I want to start off by qualifying this review by making it clear that I am a huge Terminator fan. ”The Terminator” (the first one from 1984) is my third favorite movie of all time. ”Terminator 2: Judgement Day”, while not one of my top movies, is still quite good. And in terms of pure action ”Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” is one of the best of the genre. I also very much enjoyed the TV series ”Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles”. As for ”Terminator Salvation” is was “meh”, not really bad, but not that great. I’m a fan, though.
To prove how much of a fan I am, and real fans will also recognize this: It really bothered me that in ”Terminator 3” the script repeatedly referred to Schwarzenegger’s cyborg from the first and second movies as a T-101. He was not a T-101 he was a T-800, model 101. To make things worse Schwarzenegger’s cyborg from ”Terminator 3” claims to be a T-850, which makes sense if the cyborgs from the first two movies were T-800s, because the new one was slightly upgraded. Why would the writers even acknowledge that series 800 was a thing, but then mistakenly refer to the first two terminators as T-101s? It makes no sense.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to establish in the last three paragraphs, is that I don’t just ”like” The Terminator: I’m a fan, and coming from fandom ”Terminator Genisys” was a dumb movie. That’s really all I have to say about it. It was dumb. I don’t really know why it was dumb, because I’m not really a movie reviewer, so I didn’t put that much thought into it. I just didn’t like it very much. Well, I did like the whole theme about how the machines took over the world through cell phones, and I’ve been a high tech heretic for years, with most of my heresy targeted at cell phones, so that was at least lip service to me and my kind.
Really, though, the reason I wrote this post was because I wanted to rant about the whole T-101 thing from ”Terminator 3”. It’s bothered me for years, and it would be a little too late to rant about that, except for the fact that there is a new Terminator movie out. So now’s my chance! Seriously though? Did the guys that wrote ”Terminator 3” not even watch the first two movies? Was there not one person on the set that knew to correct them? Clearly Schwarzenegger was unfamiliar with the lore because he’s the one that delivered the T-101 lines. I can almost quote Kyle Reese verbatim from ”The Terminator” when he says, “The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy, but these are new. They look human…”. There is clearly a whole lore behind these terminators, and the T-series is numbered sequentially. T-600s we never see, but apparently they had rubber skin. T-800s looked human. Arnold Schwarzenegger was ”model 101” of the 800 series. T-1000s were made out of some kind of liquid metal so they probably didn’t even have model numbers because they could look like anything. Next thing we know we’re going to see a Terminator movie that features “Phased Plasma Rifles in the 40 Ampere Range”.