Terminator (2019)

Brad2770 said:

Some of the books have altered timelines. I don’t think any of it is cannon though, other than the prequel book to Salvation.

Sarah Connor Chronicles looked like it was about to dive into sone of the merging alternate timelines. Not sure if that show was considered cannon. Too bad. It was pretty good.

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I've been reading the T2 sequel trilogy by S.M. Stirling on and off for a few years. It took a while but I finally got to the last book and have about 150 pages left. This trilogy functions as a sequel to T2 but it doesn't actually mess with the canon much, aside from Judgment Day happening regardless of Cyberdyne being blown up, just later. Everything leads right up to where T1 starts, I think. There's also a ton of stuff in these books that later movies would rip off. T3, Salvation, and Genisys all have stuff from these.


The first two books follow up on T2 (in the late 90's, I think) and the third book jumps around in the actual future war. Far as I know this is the only piece of media anywhere that covers the early parts of the future war, AKA the timeframe when the Resistance was just starting to form and the machines were still kind of primitive. It isn't much of a "war" until later. Early on, the machines mostly just half-heartedly sweep for survivors but mostly focus on building up their factories to produce new infrastructure, while the humans just sort of survive and avoid them.

TheNozz said:

Had an epiphany yesterday:

There have only been three seen models of the 800 series Terminators
Arnold: Model 101

Franco Columbu: “Model 102” from Reese’s nightmare sequence

Aaron Williams: “Model 103” from the intro scene of Genisys

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Trying to remember the third one. I don't remember there being any infiltrators in the Genisys intro, just lots of battlefield endos and the Matt Smith "T-5000" Skynet Avatar.

Unless Aaron Williams was the terminator that menaced Young Kyle in the sewer? I'm pretty sure that was supposed to be a T-600. The scene was from 2017 I think (since young Kyle there looks the same as young Kyle later in the movie in our 2017). T-800 wouldn't be around for a while if they're following the Cameron version of things, and if you look closely at the guy when he gets illuminated by plasma flashes, his face is all rubbery. That or extremely sweaty. So I think it's that movie's version of T-600 and closer to the show's version rather than Salvation's version.

Though all of this does beg the question of why plasma rifles are a thing in 2017 when I'm pretty sure most Terminator canon is that they came around late in the war because of ammo scarcity, but maybe I'm wrong. Every movie does its own thing anyway.

That sewer scene is probably one of the best scenes in the movie and one of the rare times we ever got to see a regular person being stalked by a terminator "in the wild" so to speak.

TheNozz said:

All three actors are fairly big and jacked. So this tends to give the impression that most Terminators with skin intact resemble big muscular men.

Given the setting, this actually makes little sense: we see in Reese’s nightmare that people are so desperate for food that they kill and eat rats. How in the world would anyone be able to get that muscular in a world where food is that scarce?

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Whether the guy was an 800 or 600 your point stands that these terminators should probably stick out like a sore thumb. Maybe with clothes on it's less noticeable, but probably it's just something Cameron didn't spend much time thinking about since 101 and 102 both appear in his first movie. I bet his head-canon was that there were lots of other models in different shapes and sizes. Lance Henriksen was originally supposed to be the Terminator, so maybe that's what more of them look like and we just don't see it, IDK. Problem is a lot of this stuff has to be head-canon because Cameron didn't flesh it out (no pun intended) and every other movie goes all over the place with it.

The same "how would anyone be that muscular" logic could also be applied to Jai Courtney and is another reason why he was terrible casting of Kyle Reese in Genisys. I think he did a decent job and was likeable enough, but no way a future soldier should have been that buff.

I think the guy who played Winter Soldier would have been a WAY better choice for Kyle.

TheNozz said:

prob why Robert Patrick’s T1000 is such an effective villain: much more unassuming but Patrick exudes a level of malevolence that makes it all believable that he’s a machine

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Speaking of good choices, Robert Patrick was a good choice. He's malevolent and efficient and at times almost comes across like some kind of serpent. Plus he looks like a regular person on the surface, unlike the other guys.

j00t said:

initially, the 1-800's weren't wearing skin, or at least, weren't wearing particularly believable skin. the entire reason for skin was for time travel, as you can't transport inorganic matter unless it's encased in something organic. the t800's were probably bulky when they had skin on specifically the models were designed to have clothes on so they'd pretty much just need to cover up their faces. i remember reading something somewhere ages ago that talked about early terminators could fool people from a distance but as soon as they got close or had lights on them they were pretty easily exposed.

so my reasoning for that is because the t800's just needed to be bulky enough to look human in clothing, but were then retrofitted with musculature to allow for then to be sent back in time which gave them huge bodybuilder physiques.

i mean... i've honestly never thought about this until just now but this seems plausible to me.

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I don't think time travel was the impetus for them getting skin. Time travel was a last-minute Hail Mary by Skynet. For years before that they were trying to infiltrate human bases/warrens/tunnels. At first they were easy to spot, then they got really hard to spot, to the point that dogs became needed.

The "need flesh to time travel" thing was probably just thrown on there to explain away why no future weapons had been brought back. Silverman straight up asks Reese why he didn't bring a laser gun back to kill the terminator with and that's where we get the living tissue explanation.

BTW, the living tissue? Yeah that was farmed by skinning humans and then cloning their tissue. Not sure if they killed the humans first either. This is covered in the T2 novelization and I think it's offhandedly mentioned in Cameron's T1 screenplay, but it didn't make it to the final movie because Gross.

Salvation hints at it with all the people being farmed into the T-800 research facility, and the Terminator: Resistance video game straight up tells you when you find a pile of corpses in a ditch outside a Skynet base and everyone's like a blood-soaked skeleton.