The Terminator was a remarkable movie. The sequel was also amazing.
And then, they decided to create more sequels and ruin it all...
Just a heads up - SPOILER ALERT is coming! If you haven't seen all of the Terminator movies, but want to experience them for yourself, read no further.
But do come back after you've watched them.
If you've seen them already, or you don't care if I "give it all away," then read on, my dear reader.
Let's start with the original Terminator. Way ahead of its time!
Machines and artificial intelligence have conquered the future, and the world is a dystopian wasteland.
The human resistance, led by John Connor, is victorious in defeating the machine empire and reclaiming the planet. But at the last moment, the machines send a robot, the Terminator, back in time to kill his mother. If the Terminator succeeds, time will be changed and the humans will never win.
Kyle Reese follows the Terminator back in time to thwart the plan. In a weird twist, Kyle Reese ends up hooking up with John Connor's mom while they are on the run.
And in a bizarre twist, it turns out Kyle Reese is John Connor's father. Which makes no sense. But there's something in there about fate across time, bigger themes, so on and so forth.
Anyway...Kyle dies, Terminator gets destroyed, the end.
In the sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it turns out the machines sent another Terminator to try to kill John when he is ten years old.
The good guys are victorious once again, and also manage to destroy the technology that would end up taking over the world. Thus, stopping the apocalypse from ever happening.
This is where they should have stopped. They took the good thing they had, clever time travel storylines, and went too far.
In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, it turns out the apocalypse wasn't stopped. It was just postponed. Another terminator was also sent to kill John as an adult. Good guys still defeat the terminator, but we also see nuclear bombs destroy the world at the end.
Terminator Salvation takes place in the future. In this movie, we see how adult John meets young Kyle Reese. Nothing much more special than that in this movie. Other than that John knows how all this is going to go down and needs to make sure Kyle doesn't die or the timeline will be screwed.
Now, this is where the terminator writers really screwed up and made me weep for the franchise. At times, I think I need Doc Brown from Back to the Future II to explain it to me...
In Terminator Genisys, we see Kyle Reese go back in time to save John Connor's mother. The events theoretically leading to the events of the very first movie.
But when he arrives, he's in a different timeline than the original Terminator. As it turns out, another Terminator was sent to kill John's mother when she was a kid. (See how confusing this is getting?)
I guess the machines in the future sent a comical number of robots all across time to take this dude out, too...
John Connor's mother ends up growing up to be a badass who can take out terminators. And the terminator who protected her all that time is there, too.
(Oh yeah, apparently adult John sent something like three or four reprogrammed terminators to go after all the bad ones that were sent backin time to destroy every part of his life).
So, see what happened there? In one fell swoop, they erased all the events of the previous four films!!!!!
But wait. It gets better. Or worse, I should say.
The latest movie of the franchise, Terminator: Dark Fate, picks up after the events of Terminator 2.
Yet another terminator sent to the past actually kills John Connor as a 12-ish-year-old.
And the rest of the movie is centered around a different hero that will apparently lead the new human resistance against the new apocalypse.
If I lost you there, here's the deal. This latest Terminator movie preserved the events of the first terminator because it erased all of the events from Terminator 3 forward.
And now, if there is ever another Terminator movie, I can't take it seriously. They've betrayed my trust. It's right up there with the Game of Thrones series finale.
I don't want to watch a movie where the events might be erased in another sequel. Or, the events of a previous movie will be erased.
So, let it be known about creativity. When you find something that works, careful not to go too far. Or else, you might not only change the course of time, but erase your audience's interest in your work.
I also realize this is one of my longer, more convoluted blog posts. So if you made it here to the end, big hug from me. You're the best. (Heart emoji)