For all the flaws in the later installments that more or less terminated the entire franchise, the warning signs were present as far back as the still very well received first and second movies of the series.
- For an all-powerful, hyper-intelligent supercomputer, Skynet's plans are incredibly convoluted. Over the years, many people have pointed out all the ways Skynet, with its unlimited resources and supposedly limitless intellect, could have killed John Connor or even the Human Resistance outright. This was forgivable in the first two movies because time travel was spoken of as a last-ditch effort, so Skynet didn't really have much time to plan. However, with each subsequent movie, book, comic, series, etc. that's released, the time-travel-was-a-desperation-move aspect gets retconned further and further, meaning that Skynet has essentially unlimited time to plan. This has the adverse effect of making the central premise of the series not only less believable, but harder to keep straight, since time travel theorems are both way over the average audience member's head and very easy for writers to screw up.
- In general, Terminator 2: Judgment Day kicked off many of the franchise's worse trends. While the first film was a low-budget sci-fi twist on the slasher formula, T2 was a big-budget Actionized Sequel, due in part to the Sequel Escalation involved in making a Terminator the hero. However, T2 was still genuinely scary at points, with the T-1000 being a memorably frightening villain, and the non-Terminator characters remained vulnerable despite their Action Survivor status — plus having the Terminator do a Heel–Face Turn was genuinely pretty amazing to see at the time. It also helped that the Genre Shift, complete with its multitude of Cyberpunk elements (which wouldn't be repeated in later works) made for a genuinely engaging contrast with the pure Slasher Film nature of the original, and in many ways felt like a logical extension of the story and especially the ending of T1. Later films, books, and other media would jettison the series's horror/slasher elements entirely, to the point of being straight-up action films with action-star protagonists.
- Skynet goes through quite a bit of Villain Decay throughout the series as it gradually becomes clear that using Terminators is a horribly inefficient way to kill people. After Skynet's failures in the first two films, the Terminators practically become The Artifact, as one naturally wonders why their masters can't come up with other ways to beat the humans—like chemical or biological agents which would be harmless to machines but deadly to humans. The inefficiency was excusable in the first movie, partly because the series' trademark Ridiculously Human Robots were still a novel concept, and partly because it was heavily implied that (like Time Travel) the Terminators were experimental weapons used as a last resort after the Resistance arose from nothing and wiped out most of the Machines' resources. Even when we got another Terminator villain in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it could be forgiven because the T-1000 was actually an improvement over the T-800, making it seem like Skynet actually adapted and learned from its previous failure. But after that, future Terminators like the T-X and Cromartie largely became rehashes of the originals, and it became less forgivable when Terminator Salvation and Terminator Genisys made it clear that Skynet knew what would happen in the future, and was actively preparing for it. It also didn't help that Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles made it clear that several Terminators had unshielded nuclear fuel cells, essentially making them walking nukes, but they apparently needed machine guns and knife-hands to kill humans. This trend reached its low point in Genisys, where Skynet changes things up by inventing nanomachines that can infect humans... then uses them to make another Terminator that can only infect one person at a time.
- Screen On Point
argues that the roots of the iconic machines' downfall can be traced back to the Actionized Sequel roots of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The Terminator, as a concept, relies greatly upon suspense and dread to get the most out of the mechanical assailants, which was emphasized perfectly in the original film and its Slasher Movie trappings. However, Cameron knew that since he'd already shown the audience what a T-800 was capable of, the only way he could recreate the same dread was to not only show something new but also shake up everything audiences thought they understood. This resulted in the second Terminator being heroic and a new and vastly different Terminator like the T-1000 becoming the antagonist. However, the sequels afterwards all tried to simply reincorporate the same familiar Terminator facets. Not only do Genisys and Salvation try to make the old Terminators threatening again (which, again, is nigh-impossible because they're so familiar) but the T-X and T-3000 were just slightly-upgraded versions of the T-800 and T-1000.
- Screen On Point
- The way Skynet resorts to increasingly advanced Terminator models to add to the menace. The original film had the T-800. Terminator 2: Judgment Day added the T-1000, and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines included the T-X model, and so on with each subsequent installment in the franchise. But since the most iconic character of the franchise is Schwarzenegger's T-800 note , they have to include it, preferably helping the good guys. This has the problem of having to make an increasingly obsolete machine somehow helpful against its increasingly superior iterations and even pivotal to each installment's plot. You'd think that Skynet would eventually figure out a way to neutralize the several T-800s hijacked by the Resistance every now and then.
- According to Word of God, the Terminator saga was always supposed to take place in a changeable timeline, and it was always supposed to climax with the heroes successfully stopping the birth of Skynet and rewriting history. Unfortunately, budget constraints forced James Cameron to save that spectacular climax for the sequel, with the original instead ending with a Stable Time Loop implying that John Connor's birth and the rise of Skynet were both inevitable. So when the heroes actually did seemingly stop Judgement Day, it made it look like the movies just had inconsistent rules regarding time travel. But it was easy to forgive that, partly because the heroes' victory at Cyberdyne made for a great Grand Finale, and partly because the idea of Kyle and Sarah being destined to conceive humanity's savior made for a great love story—even if those two plot points seemed to contradict each other. Many fans were unhappy when Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines claimed that Judgement Day really was inevitable all along, as not only was that idea not planned from the beginning, it also undid T2's ending. Terminator: Dark Fate also kept the idea of it being inevitable, but ignored all except the first two films. Skynet was never created, so the inevitable Robot War instead came in the form of a new artificial intelligence named Legion. Fans didn't like this twist, either, feeling that repeating the same Bad Future except with new characters didn't make the beloved ending to the second film seem any less pointless. Worse, the constant retconning as a result of the series' reliance on time-travel tropes has shattered almost any and all stakes the films used to have, as it becomes increasingly difficult to care about anything that happens in a story when there is no guarantee that any future plot points will be permanent.
- Terminator: Dark Fate was a Box Office Bomb, despite Critical Dissonance (in the form of a 70% score on Rotten Tomatoes, better than most of the weaker Terminator sequels), with most critics and post-mortem analyses blaming the film's decision to kill off John Connor at the beginning, shortly after the events of Judgment Day, as one of, if not the main reason why. Fans were extremely put off by the idea of the franchise's Chosen One being killed off so callously to make room for a new plot and characters, but the franchise has been making attempts to devalue John Connor's importance since at least Judgment Day. In that film, John repeatedly puts his own life in danger to rescue others and continuously made it clear that he won't dismiss other people's lives in favor of his own. In Rise of the Machines, we learn that John's wife Kate took over as commander of the Resistance after John's death, in the original ending to Salvation, changed after poorly testing with audiences, Marcus takes over John's identity after Connor's death to provide a symbol for the Resistance to continue to rally around, and in Genisys, Future John himself not only becomes The Dragon to Skynet, but Kyle and Sarah stop Judgment Day themselves and John is never conceived. The difference is that these films delayed John's death until after he'd grown up, giving him a more dignified send-off than merely blowing him away shortly after surviving the encounter with the T-1000 and thus rendering Judgment Day pointless.note Thus, in all the proceeding films, the message about the importance of human life could be extended to "All human life is important, including John Connor's"... which could not be said about Dark Fate, which ultimately treated John's life as expendable and replaceable, including having the T-800 that shot John team up with Sarah, Dani, and Grace to defeat the Rev-9 Terminator.
- Not helping matters is that plotting, writing, and portraying such a charismatic, natural leader is a tall order for most writers and actors. In many ways, John Connor works better as an idea than as a character. Terminator 2 got around that by showing John as a preteen, not yet the man who could save humanity (though Edward Furlong deftly shows where a lot of that potential started) while the adult John (as played by Michael Edwards) was only shown for a moment with no spoken lines but was given enough of an enigmatic yet simultaneously larger-than-life presence to make him look believable as the savior of mankind. Subsequent films and shows have had a harder time creating a character out of the myth of John Connor, increasingly marginalizing his role in favor of characters they do know how to work with (Kate in Rise of the Machines, Marcus in Salvation, and Sarah and Kyle II in Genisys). At least John Connor remained the definitive protagonist of Salvation, courtesy of a portrayal by Christian Bale, but that film's failure killed a planned trilogy that most likely would've found ways to develop him further. In a lot of ways, this was one of the main reasons why Dani Ramos felt underwhelming as successor to John - the single scene showing her as the resistance leader against Legion didn't exactly have the kind of awe-inspiring feel one would expect from the leader who inspired and rallied humanity together to fight back.
- Some fans criticized the prototype T-800 in Terminator Salvation for being too durable, noting that it survived not only grenade launcher rounds but exposure to molten steel — essentially giving it durability that exceeded what the original 1984 T-800 was capable of, despite being a prototype model made in 2018. However, if you pay careful attention to what both T-800s went through in the first two movies, the prototype's durability is not that outrageous. The original Terminator survived a tanker explosion far larger than a 40mm grenade launcher, which while briefly taking it out of commission ultimately only burned out its fleshy exterior before it resumes its chase for Sarah. The pipe bomb that Kyle places in the T-800's frame blows its legs and left arm off, but the machine's torso and CPU remain intact and it still has enough function left to crawl around. The T-800 in T2 is lowered into the molten steel by Sarah, but even after its head is completely submerged under the steel its CPU function does not turn off automatically - which makes sense, as it's probably made of a metal with a higher melting point (for instance, titanium is over 100 degrees above iron), so it stands to reason even a Terminator wouldn't be immediately melted by exposure to molten steel but would need to remain submerged for some time before it ceased functioning. The original Terminator's only anti-feat was being knocked on its back by multiple blasts from Kyle Reese's shotgun- which is not only somewhat believable given the endo-skeleton can only weigh so much no matter how durable, and is necessary to save Sarah for the first time. The T-800 seen in Salvation is not a Super Prototype made out of some superior material to survive what it did - any T-800 was capable of enduring that kind of punishment. And ironically it brings back comes down to a point mentioned above, in that the filmmakers tried and succeeded to make the T-800 threatening again, but the fans still found something to complain about, if only because they forgot how horrifyingly strong they are (and how it was a feat that humanity still won despite the odds) after two movies trying to introduce stronger Terminators.
