ChainsawAsh said:I haven't seen it yet, but there's one aspect of it that I already know about that I just can NOT forgive:
Skynet knowing that Kyle is John's father. That alone is bad enough.
But then ... they use Kyle as bait to draw out John ... when they could just fucking KILL KYLE, thereby killing John! WTF?! Ugh ...
So yeah, I'm pretty predisposed to disliking it.
See the movie before you decide to let that bit bother you. It isn't exactly as it was explained to you. Kyle's name is on a Skynet hit list, but it is never explained or suggested that it is because he is John's father. My assumption was that he was on there because he is the one John sent back to protect himself. That makes perfect sense to me. Skynet sends back an Terminator to kill Sarah Connor, John sends back a soldier to protect her, Skynet attempts to kill that soldier while he is still a teenager before John can even meet him let alone send him back in time. This doesn't mean John won't send back someone else, but to Skynet it does mean things will happen differently, which gives them a chance at success. It is perfectly reasonable to assume Skynet would try to eliminate Kyle.
By the time Kyle is used as bait, John has already talked to Marcus and told him that he needs to find Kyle, I believe he even mentioned that Kyle was his father. Marcus interfaces and syncs with Skynet's computers to find out where Kyle is being held. It is reasonable to assume that they got that information from Marcus.
Alternatively, both Sarah and Reese were at one point locked away in institutions where they ranted about Judgement Day and time travel, this information was filed away in records. It is possible that Skynet looked up these files, and discovered some connection there. I'd still go with my first explaination though.
I suppose these paradox problems depend on if you take these events as creating alternative timelines, or if you take them as a mobius strip. The first film obviously went with the mobius strip idea. John is concieved because the man he sent back in time impregnated his mother. Skynet is made because parts of the Terminator they send back in time were discovered and reverse engineered. The end is the beginning and the beginning is the end.
Terminator 2 broke the whole mobius strip thing with the whole "No fate..." bit. The original ending to that film had an old Sarah explaining that Judgement Day never came. This works just fine and paradox free (realitively speaking) if you consider it coil or a screw instead of an endless loop. With things playing out a little differently each time the game is played. This can also explain away the paradox of the first film. If you consider originally that Sarah might have had a son, named him John, and he later grows to become the leader of the resistance and good friends with Kyle Reese. He sends Kyle back in time to prevent a Terminator from killing his mom before he is born, and Kyle ends up telling her she will have a son named John who will grow up to be the leader of the resistance against Skynet. He gets her pregnant, and she has a son, names him John, and he becomes the leader of the resistance because he grows up hearing that that is what he is going to be. This John could be a completely different John from the one that originally sent Kyle back to protect his mom.
Terminator 3 comes along and teaches us that you cannot make your own fate as the second film suggested, and that the inevitable is inevitable. No matter what you do, you cannot stop what is destined to be, all you can do is potentially delay it for a few years.
In Terminator Salvation you have John talking about this not being the future his mother told him about. This suggests that things are completely different from the future Kyle came from and told Sarah about.
I think it is obvious the films have officially done away with the mobius strip and adopted a shifting timeline, or even multiple timelines. Each and everytime they screw around with the past, things in the future change. The TV show, which is a completely different continuity from the films explicitly explains that this is the case.
With this take on time travel, Kyle could be killed off as a teenager, and John could still be born, because in his own past Kyle already went back and had relations with his mother. John wouldn't disappear or cease to exist, but now a new timeline will be created in which he is never born and never leads the resistance because Kyle is never sent back.