Besides, there’s no way there could be GPL code in SkyNet. What self-respecting defense contractor would use open source? No, SkyNet is your run of the mill, Mountain Dew fueled science project. Which means the comments suck and there’s an important float variable somewhere named managerRobBlows and someone with too much time on their hands wrote in a subroutine for what Skynet should do in the case of a zombie apocalypse.

The other continuity problem people often mention is the general environment. The future war of 2029 is wasteland of eternal darkness brought upon by nuclear war; in T:S, there’s sunlight and even some vegetation poking around. Again, this could be rationalized with the time difference between 2018 and 2029.

But there really wasn’t a good way for T:S to explain these discrepancies since it’s essentially working backwards from the depictions of 2029 from the first 3 films. The film alludes to technological advances with the accelerated development of the T-800, but that in part is undermined by the Marcus character and his endoskeleton. A better script might have found a way to do explain all of this, but it’s asking a lot of the audience to try to put all of these pieces together. The safer route would have been to make the 2018 future war look more like the 2029 future war, or start the movie earlier in post-judgment day so we can see the immediate aftermath of the events depicted at the end of T:3 and start from a place we understand more easily.

T:S doesn’t even attempt to address this lack of continuity, which is baffling since it makes such a show of caring about franchise continuity (Kyle Reese learning how to strap the shotgun to himself, Sarah Connor’s tapes, etc.).

Dammit, here I go again. See earlier comment on sadomasochistic pleasure of trashing T:S.

I just watched T2 on I think AMC the other day, and I gotta say… The opening sequence, showing the post-apocalyptic world. It looks like their guns aren’t using bullets, both human and non-human- they look like lasers. The sound effects are borderline, too- they don’t *quite* sound like bullets to me, but they certainly don’t sound like the stereotypical “pewpew” of phasers and whatnot, either.

Which totally contrasts with T:S, naturally.

I could be wrong in this, but it was irking me during the entire opening scene. Not about T2, but about T:S, that, if I’m correct, they’d make such an error.

I like this train of thought. What’s Skynet’s source code like?

Does Skynet have the equivalent of Code Monkeys and Boring Manager Robs?

I bet there’s some bitchin’ ASCII art in the comments.

Also, I’m sure they re-purposed some open source code, and post-Judgment Day, the hardcore Linux junkies are still complaining that Skynet violated the terms of the GNU General Public License.

I should temper my comments a bit w/r/t Terminator: Salvation and Sam Worthington.

You’re right, Christian Bale is more directly responsible for the failure of this movie than Sam Worthington, but not for his acting. He came onto the project late in the process, and his star power necessitated extensive re-writes of the script, which is why the movie feels like a jumbled mess. This is a pretty comprehensive review of how all of this went down:

http://www.chud.com/articles/articles/19577/1/EXCLUSIVE-WHAT-WENT-WRONG-WITH-TERMINATOR-SALVATION/Page1.html

I should also admit that a small part of my “I f***ing hate Terminator Salvation” act that I play on the podcast and on the site is just that, an act. The movie isn’t entirely worthless. There are some cool parts; some of the terminator action scenes are fun, and there are a few nice nods to the past movies.

But only a small part is an act. For the most part I’m entirely sincere when I say that Terminator Salvation was a shameful moment in the franchise’s history and that I actually do get upset when I think about it.

I reiterate: Terminators don’t feel pain. I do.

The more I think about this, I kind of get some sadomasochistic pleasure from repeatedly trashing Terminator: Salvation. I’m thinking about doing an extended, detailed take-down of all of the movie’s problems similar to what that guy did to Star Wars: Episode I.

What do you say, OTI readers: do you want me to descend deep down into this heart of darkness?

Well actually, room temperature would be approximately 293 K. 273 K is zero degrees Celsius, the freezing point of water.

Big fan of the site.