Terminator is a worthy franchise. Really, I rather like it in general. Shiny robots, good special effects, lots of action. But it’s full of plot holes as large as the Mariana Trench.
There’s the obvious one: the temporal paradox. Skynet sends a killer robot back in time to kill Sarah Connor, the mother of John Connor, charismatic leader of the resistance in the future.
But if you kill Sarah, then there’s no John, and in that case Skynet has no reason to send back a robot in time. But then Sarah survives, and then Skynet sends back a robot. Etc.
As it stands, it was a pretty stupid move anyway: the robot turns Sarah Connor from a waitress into a paranoid gun nut, who trains her son in guerilla warfare. Making him, in effect, the leader he becomes. If Skynet is that smart, it should have seen it coming.
But bygones. Let’s move on to the current trilogy, starting with the Terminator Salvation movie. We are now in the predicted future, Judgment Day is past, and humans are struggling for survival. Without revealing too much, i can say that the resistance successfully fights Skynet by bombing an important bit of infrastructure.
What I would do if I was Skynet (and in theory, Skynet is smarter than me), is this: distributed infrastructure. Cloning/duplication/backups in many, many places, including under kilometers of rock, deep under the sea, and in orbit.
I would make sure that my network is utterly decentralized (not like the internet, ha ha). I would add satellite network, wires, EM waves over a lot of different frequencies, so that it would be almost impossible to cut off any part.
In short, Skynet should be impossible to destroy – unless you fry all circuits on earth, and that would involve some unhealthy radiations for the humans, too, I think.
Of course, this wouldn’t make for a very cheerful movie. So i expect a central ‘mainframe’ (like in Independence day, hilarious), or such slightly iffy plot devices. That, or the aliens come to rescue us.
I know, I know, you’re not supposed to really think about such movies. But still.
As a middle-class catholic girl with her head in the books, I was fairly blind to a certain type of activity. Then I lived in Glasgow for a few years. I got to hang out with some friends who’d been around the block a few times and then some, which was extremely instructive.
A couple of nights ago, 5 friends and I went for a meal in Brussels. We were young, crazy and expat together once, and that creates a bond. We like to meet up once in a while.
