The Terminator corrections

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The Terminator (1984) - 60 corrections

Directed by James Cameron, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lance Henriksen, Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. As such, any aggressive/abusive corrections (and I get quite a few) written as if they're comments I've made myself will be ignored. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "make changes" when viewing mistakes, and click "correct entry". Some entries have "duplicated entry" after them - these are entries which were already listed on the main page, but were submitted again. I occasionally leave these online for a while, just in case they were moved in error, so don't worry about pointing them out to me.

When the Endoskeleton is blown up by a pipe bomb in the factory, if you play the scene in slow motion, you can see the chest plate going in one direction and the head going in another direction. Yet, in the next shot, the entire upper torso of the Endoskeleton is intact and chasing after Sarah. [This is debatable. There is a piece that is similar in shape to the Terminator's head that bounces off a railing, but when the torso section falls to the ground moments later, the head still appears to be attached.]

Sarah unnecessarily puts change into a payphone before dialling 911, typically a free call. [It's not unreasonable to believe that the stressed-out Sarah might have forgotten you don't need to insert change for this call. More a character mistake than a movie mistake.] Corrected by Rooster of Doom

In one shot when Sarah and Kyle try to escape the Terminator in a large vehicle, the front tires burnout upon acceleration. The car is a large early 1980's luxury sedan, and therefore obviously rear-wheel drive. [Wrong. The car is a Cadillac Eldorado - front wheel drive.]

Given that the terminator series has a titanium casing, it also would have some serious electrical parts in order for it to master speech, as well as just for general operation. So, while the casing may survive the blast from the gasoline truck, the casing would conduct the heat and melt the motherboard, all the wires, and the little internal pieces. The important processing parts would be slag or at least overloaded, leaving the terminator useless. [Well, plastics technology might have advanced as well, but still...] [While the outer casing may be titanium, there could also be some sort of thermal insulation inside designed to protect the electrical parts from extreme heat.]

In both Terminator movies when you look into the future you see piles of broken bricks and skulls. Only skulls. What happened to the rest of their bodies? [There are other bones, most of them underneath, and if you look carefully you can see them in many scenes. The skulls are just lying on top.] Corrected by STP

Obviously James Cameron didn't have the budget to realize his full vision for this movie as he did in T2. The appearance of the time travelers is generally consistent with T2, except we don't see the actual bubble. With Reese, we see a hole in the lightning pattern, but no actual bubble. So we know Cameron was after an effect similar to T2. In T2, the time displacement dissolves surrounding matter, and causes a dimple in the ground. Same in T3. But when Arnold first appears in the first film, the ground remains completely flat. And it's pretty clear from the body position he materialized on the ground and didn't fall from the sky, as Reese did. [Reese says that after he was sent back, the machine was destroyed, so that no one else could come - 'just him and me'. Obviously another time-travel machine was built later, but it could have had subtle differences / improvements so that the method of arrival was altered slightly.] Corrected by STP

The Terminator arrives through time at about 1am and only gets to a phone book to search for Sarah Connor at around midday. What has he been doing for the past 10 - 11 hours? [Reconnoitering the area, learning the layout of Los Angeles, and preparing for his assault, one can assume. Do you think that just because we don't see every move he makes, he must be twiddling his thumbs off in a corner somewhere?]

When Kyle and his female consort take down the HK tank (2nd future war segment) there's something which confuses me: Kyle, being the intelligent soldier that he is, crouches and waits until the HK is looking the other way before throwing his grenade at it. The female soldier however remains standing in plain view of everyone and doesn't throw hers until the HK's head is looking directly at her (which of course results in her getting pulverised by laser fire). While she may not be as well trained a soldier as Kyle, common sense would dictate to anyone that attacking from a position where the enemy can both see you and hit you is just asking for it. [The novelization makes this clear. Ferro (the corporal who gets shot by the HK) slipped on the rubble as she armed her charge. She had to expose herself to the HK in order to get rid of the charge before it detonated in her hands.]

What's up with those pipe bombs Reese makes? They seem to make nothing more then a puff of smoke and a loud bang when he's throwing them on the highway, but they can blow a huge cyborg made of powerful metal into a dozen pieces? Not likely. [Be as it may, any non-shrapnel explosive works better when put into target, not on top or on the side of something.]

When Kyle escapes the department store he is not wearing a shirt, but in the next scene when he is following Sarah he is wearing a grey shirt and continues to wear it throughout the movie. [The scene where he's following Sarah actually takes place the next night. He had stolen a car by then, it's entirely possible he stole a shirt too.]

In all of the scenes leading up to when the Terminator crashes the police car into the wall, his hair is straight and parted on one side. After this crash in the remaining scenes, his hair is shorter and spiked. When did he have time to get a haircut, and why did he care about his physical appearance? [Part of his hair was burned off form the car Reese shot at in the Tech Noir alley. Look closely when he is about to punch through the windshield.]

After the car chase in which Kyle and Sarah are being chased by Arnold, Arnold's stolen cop car crashes into the parking lot wall. When the trailing police haul Sarah and Kyle away, Arnold is missing from the car he's just crashed. Kyle has clearly stated that the Terminator will absolutely not stop until Sarah is dead. Why would he flee the scene from a few cops - given his resilience - when he could have kept after Sarah and killed her right there? Was he "afraid" of doing it in front of the police? Was he concerned about getting away? [The terminator was injured in the crash as we see later when he repairs his arm and eye. He also has no way of knowing that the police don't have weapons that could damage him (he asks for a plasma rifle at the gun shop implying he knows little of 1980s weapons).]

Paul Winfield's character is Ed Traxler. Lance Henriksen's character name is given only as Vukovich, but when he starts telling the story about the Afghan during Reese's interrogation, Traxler grunts "Ed, shut up." A coincidence that these two detectives who work together are BOTH named Ed, or a mistake? [Out of the 6 billion people in the world. I'm sure there are two people with there names as Ed working together on any job.]

How can John Conner be born if he has to send the soldier back to protect Sarah, when the soldier then becomes John Connor's father. Its a paradox, an endless loop that can't get started. What came first the chicken or the egg? [It's entirely possible that someone else was the father in the original timeline, but Kyle became the father and modified the timeline.]

During the 1st few minutes of the film, the future shows a Flying HK travelling through the air, look closely at it and you can see it "clip" through a large piece of foreground. [This cannot be true for the simple reason that the HKs were done with small-scale models, not CGI.]

The Terminator has state of the art visual tracking. This is obvious for many reasons including when we get glimpses of how it sees things by heat analysis or infrared. Most notably it even has a little cross-hairs targeting system. Why then does he need to get a gun with a laser sight? [The Terminator doesn't fire through his eyes. The cross-hairs must be there for the purpose of adjusting his eyesight (maybe measuring the distance). Not aiming weapons.]

This applies to both films - If only things surrounded by organic tissue can make it through the time machine, why not put some nifty weapons in wads of cheese! That why you'll be prepared. Of course, this only makes me wonder if the computers did that with the T-1000 in the next film. How else did a liquid metal item make its way through the time portal? [He says "living" tissue, not organic. Of course, that still means if they were desperate enough they could presumably cut open some sort of animal and send it through with a gun inside it before it dies, but that's a bit grim].

When Kyle first arrives in 1984 in the alley, the police immediately show up. Who called the police and why? To report a naked guy in a dark alley? And how did the cops get there so fast? [I always had the impression that the police just happen to pull up there while he's putting on the bum's pants.]

When Arnie is in the gun store he asks for a Plasma Rifle in the 40 watt range. Surely this must be an error in the Terminator's computer files. They know enough about the past to know roughly where and when Sarah Connor lives, that he can find a phone book in a public phone booth, how to drive a 1984 car, etc., but not that a plasma rifle wasn't invented until many years later? [The gun store owner didn't ask the T-800 to pick a weapon off the shelf, he asked if he would like another type of weapon. The T-800 complied with his request and requested the gun that he would like to have: a Plasma Rifle in the 40 watt range. The gun owner didn't specify the time period that the gun had to be from, so the T-800 was perfectly justified in requesting it.]

The terminator cuts open its arm to repair the finger cables. But when it is reduced to a skeleton, there are no cables. [There aren't cables - just sliding poles]