Jeez, is McG really talking about doing 2 more of these? It's basically a prequel trilogy, since we already know how the whole thing turns out. Have we not learned our lesson on that one? Or, if they mess with causality to make some kind of "point" which this team wouldn't understand anyway, they destroy the whole inevitability paradox that made the original story so interesting. They're literally using time travel to go back in time and kill their own drama before it was ever born.
If this is the same writer as Surrogates, I have the terrible fear that he thinks these movies are actually brilliant and even worse, that there are producers out there who believe him.
Here, I had an idea while listening to the podcast. What they should have done is rip off the structure of the first movies, not the individual moments. In the story of the life of Kyle Reese, the terminators come out of nowhere and basically conquer the human race before they can mobilize. Reese doesn't know how to defend himself yet, but a mysterious figure appears to protect him. Go ahead and say "Come with me if you want to live," but this guy's kinda talking about himself, because the protector this time is John Connor.
Now we have character conflict, because he knows this is his dad, but he doesn't know how to tell him. Maybe Kyle's fifteen or something at this point, and who wants to saddle someone with that kind of information when they're just coming to grips with the fact that the world has been taken over by an army of evil robots.
Reese is frightened the same way Sarah was in the beginning. John is clearly crazy. Even regular gun-toting survivalists aren't known for their emotional stability, but getting raised from a baby not only to prepare for the apocalypse but then to become the savior of humanity can mess with your head. On the other hand, circumstances are starting to prove this particular nutjob absolutely right in his insanity. In the choice between dying at the hands of unstoppable killer robots and trusting a guy who just says he wants to help, Kyle starts to lean closer and closer to the man we met in the original movie. Not only that, he starts to see this older, protective, hyper-masculine badass like a father figure of his own.
What's he going to do when he finds out about their real relationship? Is that before or after John gives him that picture of his mother? We never knew how much information Kyle had before he went back, and we had no idea what kind of bond had ever formed between the two men. Seems like a pretty complex relationship to explore.
At the same time the familiar story beats of growing emotional connection during the escape from danger are repeating themselves like some kind of causality loop, the backdrop this time is totally different. The cops, for example, aren't dismissive of "cybernetic exoskeletons" when the evidence is walking the streets of LA shooting people with lasers and stepping on their skulls, if there are even any cops even left. Maybe the resistance is already a real thing, living in whatever hideouts they can find, scavenging resources and trying to unite as many survivors as they have contact with so that maybe someday there could be hope to rebuild the decimated human race.
Introduce to that scenario the first robots in rubber masks. We know what's coming. John knows it, but how can he that information out? What kind of confusion would that cause? How do we get to that triumphant third act, charging over the fields of our own dead to storm the gates of the MCP, the moment of victory we've been imagining since 1984, when we don't even know who's on our side?
There's four years of Battlestar Galactica to steal what works and avoid what doesn't about this setting, and with a new aspect of the paradox we already know and love, you're not invalidating or overwriting the preceding chapters, just exploring their implications the way that T2 kind of did and Aliens got exactly right. Who wrote those again? I'd vote for following in those footsteps for this project.
