Arnold = Terminator
So when he didn’t play a role in Terminator Salvation, it felt like a different kind of movie to me.
I liked it, but not in the same way I liked T2.
Terminator Genisys brought back all the T2 stuff I enjoyed and then some.
Arnold is back again and they made him just a little more likeable this time too.
But the best part of the movie is the crazy time travel paradox.
In other reviews I theorized about Skynet’s methods of going back in time:
Why just go back to the same time period once?
Why not a bunch of times with better robots?
Well, it seems that was the case, and in the 1984 Terminator movie, we just saw one occurrence.
In this movie, Skynet apparently sent someone way back in time to kill little Sarah Connor.
But guess who was waiting for them?
Yup, Arnold.
We don’t know the whole story, but Arnold saves young Sarah, her parents are killed by Skynet and he becomes her permanent protector.
So if we follow this timeline and combine it with the original movie, which they did in Terminator Genisys, we have an insane timeline.
Kyle Reese travels back in time to 1984 to protect Sarah Connor from “bad” Arnold, only to find that she’s already being protected by “good” Arnold and that she already knows that he is the father of her unborn child.
Then they travel to the future to a year that Kyle Reese only remembers from memories of a past that he actually never lived (what?) and they meet their son, John Connor, who traveled back in time to that year as well.
Wrap your head around that!
And that’s just part of the movie.
We also get some more information about the time travel device, and about the resistance, and the history of Kyle Reese.
And more Arnold of course.
No matter how many awesome things you put in a Terminator movie, Arnold will always be my favourite.