I don’t often use the break in my blog entries, but the following is going to be horrendously spoilerific, so proceed at your own risk as I launch into a lengthy discussion of how I think Terminator Salvation could have been the best movie possible. Personally, I enjoyed the movie, glad I saw it, it was fun… but it could have been better… and away we go!
Over at CHUD there is a nice article discussing changes from the original screenplay to what you will see on the screen. From reading that I can tell that the original script would have been no better than the movie we got. Both scripts went wrong, but in different places, and what made it to the screen is actually closer to “best” than the original, but it still failed in some key places.
The “best” version, in my opinion, would have fallen in the middle ground between the two. The idea that Skynet is actually trying to save humanity is garbage. The fact that someone actually wrote that in a screenplay just illustrates that some people can’t touch a franchise without pissing on it. Saying that Skynet determined humanity was worth saving, but only after it fixed it is a total cop out. It is lame. However, the original having so little John Connor in it was equally lame. John didn’t need to be a main character, but his role did need some beefing up.
Like the CHUD article says, the main failure of increasing John’s role was the loss of Kyle as a real player. The film should have kept more elements of the bonding between Marcus and Kyle, and while adding the part about John looking for Kyle was a good one, it went too far by making Skynet be looking for him too.
So… how would I have changed it?
Oddly, I’d actually keep a lot of Terminator Salvation almost exactly as filmed up to the point where Kyle and Marcus get separated, minus the submarine part, with more Kyle and Marcus bonding. John would actually be the leader of the Resistance, making his radio speeches and inspiring people to fight back, with only a small group of people actually working with him (many of whom are killed in the mission to recover the specs on the T-800). At the point where Marcus and Kyle split, I’d even retain the parts with Blair, and she would lead Marcus to John. Similar to the film, this is when they learn Marcus is a cyborg. John is ready to go deal the final blow to Skynet when Marcus reveals that the boy he’s itching to save is Kyle. John suddenly changes his tune and agrees to use Marcus to help rescue people. Marcus makes it inside the city, meets Skynet, who accesses Marcus’ memories and sees that John and the Resistance are coming. Skynet explains its going to lay a trap, and we get a whirlwind view of all that Skynet controls, including the “Temporal Research Division”, and why John is significant to the structure of the Resistance. Marcus, being a cyborg, is able to resist the control of Skynet, severs the communication from his brain to it, and starts fighting. John and the resistance roll in and you get a pitched battle between the two. Marcus, having disabled a good bit of Skynet’s defences, goes off in search of Kyle. During the battle, humans are being freed, and armed, by the Resistance, and Resistance members are getting killed left and right, but ultimately they are pushing Skynet’s forces back. John breaks off with Blair and the two of them go looking for Marcus (and Kyle). John discovers that Skynet is pulling out and preparing to nuke the entire city. He goes to see if he can stop it and sends Blair to get Marcus and Kyle out of the city. Marcus finds Kyle. Blair finds them both. Marcus insists they go save John (since he’s seen from Skynet’s point of view how important John is to the Resistance, John is the glue that holds it together). They find John, and they find that Skynet has rolled out the first T-800 to kill John. Skynet’s core has dusted off, they fight the T-800. John manages to stop the nuke, Marcus is losing the fight with the T-800, Blair and Kyle have run off to find a vehicle. John gets wounded, Marcus is down and the T-800 stands above him. Then Kyle hits him with a truck, Marcus passes safely under the truck. Marcus loads John into the truck, Blair is in back. Kyle reverses, turns around and starts driving away. Blair takes shots at the T-800 which is getting up to follow them. Despite John having stopped the nuke, the city is still burning and exploding, the damage is done. As they drive off, Marcus is trying to keep John alive. John pulls him down and says, “There is too much to explain, but Kyle is my father.” (Probably not in that way, would need to write some really great lines for that.) Pulls him closer and whispers more to Marcus, unheard by us.
Kyle stops the truck, the city burns in the distance. John is dying. A brief exchange between the four of them has Marcus explaining that the Resistance can’t survive without John. Kyle brings up that most people have never seen John, only heard him, and suggests that perhaps Marcus could be John. John tells Marcus that there are jounals and tapes back at the Resistance HQ that will help him pull it off. John gives Kyle the photo of Sarah and he explains its his mother, she taught him everything, she’s very important. And then John dies.
The movie ends with Marcus making a radio broadcast to the Resistance as John Connor.
I like this because it gives a credible reason as to why humanity eventually wins. With John being a symbol bodied by a nearly unkillable cyborg, it makes it impossible for Skynet to kill John — in the present. This would lead to Skynet pushing the temporal research in an attempt to kill John’s mother to prevent the symbol from existing. In the next film, we would follow Kyle as he fights Skynet. We’d also see how terminators are “reprogrammed” (to get the T-800’s from T2 and T3), and its because Marcus/John interfaces with them directly and changes their code. The movie would actually feature a raid on the Temportal Reseach Division, Skynet sending a T-800, a T-1000 and a T-X into the portal (to kill Sarah, to kill John, to kill all the Resistance leaders, respectively), and Marcus sending a couple reprogrammed T-800’s and Kyle after them and destroying the device… the film would end with Marcus burning all of John’s journals and tapes with a voice over to the effect of “From the first time a T-800 showed up to kill Sarah Connor until now, we’ve always known what the future would look like, perhaps not the details but the general shape of it… I just sent my best friend to become the father of the man whose legacy I uphold… the future is a dark highway leading off into the distance, there is no fate but what we make now…” I wouldn’t even do another film after that, but if you really wanted you could have a film that deals more with the morality of the destruction of Skynet. If Skynet is “just a machine”, is Marcus? Hunting down the last remnants of Skynet’s armies put Marcus at odds with the rest of the Resistance. You could end it with Skynet building itself a cyborg body in the form of Dr. Serena Kogan, severing its own ties to the rest of the network, and Skynet and Marcus leaving the rest of humanity behind. But whatever…
Anyway, if I had it to do, I think that is how I would do it.