The biggest problem in the Terminator series might be the birth of not John Conner but Kyle Reese.
The film Terminator Salvation is just a bit vague about the age of Kyle Reese during this week or so in 2018, and that amplifies the problem. We take him for a boy, not much more than twenty, but certainly at least fifteen. If he is twenty, he was born in 1998; if he is fifteen, he was not born until 2003. That puts his birth inside the the uncertain period created by the shift in judgment day. The earliest date we can easily imagine for him means he was born the year after the hardware version of SkyNet would have gone live in 1997; the latest puts him the year before the software version went live in 2004. This matters.
There are a few events in history that change everything. We know for example that the British lost a million men in World War One, and the French, Germans, and Russians each increasingly more. That is millions of men whose heredity was eliminated from the gene pool. Had World War One not happened, almost nobody native to those countries today would ever have been born, the impact on the gene pool would have been that significant.
Judgment day is a similar event. It begins with a defense computer system becoming sentient, and within a very few hours the major population centers of the United States and of most of the world are obliterated in a nuclear attack. Very few people who would have been born otherwise will be born following this event. Part of that is because some mothers and some fathers are dead; part of it is because the general upheaval of society means that people who would have met now won't; part of it is simply that everyone's lives have changed so drastically that even the unplanned children are not the same children.
The problem is that Kyle Reese must exist after both the 1997 hardware launch and the 2004 software launch, and yet his birth falls between the two. If SkyNet does not go live until 2004, Kyle's parents are living in the peaceful pre-apocalyptic world of California. When that date shifts to 1997, if they both survive at all their lives are in that post-apocalyptic upheaval. Yet somehow Kyle must be born within those years in both histories.
We could solve the problem by making him older or younger. Younger is the better solution, because then we do not have to worry about whether he has memories of the pre-apocalyptic world; yet it is easier to make him twenty-two than to make him fourteen, and not easy to do that. The Kyle Reese who meets Sarah Conner does not know the 2004 date, so as we mentioned he must know this history based on what John Conner told him, and not based on his own experience.
Although it seems implausible, in order for this Kyle Reese to exist in both histories he must have been born after the 2004 date. That means he cannot be older than fourteen now, despite his looks. Even this is difficult, since it means that Kyle's parents in one history survived seven years of the war against the machines and in the other they had him shortly after the disaster struck. He becomes the greatest improbability in the film.
There is, however, another potential solution to this problem, which we will have to present next time.
Comments
How come in Salvation there aren't any types of terminators like in T-2 or T-3? Is this a different time line, because Reese in the first film says that the new type of terminater had human skin and not easy to spot like the ones with rubber skin?
Have you done an analysis of Meet the Robinsons? It's one of the biggest time travel pictures of all time. Did you know that? Do you drink tap water? How did Chicken of the Sea get its name? because it surely isn't chicken!
Thanks for the questions, Pizza Guy. Best answer: old model terminators that did not continue to be useful were discontinued. As to the rubber skin, the director probably thought the T-600 looked more frightening as a machine, and rubber skin probably would look silly. There were other terminators--the hydra type, the motorcycles, hunter-killers. As to the T-1000 and T-X, they've not yet been invented--the T-800 is new at this moment, and we're eleven years from the first time trip, and the more advanced machines weren't created until after that.
But you are right in this: that "new" terminator had been around quite a while before it was sent to the past, so Kyle ought not have thought of it as "new". Or maybe the one in Salvation is supposed to have the rubber skin.
--M. J. Young
Duke Pepperoni--I admit to being unaware that Meet the Robinsons was a time travel film; I will add it to my increasingly long list of films to find and analyze. I would not think, though, that an animated film released in 2007 with a 6.9/10 rating at IMDB could justly be called "one of the biggest time travel pictures of all time" in a field in which the Terminator franchise, Back to the Future franchise, 12 Monkeys, Time Machine, and Star Trek figure so prominently.
As to your other questions, we have our own well, and most bottled water is just repackaged tap water anyway; chicken is the common white meat on land, tuna the comparably common white meat from the ocean, and the company obviously thought they could sell canned fish if they connected it to the idea of canned chicken. Apparently that worked, since canned tuna is now more popular than any other canned meat.
Were you really serious about anything in your post? Anyway, thanks for posting.
--M. J. Young
yo
i've been reading your time travel articles for a minute. i started thinking about Dances with Wolves. Is it a time travel movie? cuz it happened in the past but wasn't real.
the pizza and peporoni handles made me think, were you the Mark Young that did the peporoni pizza examiner on here? i used to read them and they got yanked so i wanted to see if i could get them from you
thanx
Uncle Footie's Nan Nan--
On the off-chance that these are serious questions:
--Fictional accounts and anachronisms do not turn a period piece into a time travel movie; I am confident that Dances with Wolves can be ignored by time travel enthusiasts.
--I know very little about pepperoni pizza but that it tends to give me heartburn, and if there ever was a Pepperoni Pizza Examiner here (which would surprise me) I have no connection with him.
--Testing to see what I will endure before ignoring or deleting posts is a waste of everyone's time. If that's not what you are doing, I apologize; but the rise of inane comments by inanely-named posters suggests that there is only one heckler in the crowd small-minded enough to waste his time by wasting mine.
Thanks for reading.
--M. J. Young
--Fictional accounts and anachronisms do not turn a period piece into a time travel movie; I am confident that Dances with Wolves can be ignored by time travel enthusiasts.
yeah but how do you know? it was a different time period in the movie so wouldn't that make it time travel?
Uncle F--
Saturday Night Fever was filmed in the 1970s about the culture of the 1970s. It was at the time of its release a story about the current time. It is now a story about the past, because that time is past. It did not "become" a time travel movie.
Flashbacks do not make a time travel story, either; they only present a story out of temporal sequence.
A time travel story is not one that takes the audience to another place and time, nor even to several other places and times; most stories do that, to one degree or another. It is only a time travel story if characters or objects or information within the story move between points in time. The audience not being part of the story does not get counted as one of the places or times.
--M. J. Young
I get what you are saying but Saturday Night Fever was filmed in the 1970s so when they filmed it it was the present. But, Dances with Wolves was in the old West. So it was not filmed then before video cameras and all that. So why isn't it time travel? How do you know for sure? I look at Dances with Wolves and it travels me and the actors in it to that time.
As do Dangerous Liasons and Raiders of the Lost Ark; but then, too, Star Trek and Alien, which take us to the future; and Peter Pan or Narnia which take us to imaginary worlds with their own time.
Every story must be set in a time and place; that becomes the set time for that story. A story can recall what happened in the past, or move naturally forward into the future, and be simply a story. Time travel happens when plot events occur out of temporal sequence--when Marty visits his parents before they met, or Kate sends letters from the future which Alex receives in the past, or the FBI uses a wormhole to view events surrounding a bombing. It is only when the characters within the film experience events out of temporal sequence that we consider it time travel.
There are close cases (e.g., Sliding Doors, Run Lola Run), but they don't include films set in a single different time.
--M. J. Young
So then you'll be doing articles on Dangerous Liasons and Raiders of the Lost Ark and Alien? i look forward to them.
Let me not be accused of ignoring a legitimate comment.
I will not be reviewing any film in which there is not evidence of someone or something within the film moving in a fashion that disrupts the temporal sequence of events, whether by traveling to the past or by skipping to a distant future without being present in the intervening time. I was hired to analyze time travel movies, and absent obvious time travel elements within the stories themselves they are outside my purview. There are more than enough movies within that range (I have been promised a reviewer copy of Hot Tub Time Machine, The Last Mimzy pieces are ready to go, and Time Traveler's Wife is around here somewhere awaiting my attention) to keep me busy for a long time.
Thanks for asking.
--M. J. Young
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