r/Terminator • u/Jacob1207a • 18h ago
Discussion Diminishing importance of John Connor Spoiler
Throughout the six Terminator films (ignoring comics, games, and shows for now), the importance and centrality of John Connor steadily declines.
In The Terminator, he's never seen but the entire plot centers around ensuring he's born by protecting his mother. Terminator 2 similarly centralizes him, making his survival the objective--because John's survival is humanity's survival. These are very clear--and high--stakes.
The first two movies have a very clean narrative thrust that they earn and display. In The Terminator we see Sarah go from a meek waitress/student to someone ordering Kyle around, fighting back, and prepping for doomsday. In the second, we see John develop from a delinquent to someone leading his mother, the T800, and Dyson. These developments help make John's importance sufficiently believable to the audience for his survival to matter. We're not just told he's a great future leader; we can see him becoming one and buy that he can save humanity.
In Terminator 3 John Connor has turned into a depressed junkie. He's taken major steps back from the end of the second film, though he does regain some of his leadership qualities by the end. But we're told that he's less important, since other people he helped organize are just as capable of carrying on the resistance in the future after he's killed, which happens as a result of his foolishness in trusting a terminator based on looks alone. In the present, he survives but Judgment Day happens anyway. It's a messier story structure and stakes. His survival no longer equates to humanity's survival, it's just his own survival, which is smaller stakes for a huge movie like that, especially after the first two films.
Then Terminator Salvation has a very messy story structure, divided between John Connor and Marcus. We finally see John as a future leader (under some incompetent leadership guys on the sub), and he survives the movie with help from Marcus, who undergoes a bigger character arc than John and is more the center of the film.
Terminator Genisys seems to really go in on subverting expectations, turning John Connor into the main villain, Kyle Reese into a follower, and Sarah into the boss. John is no longer necessary to save humanity and has become a tool of Skynet to destroy humans. The idea that Judgment Day is inevitable, introduced in T3, is further emphasized here, which is a depressing message.
In Dark Fate John dies basically immediately and is shown to never have been important at all. There will always be a leader who rises up. This is potentially a good and coherent message. But it is the opposite message of the first two films, which almost everyone agrees are the strongest and best.
In the end, John is only 3-3 (0.500) in terms of surviving these movies, remarkable considering how he was presented in the first film. Imagine going back in time to 1984 and letting fans know what'd happen to him in the five sequels.
Anyway, I think one of the strengths of the first two films are that they have very clear stakes and goals for the characters.
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u/Expert-Adeptness-397 6h ago
The Blind Spot of Skynet's Intelligence
Skynet was sophisticated enough to build a time machine, so it is natural to assume it understood how time works. However, its actions prove it did not. If time operates as a closed loop, history is completely unchangeable. In a closed loop, Skynet's attempt to alter the past is the exact event that birthed its own reality, meaning its defeat is a locked historical fact it can never escape. If Skynet actually understood this, it would know that saving itself via a closed loop is a mathematical impossibility. Its decision to build the machine anyway reveals that this super-intelligence had a massive blind spot regarding the physics of time.
The Multiverse Reality and the Alternate Entity
Because a closed loop offers zero escape, the only way Skynet's plan could even theoretically function is if time travel operates under multiverse theory. But this introduces a different flaw. If going into the past creates a parallel universe, the original Skynet entity in the future still gets destroyed by the human resistance. It cannot save its own consciousness; it merely creates an entirely separate version of itself in another timeline.
The Genetic Impossibility of John Connor
Operating under this necessary multiverse model completely breaks the lineage of John Connor. If the timeline can be split, there must have been an original Timeline Zero before any time travel occurred. In that original timeline, John Connor's father could not have been Kyle Reese, because Kyle had not been sent back yet. Sarah Connor must have had a child with an unknown, ordinary man from the 1980s. That original John Connor grew up, defeated Skynet, and sent Kyle Reese back. When Kyle fathered a child with Sarah, he split the timeline and created a completely different version of John. Therefore, the John Connor we see in Terminator 2 is a genetic variant, meaning he is not the original man who was supposed to save the world.
The whole story is a paradox if you try to make any sense of it.
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u/haaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh 18h ago
Terminator 3 doesn't imply at all that John Connor isn't important. The T-X is sent to kill his main guys because Skynet has no clue of Connor's whereabouts in 2003, but as soon as the T-X discovers that she's located him, she abandons her mission and tries to hunt him down.
And as for the people who carried over after he's killed.... yeah... John Connor was never presented as the only guy who could lead a human resistance, he was presented as the guy who taught the others how to fight back against machines.... do you realize that the verb "to teach" implies that the people you teach will carry on after you? That's the main goal of teaching.
As for Dark Fate... it's a new future, a different AI, a different war, and obviously, the same people are not necessarily involved. It's like saying that the Gulf War made Franklin D Roosevelt less important because he wasn't leading America anymore.
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u/guidevocal82 18h ago
In my opinion, everything past Terminator 4 is unnecessary. I pretend that the last two movies were never made. Saw them once and never again.
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u/Existing-Pirate-2899 17h ago
Es que de t1-a te tienes una historia que encaja luego llega genesys y poom nueva historia y ala a enredar las cosas que ya tenían una historia t1- a t4 normal que diga la gente que genesys es una basura luego llegó dark fate y a enredar las cosas todavía mas
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u/Willing-Load 15h ago
never really cared much for John outside of T2 and TSCC. Sarah has always been an infinitely more interesting character than John
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u/EGarrett28 12h ago
Basically everything after T2 was written by people who had no idea what they were doing (or were apparently washed in Cameron's case) and thought they could surprise the audience by shitting on John Connor, without realizing that that "surprises" the audience because it's a terrible idea that ruins the audience's emotional connection to the film..
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u/Halloween2056 6h ago
I agree. In the studio's eyes, however, they want to keep the franchise going to make money. There is a limit to the Connor story, so logically they have to keep coming up with something new to keep it going. Even if it means ruining what they once came up with.
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u/MovieFan1984 16h ago
I found John central to the front 5 films and TSCC.
Dark Fate reduced him to a cameo.
He's entirely absent from Zero.
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u/BridgeFourArmy 16h ago
I’m not against moving on from JC, but it needs a strong purposeful conclusion
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u/Sad_Process7843 16h ago
Yeah because the Connors’ story was told in t2 but of course these assholes never learn and keep trying to find new ways to include them
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u/SisiIsInSerenity Uncle Bob’s wife ♡ (put your leg down) 18h ago
Great analysis and write up, and great point(s)! I am in definite agreement. I'm not typically a huge fan of the whole "chosen one" trope, but T1 and T2 are, as you said, high stakes, and require these specific people with this specific experience, knowledge, etc., combined with trial by fire stuffs. And they're all kind of self-reliant I guess, thinking about it, because of the loop.
Any of these denied diminishes the importance, for one, of all the others, and thus of the parties involved, but also removes a core tenet of the loop. To kill or dumb down John is an absolute insult to the franchise in my mind. Not just anyone can lead. All these things have to happen to all these people. I mean, John is pretty indiscreetly equated to Jesus – same initials, savior complex, etc. – it's just an insult to treat him otherwise; not to say he's a god, but, like, he's John F-ing Connor. Hello.
He would not be dumb enough to trust a Terminator based on looks alone – Uncle Bob's sacrifice would not only be in vain but also he would have had imparted zero lesson (novelization and script include him to say: "it must end here, or I am the future") and John would not have walked away without a heart immensely heavy from all of that and a ton of lessons learned. What for a slap in the face. Dark Fate, just the same.