My theory is that Connor only wanted to rescue Skynet's prisoners because his future father Kyle Reese was one of them, and bombing Kyle would have only made John go see-through like Michael J Fox at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance. All he wants to do is kill robots, bellow at his superiors like a stroppy teenager and repeatedly say his own name into a radio handset. He's not one for smalltalk, and he pretty much doesn't crack a grin for the entire duration of the film. This, obviously, means he isn't all that much fun to be around. He's basically what Julian Assange would be if a squadron of killer robots destroyed the Ecuadorian embassy before he could get to it. Some see him as humanity's redemption, others as a false prophet.
Back in the 1990s, he was an endearingly punky kid here, though, he has the weight of history kneeling on his chest. Time has not been kind to John Connor since the war with the machines started. "You and me, we've been at war since before either of us even existed" – John Connor
Without Marcus, Terminator Salvation would solely be about John Connor being a petulant cock to everyone. He's the one who beats up a load of terminators and, in the end, sacrifices his life for the cause.
He's the one who struggles with the divide between fate and free will. He's the one who battles with his identity. Still, Marcus is easily the most intriguing part of Terminator Salvation.
You lose points if you didn't see this twist coming a mile away. But what's the true identity of this mysterious stranger … oh, right, he's a robot. Terminator Salvation muddles things even further by introducing Marcus Wright, a murderer who dies and then reappears more than a decade later, screaming, naked and caked in mud.
Onwards! "So that's what death tastes like" – Marcus WrightĮven though Empire gave it a good crack a while ago, unpicking the various timelines hinted at in the Terminator films (let's not include the Sarah Connor Chronicles TV show here, because I don't want to live in a world where the lead singer of Garbage turning into a murderous robotic urinal is canon) is a pointless work of backbreaking labour. Got that? Don't worry, nor did anyone else. To save him, Connor needs to become BFF with an occasionally Australian robot. There's just one problem: 33-year-old John Connor's teenage dad is trapped there.
The Resistance thinks it can end the war by bombing Skynet HQ. Skynet has grown bored of killing humans in a genocidal extravaganza and decides to finish the stragglers off in one last apocalyptic push. If anyone alive could make a definitively idiotic Terminator movie, it was McG. He'd spent his whole life taking stupidity and finessing it into an art, by making videos for the Offspring and adding pointlessly dramatic sound effects to hair-swishes in the Charlie's Angels films.
They said Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, with its sexy robots and its disco sunglasses, was as stupid as a Terminator movie could get. "This is not the future my mother warned me about" – John Connor Do not read if you have not seen the film and don't want to know anything about it. SPOILER ALERT: This blog is published ahead of the screening on Film4 tonight (Friday) at 9pm.