It’s incredible how little redundancy is built into Skynet. Not long after Terminator Genisys opens, we see the mythical John Connor leading an assault on Skynet’s time travel facilities. Connor, played by Jason Clarke, has ordered the bulk of his forces to attack Skynet itself, farther north, much to the consternation of Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney), who hasn’t been let in on the Terminator series canon at this point. As the battle rages at the time machine, all of Skynet’s killer robots go inactive, signaling that Skynet has been destroyed, and only the war in the past remains undecided.
A viewer is required to engage in a large amount of suspension of disbelief in order to enjoy Terminator films. There’s the whole time travel/killer robots thing to get past, and a plot hole-to-consistency ratio that is weighted too far towards the wrong side. But the idea John Connor’s troops could attack a single location, presumably blow it to smithereens, and a worldwide computer network would collapse, is ludicrous.
This is it. We’re in the future. Thirty years ago, when the first Terminator was released, something like Skynet was as far beyond our comprehension as time travel, making it fine to just make stuff up. But today we live in a world of server farms and off-site backups. Sure, there are still times when an ISP goes offline and millions of people can’t get their email, but those times are rare, and never last all that long (unless it’s a Sony network). Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Terminator Genisys”
Thank goodness for Roland Emmerich. If it weren’t for filmmakers like him, we’d all be stuck watching Terrence Malick and David Lynch films. Please, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not picking on Malick and Lynch for no reason. They’re great filmmakers, as are too many others to mention. But when I thought of great filmmakers whose work is a real slog to get through, those two names popped into my head. You lucked out this time, Werner Herzog.