminator Salvation as a whole, represents a return to the franchise’s roots. The machines are the enemy. They are the enemy because they are cold, and there is something special about being human. Humans comprehend the existence of love, justice, beauty — things that a machine can’t program into binary — and those ideals are worth fighting for. Humans also value life. We, as Kyle Reese says earlier in the film, “bury our dead.”

John’s speech is enough to convince the Resistance to refuse Command’s orders, securing John’s position as humanity’s true leader. He, in effect, reminds the humans of their ideals and performs a coup at the same time. Having bought himself a chance to save Kyle, John rushes off to Skynet’s headquarters. John and Marcus arrive at Skynet’s main facility. We’ll cover what happens then next Saturday.    

Here are the first two 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.

and

Terminator Salvation (2009), Part 2: 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.