The Terminator and Troubling Time Travel Twists
June 5th, 2009
I just went to see Terminator Salvation yesterday. Like those who remember the first Terminator (but weren’t die hard fans or remember the core details), I’m on the positive side of the fence with how I felt about this movie. I thought it was as complete a movie as I could hope for considering I stopped caring about the Terminator franchise at T3… and The Sarah Connor Chronicles don’t even seem to exist in my reality. Soooo… I think I just backed up why I think this movie was a fine enough action movie… pretend the stuff before it doesn’t matter. Maybe one day I’ll go back just to complete my T-Lore in preparation for the renewed franchise that is undoubtedly on the war-torn horizon of the future.
The thing about the Terminator series–and in fact ANY story with time travel in it–is that eventually my brain hits a “wall”. The X-Men comic franchise is notorious for convoluted time travel, parallel universe, alternate universe, parallel alternate future universe, etc. storylines… and more than once I’ve just had to jump that persistent WALL in order to enjoy the story. The 12 Monkeys movie is also one of my favorite movies ever, and it TOO has this wall I speak of.
The Wall: The moment in a time travel story when the continuity of events become theoretically impossible, even considering and accepting the real possibilities of a quantum physics event such as time travel. It’s a time also summarized by “What came first: The chicken? Or the egg?” It’s a moment in the time continuum where “the beginning” doesn’t and CAN’T exist.
For the Terminator story that moment happens when the audience discovers John Connor is the son of a future time traveler, Kyle Reese (is is old old lore, so no spoilers here). In Terminator Salvation we then see that if it wasn’t for John Connor, Kyle Reese wouldn’t have been saved (this could be a spoiler if you’re naive enough to believe the movie would be ANY OTHER THING than this). There we hit THE WALL in time travel continuity. It is at this moment that a LOOP in time is created where both father and son will continue these exact moments of the last 20-30 years for INFINITY! Now that Kyle Reeses is alive, he’ll go back in time, have a son with Sarah Connor, John Connor will be born, John Connor will lead The Resistance, John Connor will save Kyle Reese… repeat. Kill Kyle and there is no John, but kill John and there is no Kyle.
So why didn’t Marcus KILL Kyle and end this whole problem 15-20 minutes into the flm?! Machine’s problem SOLVED! No Father = No son = Robots win! This is one of many time-created holes saturating this film to the point of making the entire film a disappointment to many hard core fans who wanted to see closure to many past continuity points brought up in previous films.
This is both a love and hate relationship I have with this kind of story telling. It’s an anomaly for the sake of creating a high concept anomaly. The fact is though that the story hinges on this concept which in turn creates a reality that constrains and perpetually limits the span of the story telling further creating other loop variables, continuity concerns, etc.
For example: Why are the machines sending Terminator units back in time to kill Connor? Is the math two complicated for a MACHINE to grasp? They will NEVER kill Connor in the past because the future they came from will always be what it is. IF there is NO Connor, then that future will never be what it is–it will be a DIFFERENT future all together in a parallel universe constructed of an alternative possibility, but it won’t be the same future… see this is the kind of stuff that makes my head twirl until I force myself to walk away from it. With that I end this blog…
I haven’t seen Star Trek yet (but will at the start of next week) but I’ve heard that they did it the way it needs to be done in order to have the freedom to do whatever you like thereafter. Parallel universes people! Comics do it all the time, it’s about time that story telling gimmick gets adopted into film screenwriting! It’s the magical component for rebooting many franchises for new generations!
Related Posts
New blog post: The Terminator and Troubling Time Travel Twists http://bit.ly/19M4W5