I was thinking the other day that the ‘80s had a lot of good time travel movies - the incomparable Back to the Future series obviously, but also Bill & Ted, Terminator, Flight of the Navigator, even Star Trek 4. And Quantum Leap on TV. But recently we’ve had what, Hot Tub Time Machine? Safety Not Guaranteed? (Well, I guess Doctor Who on TV.)

Which got me thinking - for a series premised on time travel, there’s not much time travel in the Terminator movies. Like, once each movie gets going, as far as “rules” of the universe go, “dogs bark at Terminators” literally has more influence on plot developments than “both Skynet and the resistance are capable of traveling back in time”.

Really, you’d think the resistance could just relocate back to prehistory. Hell, between John’s conception and Cyberdyne developing Skynet from T1’s T-800, it’s established that closed causality cycles work, so that could be the origin of humanity, stuck in an endless recurring loop punctuated by machine-war apocalypse.

So I guess what I’m saying is the third Matrix movie might have actually worked as a Terminator film.