Terminator Movie

I went to see the new Terminator movie last Friday, and it was fantastic. Another non-stop nail biter that also manages to address the question of what makes us human.

(minor spoilage ahead for Terminator Salvation, the New Star Trek movie, and somewhat more for the finale of TV’s Sarah Connor Chronicle)

But, as I say to Daniel whenever we get into questions of cause and effect in sci-fi movies and shows, “I hate friggin’ time travel.”

It makes use of the same alternate/branching realities idea as the Trek movie, in that in this version of the Terminator multiverse, the events of the various movies seem to have happened (although only events in the first movie are directly referenced), but events from the TV show have not (as evidenced by the fact that his father is younger than he is, in the conclusion of SCC, he was in the future, a teenager, and no one knew who he was.) But it would have been hard to tell this particular story (he’s looking for his father so he can send him to the past) with a teenaged Connor, even ignoring the fact that they met at the end of the series.

I’ve never been a fan of the infinite alternate realities version of time travel, because if every possibility exists, there is no point to traveling to the past to “set right what once went wrong.” But it bothered me less than the similar plot point in the Trek movie, I suppose because the Sarah Connor series already had gotten me used to rewriting the Terminator timeline when it basically wiped out the plot of the third movie in the first episode, and the fact that the date of Judgment Day changed as people from the future kept going back in time. In Star Trek, though, any time they traveled to the past in the television shows, it turned out that whatever they did in the past had already happened in the existing timeline (like the ep where they accidentally traveled back to the 60’s and had to put the pilot back because a descendant of his would be among the first to go to Mars.) Previously in the Trek universe whenever an evildoer tried to alter the past to his advantage, it turned out that, like Oedipus’ father, he was the engineer of his own demise, rather than preventing it (although you can make that point with the first Terminator movie – if the machines hadn’t tried to kill Sarah, her son would never have been born.)

I hate friggin’ time travel. ;-)