perpetual_motion | I just realized something, re: Terminator Salvation (Reply)

The terminator in the movie is supposed to be the terminator style on which the T-800 [Ah-nold] is supposed to be based. And this would be very interesting, except that they never make it clear. Having last seen the original Terminator about ten years ago [and not even the whole thing], I knew Ah-nold was the T-800, but as I didn't have the full, written history of the robot right in front of me, I couldn't connect the dots.

This is bad writing, folks. When your robot is supposed to be a precursor to a different [very recognizable] robot, you need to make that clear. There is a scene, during the big climactic battle, where an Almost-Ah-nold [body double/digital face] comes out of a room and tries to kill John Connor. And even then I just assumed that there were T-800s out there in the war zone killing stuff.

Continuing to think over the movie again, I realize that all of the robots in it look like robots, while everything from the T-800 on has always looked human. But I still don't see this as enough information to get across that the terminator in TS is the precursor to Ah-nold. Given that this is a film series where the human-looking terminators always end up with half their metal faces showing by the end of the movie, I didn't find the use of plain robots to be a sign of how Skynet had not yet perfected their human-looking models. Because if they're machines, they don't need to look human. At least, not until they send them back in time to murder people.