The McG Ouevre
Chris Orr was not a big fan of Terminator: Salvation:
What’s missing is much of anything that could be plausibly described as fun. Director McG–best known for his work on music videos, commercials, and the Charlie’s Angels movies–paints his post-apocalyptic landscape in a palette of sand and steel, as if color itself had been bleached from the world. But in contrast to The Dark Knight (one of the obvious models for this reboot), he fails to imbue his grim vision with any depth, texture, or complexity. A slender, silly movie that is upfront about its silliness (say, Star Trek) can be a giddy pleasure; a slender, silly movie that presents itself as an unflinching portrait of human endurance is setting itself up for failure.
I keep hearing McG’s music video work referenced in negative reviews—see, e.g., Smash Mouth’s annoying years-old hit “All Star”—but in my view the quintessential McG work was the short-lived Fox cop show “Fast Lane”. It was about a small crew of sexy undercover narcotics cops (two dudes who I forget, with Tiffany Amber Thiessen as the boss) in Miami, who worked out of some kind of giant barn full of awesome stuff they’d confiscated from bad guys. The show was terrible, but damn stylish. This scene has Mischa Barton and “Pictures of Success” by Rilo Kiley:
I can’t really stomach the way the Terminator franchise has inconsistent treatments of time travel paradoxes.
49 Responses to “The McG Ouevre”
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May 23rd, 2009 at 1:14 pm
I don’t know if I’d call the lovingly filmed conspicuous consumption thing stylish. (Tho’ I guess that more or less the point of James Bond) It’s more like an attempt to imitate Miami Vice. Which, when combined with a dumb pseudonym ends up being pretty annoying.
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:29 pm
I always think of him as “MookG.”
A hack director who is hackish in a way that makes everything he touches lifeless, and who instead fakes “attitude,” which is death to style.
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:32 pm
loved that show
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:46 pm
What really matters is writing. Visual style is easy. There are a zillion good TV commercial shooters, a zillion good DPs out there. Sounds like this movie has zero story.
There are very few good writers, and few good executives/producers who can shepherd a well written project through. Too many weigh in with their view of what will be commercially viable. This is why there is so much suckage.
McG was probably not in control of this project, he was one of 5 or 6, so talking about this as a McG thing misses the point.
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Wait, what the fuck was this post about?
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:54 pm
I can’t really stomach the way the Terminator franchise has inconsistent treatments of time travel paradoxes.
Matt Yglesias: not sufficiently beaten up as a child.
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:59 pm
The original Terminator has a pretty clever take on it: they invent time travel without knowing much about how it works, they implement a plan assuming that it works on the Back to the Future model, and then they find out that it actually works on the Bill & Ted model. Clever and self-contained.
It’s really T2 where they screw it up, and I’m not gonna slam that excellent film too harshly for that.
May 23rd, 2009 at 2:04 pm
the original terminator was ripped from La Jetee, a 60’s experimental film by Chris Marker, a famous documentarian. Great stuff
May 23rd, 2009 at 2:09 pm
It is worth watching if only because of Mischa Barton. Mischa Barton is the hottest person in the world.
May 23rd, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Hottest person in the world.
May 23rd, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Not that hot, and a damn horrible actress! That line delivery was cringe-worthy.
But, I want to hear Josh Hall-Bachner expand on what he means by the “Bill & Ted model”. Its been too long since I’ve seen that to remember their treatment, and I was always more of a “Bogus Journey” fan to begin with.
I do vaguely recall a situation where they needed some keys and just decided then and there that, in the future, they’d come back and put keys in the drawer, and voila, it was done.
But, if we’re going to talk time-travel movies, we should talk Primer.
May 23rd, 2009 at 2:17 pm
the original terminator was ripped from La Jetee, a 60’s experimental film by Chris Marker, a famous documentarian.
I loved both “La Jetée” and the first two Terminator films, but the sci-fi plot device of traveling back in time and influencing an earlier version of oneself was already well-worn in 1962.
May 23rd, 2009 at 2:21 pm
I share Matt’s problems with the Terminator films’ time travel paradoxes, although, to my recollection, they’re NOT “inconsistent”. They simply follow, as the previous commenter pointed out, the “Bill & Ted” model rather than the “Back to the Future” model.
(By the way, those are wonderful and apt descriptors for the two main types of time travel as presented in fiction — either you can change the future, or you can’t (i.e., it all already happened this way)…)
That said, I hate “closed loop” time-travel stories. Where in the world is the fun in time travel if you can’t change the future? This is why I haven’t been able to get into this season of “Lost,” either.
May 23rd, 2009 at 2:42 pm
coincidentally I watched Timcrimes last night, a Spanish movie that is just time travel paradox, very well done worth a rental.
And Myles, it features some unknown Spanish actress who is one of the thousands upon thousands of actresses who are hotter than Mischa Barton:-)
May 23rd, 2009 at 2:44 pm
My God that clip was horrible. Every bad device and bit of camera work all in a minute and a half.
May 23rd, 2009 at 2:44 pm
How could you forget Bill Bellamy?
May 23rd, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Oh hells no. Have you never seen the OC, first and second seasons? No Spanish actress is hotter than Mischa Barton. She’s God, or Goddess.
May 23rd, 2009 at 3:20 pm
The second Charlie’s Angels film, which I got to endure on a flight, was possibly the worst movie I have ever seen. I’m not even sure if it has the enduring ironic so-bad-it’s-good value of, say, Showgirls.
May 23rd, 2009 at 3:30 pm
“Wait, what the fuck was this post about?”
It’s actually an interesting post.
I’m surprised Matthew doesn’t defend McG, who’ve I always seen as a lousy popcorn movie director much like Michael Bay, whom Matthew admires.
But the idea that McG’s most comfortable fit is TV strikes me as quite reasonable, (though I haven’t seen the TV show he did.) McG is quite good with surfaces, but can’t quite manage the depth necessary to sustain a feature.
May 23rd, 2009 at 3:38 pm
“I’m not even sure if it has the enduring ironic so-bad-it’s-good value of, say, Showgirls.”
I never understand when folks dismiss Showgirls in this manner.
Audiences have a weird relationship to Verhoeven’s American movies.
Starship Troopers, Showgirls, Basic Instinct, and Total Recall all have reps as “bad movies”, but they’re actually really good movies in really trashy genres.
May 23rd, 2009 at 4:21 pm
“It was about a small crew of sexy undercover narcotics cops (two dudes who I forget, with Tiffany Amber Thiessen as the boss) in Miami,”
if you’re as old as i am, then this will seem like a pretty straight rip-off of “the mod squad”, which featured two dudes i forget, with peggy lipton.
May 23rd, 2009 at 5:02 pm
I can’t stomach the way Terminator 3 changed the whole point of the story—the future is not fixed…—and made nuclear war “inevitable”. Who the hell was that for? The first two Terminator movies are the only movies for which I can tolerate the theme of time travel. Anything to stop a nuclear holocaust.
May 23rd, 2009 at 6:28 pm
Changed the point of which story? Not Terminator. It was Terminator 2 that was revisionist.
The original is a very bleak movie that captures the 80s American cold war psyche, much like Godzilla is a stand-in for Japan’s wrestling with the atomic age. The second one was made after the end of the Cold War, and that is why it is much more upbeat — contradicting the inevitability of the first movie. The are both very much products of their time.
I hated Linda Hamilton’s monologues (with the open highway scenes) in Terminator 2; the ones where which she talks about changing the future. They were cheesy and ham-fisted.
May 23rd, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Mr. Yglesias scores all sorts of cool points for being familiar with–and somewhat admiring–”Fastlane.” Fox gets rid of all the best shows.
May 23rd, 2009 at 6:58 pm
“Fox gets rid of all the best shows.”
Only because they’re the only one who commissions all the best shows in the first place.
Murdoch may play loathsomely in the political arena, but he understands entertainment.
May 23rd, 2009 at 7:08 pm
My only objection is this part:
Um, I kind of expect a Terminator movie to be “a slender, silly movie that is upfront about its silliness.” I don’t think any of them were aspiring to be Schindler’s List.
It’s about a cyborg sent back in time, for god’s sake. Who’s taking that seriously?
May 23rd, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Walker: As the resident Terminator expert here, no, you’re wrong.
T-2 retained the notion that the future was not set. In fact, T-1 also had that notion for two reasons: first, Kyle Reese relayed future John’s explicit message that it was not set (although HOW he KNEW that is an open question), and second, because there is a deleted scene in which Sarah tries to convince Kyle to stop Cyberdyne from building Skynet in the first place – a theme which was made explicit in T-2.
T-3, however, made TWO major mistakes for the franchise: first, by denying that Judgment Day could be stopped, and second, by making John Connor a whiny wuss, which is precisely one of the MANY problems the TV series had.
TSCC has been canceled, however, and word is that Warner Brothers isn’t even bothering to try to shop it around to another network. The ratings were horrible, the show bled viewers, and the characterization was so bad it probably damaged the franchise almost as much as T-3.
The finale was an unmitigated disaster, with the worst “sex scene” between John and Cameron possible which was probably also the worst scene of the entire series, on a par with the “Three Hundred Foot Cameron Throw” in “Alpine Fields”.
How Josh Friedman even got the job as show runner in the first place is open to question. He had zero broadcast TV production experience, and zero sci-fi “street cred” other than a “War of the Worlds” script that was never used.
From his Wired article, you can see he never had a clue what Terminator was about and how Terminator should be done on TV, thinking he could make it all about Sarah Connor’s psychology and a “family drama” – which is idiotic.
The one thing he did right was cast Summer Glau as the female protective Terminator – and then he did next to nothing with that concept and sidelined her for most of season 2, except for 2 episodes devoted to her character. The story telling potential of a relationship between human and AI was completely lost.
Season one showed the show had tremendous potential. Season 2 blew that away and sank into the toilet.
Fox would have canceled it back in October, but Warner Brothers paid Fox to leave it on the air as a lead-in to T-4. Fox TOLD Friedman not to spend so much time on Sarah Connor in the back nine episodes, so what does he do? Lead off from the two month hiatus with THREE straight episodes of “Crazy Sarah” crap.
How the hell can somebody other than a five year old SCREW UP TERMINATOR? It was a guaranteed hit!
May 23rd, 2009 at 7:38 pm
Well, one good thing about TSCC: they used my name in one episode!
See here:
Shirley Manson in Terminator S02E19
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOeUOoNjl8M&feature=related
May 23rd, 2009 at 8:41 pm
Deleted scenes do not count. We are talking about the movie that was shown, not some alternate version that 0.1% of the viewers know about.
The only thing in your favor is John’s message. However, this is weak sauce; the message serves the same function that humans need to believe they have free will — in order to function — even if they do not. The closed loop at the end of the movie, together with Sarah’s final narration, is a much stronger theme, and it overwhelms John’s message. John’s message becomes a minor footnote that is easily dismissed as motivation.
T1 is a cold war movie whose primary theme was the notion self-destruction that was very popular in movies made 82-84. T2 is the first movie in the franchise to actually explore the question of fate.
May 23rd, 2009 at 9:06 pm
Yet T-2 has the most graphic depictions of nuclear war, and Sarah Conner screaming “…you’re dead already…” It worked very well for me, but I’m a veteran of nuclear forces, so both Terminator movies are particularly meaningful for me–especially since it is, from a human point of view, an accidental nuclear war, which is not a threat that is limited to the Cold War. I hate T-3. Hate it. Hate it. Hate it.
May 23rd, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Terminator 3 was very much the Bush Era Terminator film. It’s morbid pessimism precisely matched the negativity of the Bush administration. Judgement Day was the future version of 9/11, both played as inevitable and unstoppable. All you could do was kiss off the victims, consolidate power and deal death and destruction into a dystopian future. With, of course, the divinely annointed leading us poor wretches from the pristine safety of their command bunker.
In contrast, I didn’t despise the series nearly as much.
As for Terminator 4 – SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT….
Yeah, like its a frakking spoiler when the trailers for Terminator 4 give away the big shocker – that befuddled stranger Marcus Wright is actually a Terminator.
Seriously, I have to wonder what sort of trailers this bunch would give to the Sixth Sense “You’ll be shocked when you discover he was dead all along.” “A touching relationship between a guy and a girl who is really a guy.”
Do they have ANY grasp of drama, when they give away this big and critical a plot point IN THE TRAILER?
Ah, never mind. Even if it wasn’t revealed in the trailer, there’s blatant and unsubtle hints revealed through the first half of the movie, and then its blown in the most uninteresting way possible halfway into the movie.
Having prematurely shot their wadd, and established Marcus Wright as a strange new form of Terminator, they then proceed to flounder.
I mean, wow, who would have done something like that? Could it be….. Skynet!!!! Could Skynet possibly have an evil ulterior motive? You think!!!!
Will Marcus wrestle with his cyborg nature? For about 3 seconds 85% of the way into the movie, after which he pulls the EEVIL skynet chip out of his head… and that’s that.
In contrast, the Shwarzeneggerbots struggle with his programming is a masterpiece of drama in T3.
May 23rd, 2009 at 9:37 pm
T-3 also ends with the Adam and Eve story—the most stupid post-apocalyptic scenario imaginable.
May 23rd, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Structurally, a major problem with T3 is that it blows its load way too early. The major action set piece takes place about a third of the way into the movie and then the whole film runs out of steam until the last ten or fifteen minutes.
And let’s face it, when Arnold Shwarzenegger is the best actor in the cast… you’ve got troubles.
May 23rd, 2009 at 10:04 pm
I saw T-3 at the theater. Wasn’t John Conner living under a bridge, or something? So much for training. I was so pissed when nuclear war was declared “inevitable” that the rest of the movie seemed like lobbying to me. I wondered what contracts Arnold was lining up for missile defense. A million a day blowing up missiles in rigged tests. Blech.
May 23rd, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Amen. Which is why TV is a VASTLY more interesting medium than film, and has been for at least twenty years.
As far as I can tell, the only item in the history of film/TV that ever got this right was the Futurama movie _Bender’s Big Score_.
But what do you expect — you introduce a deliberate inconsistency into a plot, then complain it makes no sense? There’s a reason most of the public are irritated by this sort of thing.
May 23rd, 2009 at 10:29 pm
He might have been. As I recall, Connor is doing day labour on a road crew and bragging about ‘living off the grid.’
As Wiley points out, he’s shown himself to be something of a loser and underachieve, just like Bush, before fate takes a hand and brings him into a role as ‘Man of Destiny.’
He flounders around pointlessly, pulled this way and that by mentors, until finally millions of people die so that he can assume his ordained role in history. Judgement day comes, but its not as if he’s actually clued in or doing anything about it. It’s fate or kismet or something, just like 9/11.
Like I said, T3 is the Bush version.
May 23rd, 2009 at 10:55 pm
I’ve worked for McG, and though I haven’t worked for Bey, I know people currently toiling on Transformers 2… They are very different temperamentally. It’s hard for me to imagine McG yelling at anyone, which for someone in his position, isn’t such a good thing. Bey knows what he wants and gets it. The really interesting thing about that whole Christian Bale tantrum audio that came out a few months ago is that McG was present for the entire thing, and he’s nominally supposed to be the guy running the set, be he doesn’t dare try to reign in an angry actor… He’s non-confrontational, where Bey, like James Cameron, doesn’t take guff from anybody.
May 23rd, 2009 at 10:57 pm
Well, on the subject of Michael Bay, I’ve seen Transformers and I came away from it with the realization that there is no God. It’s proof.
May 24th, 2009 at 1:10 am
Since when do directors have a “stage name”? Wikipedia reveals that our friend McG has a perfectly usable real name, so why do movie studios indulge his vanity?
May 24th, 2009 at 1:37 am
The name’s absurd, but I’ve heard him asked about it, and he freely admits it’s absurd. He just doesn’t care. Also, he’s one of the producers of Chuck, so that earns him a fair amount of goodwill from me.
In regards to the original article, I’ve noticed an annoying trend of journalists misusing the term “reboot.” Batman Begins was a reboot. Casino Royale was a reboot. Terminator: Salvation is a sequel.
May 24th, 2009 at 11:46 am
28: Man, even if he’s supposed to be a robot that guy is one crappy actor. For once the YouTube commenters got it exactly right.
May 24th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
Walker: You’re still wrong.
First, deleted scenes count since they speak to the director’s intent. The scene was cut due to time constraints.
Second, my point was that T-2 retained the message of T-1 from the deleted scene because of Sarah’s intent to stop Cyberdyne. A point you ignored in your reposte.
Give it up. You’re wrong. Both T-1 and T-2 expressed the view that the future was not set, whereas T-3 explicitly said it was.
McG’s nickname was given him by his parents. Who wants to have a name with McGinty in the middle? So what? There’s another director who has a long foreign name and he goes by the single short name “Kaos” which is extracted from his longer name.
The really stupid thing about McG is that he’s willing to cast Will Smith as Captain Nemo in a remake of Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”! WILL FUCKING SMITH?? WTF??
One thing I give McG credit for: he knows how to run a PR operation. I attended the T-4 panel at WonderCon in February, and he knows how to generate crowd excitement. By comparison, the TSCC panel looked like a wake – which it was.
May 24th, 2009 at 10:51 pm
Completely forget to say:
I did see the movie last night. I thought it was pretty well done, the ending didn’t bother me at all. Even the introduction of a CGI Arnie into the movie was well done.
One big issue I had is why Skynet was after Kyle Reese since there is no way Skynet could know Reese was Connor’s father – unless when Sarah had the kid (which, by the way, according to TSCC was in the jungles of Central America) she put Reese’s name down as the father on the birth certificate – assuming there was a birth certificate and assuming she was dumb enough to do that and assuming the record survived Judgment Day to close the time loop.
In fact, in the movie, Connor continues to NOT tell anyone who Kyle Reese is, even his superiors when they are about to attack Kyle’s location. He merely claims that the attack must be withheld because it would jeopardize their future. He clearly cannot reveal this fact in the future because then Skynet could find out and eliminate him by eliminating Kyle. Forget Sarah Connor and time travel, Skynet could stop him in the future without ever having to do time travel.
In TSCC they made a point of saying that nobody knew Kyle Reese was John’s father – except that Derek figured it out, and Cameron undoubtedly could too except she never mentioned it. She knew Derek was Kyle’s brother, she knew that Kyle had been sent back to save Sarah and when, and once John was revealed to have the same blood type, she could reason that Kyle was sent back exactly 16 years and nine months prior to John’s current age, and clearly that would indicate who was his father, coupled with the rare blood type.
I’ll have to watch the movie a couple more times to see the plot holes, but so far that was the biggest one.
May 25th, 2009 at 9:44 am
It now feels like I’m carping a bit. But here goes.
T4 seems to be an explicit repudiation of T3 and of the Bush Era of pointless and futile grand strategy.
John Connor says a couple of times “Staying the Course will get us killed!”
He also appeals to humanity, ‘if we do this, then we’re no better than the machines, what’s the point.’ This certainly reflects back on the ongoing debate over torture.
Finally, Connor seems to argue that the future is not set and that free will exists.
As for Kyle Reese, not only does Skynet know who he is, which seems impossible, but he’s logged in and listed on their facial recognition software and in the database. When did that happen?
Also, knowing who he is, why bother holding him at all, or strapping him down on the table. Snap his neck, problem solved.
May 25th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
More carping, but I really found the ‘post-apocalyptic’ world of Skynet to be trite and cliched. This is stuff we find in 80’s heavy metal music videos. Lots of well fed people in designer rags and set decoration from junkyards.
The heavy metal music video influence was most obnoxious in that scene where Marcus Wright finds himself looking down a wrecked LA streetscape and finds wreckage strewn everywhere, and fires burning.
Fires burning? How long ago was judgement day? Ten years? Have those little fires been burning for ten years? Nonsense. A few hours then at most? Maybe an hour or so? What started them, what exactly is burning. There’s no reason for this, its just rock video set dressing.
Later on, as the humans are being ‘processed’ at skynet headquarters, once again, we see fires burning. What for? More rock video set dressing.
Go back to the first movie – the few flashbacks are horrific. The resistance doesn’t look ‘metal video’, they look like refugees, dirty, scared, hiding like rats, cobbling whatever they can together. Massively outgunned by the enemy. The one battle we see ends badly. Its a world of skulls. Kyle Reese comes out of this world covered in scars, shaking from PST, plagued by screaming nightmares. Event he flash forwards of the second movie give this impression.
But in T4, what we get is sanitized and kid friendly, a set dressed video game. There’s no sense of this as a scary world.
May 25th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Thanks for putting Smash Mouth in my head. I’m at work and this will kill me.
May 25th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
The problem with T4 isn’t McG’s direction, which is really only hampered by the fact that this post-apocalyptic world is so ugly. The best thing about the new STAR TREK is that it embraces the idea that it’s better for thing to look pretty than realistic.
The problem with T4 is that John Connor is barely more than a supporting character and his wife Kate is not much more than a cameo. Who wants to watch a Terminator movie that’s largely about two brand new character? Once they made that decision (much like when Lucas decided that Anakin Skywalker was going to be a little kid in EPISODE I), the story was screwed from the get go.
It also didn’t help that instead of standing on its own like the first three films, this one was never considered to be more than another installment in an ongoing series of Terminator flicks. I think the plan was to make a trilogy with Bale as John Connor.
Mike
May 25th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Dammit, now I gotta spend $9 to see this piece of trash…
May 26th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Richard Steven Hack, you seem like a smart fella, but you’re wrong about Terminator for the same exact reasons you think you are right. You say that “T-2 retained the notion that the future was not set. In fact, T-1 also had that notion…” but this is certainly incorrect. In fact, both movies retained the notion that the future is in fact fixed. First, consider the existence of both John Connor and the Terminators. John Connor exists because he sends his father, Kyle Reese, back into time to protect his mother, Sarah Connor, and insure that he is born and is able to lead the human resistance against the Terminators. If Kyle Reese, Sarah Connor, or John Connor are able to stop Skynet from existing, that means there is no reason for John Connor to send Kyle Reese back into the past to save John, which means John is never born. This is a closed-loop ontological paradox that cannot be broken. John Connor does not exist without Skynet. At the same time, recall in T2 that Miles Dyson admits that the reason they were able to get their research up and running (that eventually births Skynet) is because of both the terminator hand and CPU that was found in the hydropress that Sarah Connor used to kill the first T-800. In effect, the act of trying to stop the terminator from completing its objective allows Skynet a technology branch to be produced from. Without the threat to John Connor’s life, there is no Skynet (quite close to the predestination paradox). John Connor and Skynet do not exist without each other.
Furthermore, in T2, all we saw was an attempt by Sarah Connor to change the future. In fact, she never states that the future is changed. According to Wiki, she says the following, as the film shows a car driving down a dark freeway: “The unknown future rolls toward us. I face it, for the first time, with a sense of hope. Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.” This is important. The point was never that we know everything is going to be great, but just the opposite. Whatever you think Cameron intended is also irrelevant because intent only exists in the mind and heart of the creator. We live in a world of products, and as such, we can only interpret based on the results. Scenes get cut for a number of reasons, including pacing issues, character issues, script re-writes, or simple time issues. But deleted is deleted. If F. Scott Fitzgerald had a scene in the Great Gatsby where Gatsby is really alive and faked his death just to run away with Daisy, but he decided not to include it in the novel, we could not consider that edited scene cannon. It’s not part of the novel, whatever he wanted before or after the fact. Adding that scene makes it a different product entirely (see: Blade Runner).
That said, the one and only thing that T3 did well was not break the predestination/ontological paradox by having all the nukes drop at the end of the movie. This is precisely what needed to happen. And this is exactly what is wrong with T4, because it breaks all of the paradoxes and creates plot holes everywhere. You say the biggest plot hole is Skynet knowing about Kyle Reese before Kyle Reese has done anything? How about, for one, Skynet not just killing Kyle Reese as soon as it had the chance, rather than drawing John Connor into an elaborate trap (in which a Terminator tries to kill him with bare hands, instead of with the guns they were so fond of in the first three movies). Or what about the fact that everyone in the future hails John Connor as a savior before Connor does anything worthy of being savior-like? What about the fact that the only people that don’t see him as a savior are the “high command” or whatever they were called, who are totally unconcerned that they are likely going to murder the man that causes John Connor to exist, thus wiping out their savior? If they think that John Connor is not a savior, then it would make sense to be unconcerned that they might kill a man he falsely thinks is his father. But it would not make sense to allow a man spouting such crazy nonsense to command any number of soldiers with weapons. And even worse–the major paradox violation–is the fact that, if John Connor exists, and if Kyle Reese is his father, then anything the high command is planning must inevitably fail, since Kyle Reese is able to grow into a man well into his 30s, travel back into time, and help create John Connor, all occurring while the war is still raging into the future. John Connor cannot exist if those events in the future do not happen, so anything that occurs to try to change that must necessarily push that event forward (predestination paradox). If this resistance believes anything John Connor tells them, then they should understand this basic logical fact. And if they don’t believe what he says, then he should have been locked up in a brig.
And let’s not get into the fact that the humanoid-terminator destroys his “control chip” by active choice so he can have the freedom…of active choice.
It’s almost worse than T3, when you think about it.