Ok, so it's a sequel bait. Everyone survives, and Arnold gets a pokemon-style "upgrade". I guess they should realize that Arnold is getting too old to play this fucking part. But then again, Arnold dying heroically at the end would also be a stupid-ass cliche so I guess it would be really hard to get right. It's incredibly annoying that they write a movie with sequel in mind, but don't have a clear idea what it'll be other than round six against Skynet. The writers didn't even bother explaining who the hell sent the terminator from the future, probably thinking that they can wing it if and when they do the sequel. That's just lazy. And really, the time travel shit ... they don't evne bother makng it consistent anymore or thinking it through. It has pretty much every stupid movie time travel cliche crammed together that you can think of: Kyle Reese having memories of a past he never had, then implanting his younger self with those same memories even if they just thought they stopped Skynet for good, and most certainly prevented the John Connor that he knew from being born. People saing how thinking about time travel makes their "head hurt". Star Trek technobabble. And apparently building time machines is at the same time super-easy and for some reason only our heroes or the villains have one. And time travel at the same time somehow changes the future and doesn't without any kind of consistency.
And really, it's that consistency that sets it apart from the first two movies. The original Terminator had past that couldn't be changed. Skynet tried to kill John Connor by sending a terminator to the past, but all it did was cause John Connor to be born in the first place. The sequel turned this upside down, and changed the rules but it was still consistent internally within that one movie: the future could be changed and there is no fate. The problem is that those pretty much exhaust all the options. When you try to mix and match, all you get is a horrid mess, which itself wouldn't be a problem if the entire premise of the movie didn't depend on it. For example, why the hell would Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese travel just moments before the Skynet comes online? Why not, say, five years in advance? Or heck, if there was a chance that world was going to end in 1997, why not travel there just to be sure and if it turns out Kyle is right and it's really 2017 then you get twenty year head start. That's just bad planning.
Speakign of silly technology, the first two movies were great because they pretty much just had the heroes deal with tech and weapons they can find in our time. Only anachronisms were the terminators. But now there are time machines and factories that make T1000s and sentient AIs with lifelike holographic projectors like it's nothing, and those magic superweapons are what bring the villains down, so it doesn't feel as grounded. It just feels like a cartoon. And also, if Skynet is an AI, wouldn't it be easily replicated to any number of places around the globe, so what would blowing up one building really do?
