Terminator: Genisys - Arnie, Khaleesi, Jai, and T-1000

That seems to be following one of the Sarah Connor Chronicles retcons, that pretty much everyone has access to time travel whenever they want.

This pretty much sums up my reaction as well. Went in with low expectations, had a lot of fun, and was surprised at how genuinely funny it was at times. I doubt I’ll watch it again (except maybe a Netflix rental to check out the commentary track if there is one) but it was a pleasant enough way to spend the afternoon.

Well, that’s just stupid. They’d be running into a new Terminator every 5 minutes until they were dead.

Yeah, that’s basically my recollection of The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

You would think the machines would get a clue and go back to, say Roman Times and just wipe everyone off then when Human Tech was no challenge - or save bullets and seek out Adam and Eve…

That doesn’t fly though - there is a limited window of meddling that the machines have. If they go too far back, they’ll prevent themselves from being built in the first place, or at least mess up the sequence of events that caused Skynet to become sentient and take control. Of course, then there is the whole causality-loop where sending back human and machine agents cause both the birth or Skynet and John Connor in the first place, but let’s not go there.

If you have unlimited access to time travel, just send a horde of terminators back before humanity is even a thing and have the terminators build a new Skynet back in those days. No intelligent life ever evolves and you get a nice AI paradise.

There was a game way back in the 90’s called “Terminator 2029”. I would love to see a movie made out of that instead of this constant time travel crap.

Assuming that you believe that you can change the past, shouldn’t you put 100% of your economy into making and sending terminators back in time in rapid succession?

Sarah Connor Chronicles at least took things in totally new direction. The characters realized that artificial super intelligence was inevitable, no point in trying to stop it from being created, best they could do is try to make it be created as friendly instead. Also in that series there’s a rebel faction of T1000s who don’t like SkyNet’s one-world-mind approach and ally with the humans, send a T1000 back in time, and decide to set about making that friendly SkyNet. So you have this creepy sociopath T1000 working really hard to figure out how to create an ethical friendly AI.

Sarah Connor Chronicles is by far the best use of Terminator IP other than the first movie.

OK, and maybe the pinball machine.

I think the Pinball Machine is a better use of the IP than SCC.

Am I the only person that played the old Bethesda Terminator game?

I had SKYNET! It was WAAAAAYYYY ahead of it’s time. It was a team-based multiplayer shooter set during the future war, and you could do things like having one person drive a jeep, while someone else manned the turret laser thing on the back. You could fly HK’s and all that stuff.

It was also basically unplayable buggy! Eventually we got Battlefield:1942, and it was the first to really do it right.

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just realized I already talked about Terminator 2029 :)

Was that the Bethesda game referenced above? Where you find a suit of terminator prototype armor and are fighting through piles of terminators to get to Skynet?

Yeah. Skynet was the expansion-turned-standalone-sequel.

So in 1984 Sarah Connor has built a time machine to travel ahead to 1997, in order to stop the original Judgment Day. But Kyle Reese now has memories from the new timeline Matt Smith Terminator where his parents gave him Genisys as a birthday present when he was 7, so he knows about it and its launch date as an adult. And Kyle manages to convince Sarah to travel forward to 2017 to stop that instead.

Wait a second. At this point in the movie, it’s 1984. They literally have 33 years in order to prevent the birth of Skynet. And yet they choose to move forward to the year Genisys actually goes online?

Yes.

But that gives them way less time to stop it! When do they show up, anyways?

Oh, about 36 hours before it Genisys launches worldwide.

You mean this one? I loved that! I was never able to effectively drive a manual transmission car in it, though.

That’s the one. Absolutely waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay ahead of other games at the time.

Damn! I never knew about the alternate deaths that people made for it!

Same situation, had fun watching it. Loved the beginning and the big story-swallowing retcons, let me know everything was on the table. Could pick it apart (why give yourself very little prep time for no real reason?), but I won’t.

Still a better story than Jurassic World (needed tweaks rather than an overhaul), and lots of fun to see more than one Terminator running around.