Plot:
Terminator Salvation is a 2009 action / sci-fi film set in the then-future year of 2018. It follows the events of the preceding film, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, in which the U.S. military supercomputer “Skynet” initiated a nuclear war in or around 2005 to kick off its longer-term project to exterminate humankind. Nuclear bombs, subsequent conventional warfare between humans and machines, and years of neglect have ruined the landscape. Most of the prewar human population has died, and survivors live in small, impoverished groups that spend most of their time evading Skynet’s killer machine patrols. The film is mostly set in the wreckage of Los Angeles, once one of the world’s most important cities, but now all but abandoned.
The character “John Connor” returns as a leading figure within the human resistance, though his comrades are divided over whether his claims about time travel are true. To some, he is almost a messianic figure who has direct knowledge of events going out to 2029, including Skynet’s inevitable defeat. To others, he is just a good battlefield commander who likes telling unprovable personal stories about time machines and friendly Terminators that visited him and his mother before the nuclear war. Rivalries over military strategy between Connor and a group of generals who are skeptical of him are an important plot element.
John Connor’s father, “Kyle Reese,” is also in the film, but due to the perplexities of time travel, he is younger that Connor in 2018 and has not had sex with the latter’s mother yet. A third key character, named “Marcus Wright,” is a man who wakes up on the outskirts of the L.A. ruins with only fragmentary memories of his own life, and no awareness of the ongoing human-machine war (the first time he sees an armed Terminator walking around, he calls for its help). Unsurprisingly, there’s more to him than meets the eye, and he becomes pivotal to determining the fate of the human resistance.
I thought Terminator Salvation was mediocre overall, and had an overly complicated plot and too many characters. Keeping track of who was a good guy, who was a bad guy, and why one person was threatening or shooting a gun at another was harder than it should have been. Several of the film’s events were also silly or implausible, which inadvertently broke with its otherwise bleak and humorless mood.
At the same time, I liked how Terminator Salvation moved beyond the played-out formula of the previous three films. While the characters mentioned the importance of time travel technology to the success of the human war effort, no one actually did any time traveling in the movie. There was no desperate race to prevent Skynet from starting a nuclear war because the war had already happened. This was also the first Terminator film set in the future, not the present, which let us see a new part of the Terminator franchise universe. The acting was also pretty good.
The potential for a good movie was there, but the filmmakers bogged Terminator Salvation down with too many bad elements. I don’t recommend wasting your time on it.
Analysis:
Machine soldiers will be bad shots. Towards the beginning of the film and again at the end, the humans encounter humanoid “T-600” combat robots, which are armed with miniguns. In both battles, the machines spew enormous volumes of fire (miniguns shoot 33 to 100 bullets per second) at the humans and miss every shot. This is a very inaccurate (pun intended) depiction, as combat robots have the potential to be better than the best human sharpshooters.
In fact, machines were put in charge of aiming larger weapons decades ago. “Fire control computers,” which consider all variables affecting the trajectory of projectiles (i.e. – distance, wind, elevation differences between gun and target, amount of propellant behind the projectile, air density, movement of the platform on which the gun itself it mounted), are used to aim naval guns, tank cannons, antiaircraft machine guns, and other projectile weapon systems. In those roles, they are vastly faster and better than humans.
In the next 20 years, fire control computers will get small enough and cheap enough to go into tactical scopes, and entire armies might be equipped with them as standard equipment. A soldier looking through such a scope would see the crosshair move, indicating where he had to point the gun to hit the target. For example, if the target were very far away, and the bullet’s drop during its flight needed to be compensated for, the crosshair would shift until it was above the target’s head. Smart scopes like these, paired with bullets that could steer themselves a little bit, will practically turn any infantryman into a sniper.
Human-sized combat robots would be even more accurate than that. Under the stress of battlefield conditions, human soldiers commonly make all kinds of mistakes and forget lessons from their training, including those relating to marksmanship. Machines would keep their cool and perform exactly as programmed, all the time. Moreover, simply being a human is a disadvantage, since the very act of breathing and even the tiny body movements caused by heartbeats can jostle a human shooter’s weapon enough to make the bullet miss. Machines would be rock-steady, and capable of very precise, controlled movements for aiming their guns.
Machines wouldn’t just be super-accurate shots, but super-fast shots. From the moment one of them spotted a target, it would be a matter of only three or four seconds–just as long as it takes to raise the gun and swing it in the right direction–before it fired a perfectly aimed shot. With quick, first-shot kills virtually guaranteed, machine soldiers will actually have LESS of a need for fully automatic weapons like the miniguns the Terminators used in the film.
It would have been more realistic if the T-600s had been armed with standard AR-15 rifles that they kept on semi-automatic mode almost all of the time, and if the film had shown them being capable of sniper-like accuracy with the weapons, even though the shots were being fired much faster than a human sniper could. The depiction would also have shown how well-aimed shots at humans safe behind cover (e.g. – good guy pokes his head around corner, and one second later, a bullet hits the wall one inch from his forehead) could be just as “suppressive” and demoralizing as large volumes of inaccurate, automatic gunfire from a machine gun.
So watch out. If your robot butler goes haywire someday, it will be able to do a lot of damage with Great-grandpa’s old M1 Garand you keep in your closet.
Hand-to-hand fights with killer robots will go on and on. There are two scenes where poor John Connor gets into hand-to-hand combat with Terminators. Both times, the fighting is drawn-out, and John survives multiple strikes, grabs and shoves from his machine opponents, allowing him to hit back or scramble away. This is totally unrealistic. A humanoid robot several times stronger than a grown man, made of metal, and unable to feel pain would be able to incapacitate or fatally wound any human with its first strike. The Terminators in the film could have simply grabbed any part of John Connor’s body and squeezed to break all the bones underneath in seconds, causing a grotesque and cripplingly painful injury.
The protracted, hand-to-hand fights in the film are typical Hollywood action choreography, and are the way they are because they are so dramatic and build tension. They’re also familiar since they resemble matches in professional fighting sports, like boxing, MMA and wrestling. However, we can’t make the mistake of assuming actual fights with robots in the future will be like either. Professional fights are held between people of similar sizes and skill levels, and are governed by many rules, including allowances for rest breaks. As such, it often takes long time for one fighter to prevail over the other, and the use of fighting techniques. A real-world fight between something like a Terminator and a human would feature a huge disparity in strength, fighting skill, and endurance that favored the machine, and would have no rules, allowing the machine to use brutal moves meant to cause maximum pain and incapacitation. It would look much more like a single suckerpunch knockout street fight than a professional boxing match.
Actual hand-to-hand combat with killer robots will almost always result in the human losing in seconds. Owing to their superior strength, pain insensitivity, and metal bodies that couldn’t be hurt by human punches or kicks, killer robots will not need to use complex fighting tactics (e.g. – dodges, blocks, multiple strikes) to win–one or two simple, swift moves like punching the human in the forehead hard enough to crack their skill, or jamming a rigid metal finger deep into the human’s eye, would be enough.
Terminator Salvation only depicts this accurately once, when a Terminator deliberately punches one of the characters on the left side of his chest, knowing the force of the impact will stop his heart. In the first Terminator movie, there was also a scene where the machine kills a man with a single punch that is so hard it penetrates his rib cage (the Terminator then pulls his hand out, still grasping the man’s now-severed heart), and in Terminator 2, the shapeshifting, evil Terminator kills a prison guard by shoving its sharpened finger through his eye and into his brain.
Some machines will be aquatic. A common type of combat robot in the movie is an eel-like machine with large, sharp jaws that it uses to bite humans to death. They live in bodies of water and surface to attack any humans who go in or near them. Though at first glance, this might seem unrealistic since electronics and water don’t mix, it actually isn’t. Machines can be waterproofed, and they can cool themselves off much better when immersed water than when surrounded by the air. (I explored this in my blog post “Is the ocean the ideal place for AI to live?”)
One of the few things I liked about Terminator Salvation was its depiction of the diversity of machine types. Just as there are countless animal and plant species in the world, each suited in form for a unique function and ecological niches, there will be countless machine “species” with different types of bodies. The Matrix films also did a good job depicting this during some of the scenes set in the machine-ruled parts of the “Real World.”
We should expect machines to someday live on nearly every part of the planet, such as oceans (both on the surface and below it), mountaintops, deserts, and perhaps even underground. Intelligent, technological evolution will shape their bodies in the same ways that unguided, natural evolution has shaped those of the planet’s countless animal species, and there could be certain environments where machines find it optimal to have eel-like bodies. Terminator Salvation’s hydrobots were thus realistic depictions of machines that could exist someday, though it won’t be until the next century before aquatic robots become as common in bodies of water as they were in the film.
Small robots will be used for mass surveillance. Another type of machine in the film is the “aerostat”–a flying surveillance drone about the same size and shape as a car tire. A single, swiveling rotor where its hubcap should be keeps it aloft. The aerostats have cameras, microphones, and possibly other sensors to monitor their surroundings. They seek out activity that might indicate a human presence, and transmit their findings to Skynet, which can deploy machines specialized for combat or human abduction to the locations. Aerostats seem to be unarmed.
Flying surveillance drones about the size of aerostats have existed for years, so in that respect, the film is not showing anything new. What’s futuristic about the depiction is 1) the aerostats are autonomous, meaning they can decide to fly off to investigate potential signs of humans and report their findings after, and 2) they are so numerous that the humans live in fear of them and must take constant measures to hide from them. Something as innocuous as turning a radio on high volume for a few seconds will attract an aerostat’s attention.
Though they are unarmed and certainly not as intimidating as the other machines in the movie, the aerostats are surely no less important to Skynet’s war effort against the human race. Knowing where the enemy is, and in what numbers, is invaluable to any military commander. The aerostat surveillance network coupled with Skynet’s ability to rapidly deploy combat machines wherever humans were detected also put the latter at a major strategic disadvantage by hobbling them from aggregating into large groups.
Autonomous surveillance drones no bigger than aerostats will exist in large numbers by the middle of this century, and will have different forms. Some will be airborne while others will be terrestrial or aquatic. Many of them will be able to function by themselves in the field for days on end, and they will be able to hide from enemies through camouflage (perhaps by resembling animals) and evasion. The drones will give generals much better surveillance of battle spaces and even of the enemy’s home territory, and a soldier near the front lines who merely speaks loudly in his foxhole will risk being hit by a mortar in less than a minute, with his coordinates radioed in by a tiny surveillance drone camouflaged against a nearby tree trunk.
Criminals AND law enforcement will find uses for the drones, and, sadly, so will dictators. Mass drone surveillance networks will give the latter heightened abilities to monitor their citizens and punish disloyalty. It sounds crazy, but someday, you’ll look at a bird perched on a branch in your backyard and wonder if it’s a robot sent to spy on you.
People will be able to transplant their brains into robot bodies. SPOILER ALERT–one of the main characters is a man whose brain was transplanted into a robot body while he was in cryostasis. Because the body looks human on the outside and his memories of the surgery and the events leading up to it were wiped, he doesn’t realize what his true nature is. He only figures it out midway through the film, when he sustains injuries that blow away his fake skin to reveal the shiny metal endoskeleton underneath. He is as strong and as durable as a Terminator and can interface his mind with Skynet’s thanks to a computer chip implanted in his brain.
Transplanting a human brain into a robot body is theoretically possible, it would bring many advantages, and it will be done in the distant future. As the film character shows, robot bodies are stronger and more robust than natural flesh and bone bodies, and hence protect people from normally fatal injuries. This will get more important in the distant future because after we find cures for all major diseases and for the aging process, injuries caused by accidents, homicides and suicides will be the only ways to die. As such, transplanting your brain into a heavily armored robot body will be the next logical step towards immortality. Even better might be transplanting your brain into a heavily armored jar, locked in a thick-walled room, with your brain interacting with the world through remote-controlled robot bodies that would feel like the real thing to you.
The ability to pick any body of your choice (e.g. – supermodel, bodybuilder, giant spider, dinosaur) will have profound implications for human self-identity, culture, and society, and will be liberating in ways we can’t imagine. Conceptually, bringing this about is a simple matter of connecting all the sensory neurons attached to your brain to microscopic “wires” that then connect to a computer, but the specifics of the required engineering will be very complicated. Additionally, your brain would need a life support system that provided it with nutrients and oxygen, extracted waste, kept it at the right temperature, and protected it from germs. The whole unit might be the size of a basketball, with the brain and the critical machinery on the inside. The exterior of the unit might have a few ports for plugging in data cables and plugging in hoses that delivered water, nutrients and blood, and drained waste. A person could switch bodies by pulling his brain unit out of his body and placing it into the standard-sized brain unit slot in a new body.
While this scenario is possible in theory, it will require major advances in many areas of science and technology to bring about, including nanotechnology, synthetic organs, prosthetics, and brain-computer interfaces. I don’t expect it to be reality until well into the 22nd century. By the same time, technology will also let us alter our memories and minds and to share thoughts with each other, and humans with all of the available enhancements will look at the humans of 2021 the same way you might look at a person with severe physical and mental disabilities today. The notion of being trapped in a single body that you didn’t even choose and have minimal ability to change will sound alien and stultifying.
Links:
- The T-600 Terminators used real weapons called “miniguns.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M134_Minigun - The Mark I Fire Control Computer was the first machine the U.S. Navy used to aim the big guns of its warships. As technology has improved, smaller, cheaper, and better Fire Control Computers have been installed in other weapon systems, like tank cannons. Human-sized machines with these devices are a logical future phase in the progression of the technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_I_Fire_Control_Computer - The video shows that a no-frills .22 LR rifle can consistently hit torso-sized targets at the remarkable distance of 500 yards if aimed perfectly. Machines will be able to aim perfectly, meaning they will be able to use regular guns much more effectively than humans, lessening the need for fully automatic gunfire.
https://youtu.be/2dn-bqyMkfs - The man who invented the “Gaia Hypothesis” believes machines will someday take over the planet, and fill all the ecological niches occupied by humans and contemporary animal species.
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/cyborgs-will-replace-humans-remake-world-james-lovelock-says-ncna1041616