The Terminator

Plot hole: When Arnie is driving the cop car and shooting at Conner and Reese, 5 or 6 inch holes from the gunfire are shown in the door right beside Connor. If the shell penetrated the steel door (which it could easily do - and was shown to do), there's nothing inside the door or on the other side of it to stop the bullet. Connor, and probably Reese, would've been ripped to shreds.

ReRyRo

Plot hole: When Kyle Reese first enters the picture, the police immediately start chasing him (which ultimately works to the Terminator's advantage, as he is able to use the radio chatter to track his target). But why are the police after Kyle in the first place? All he did was steal a homeless guy's pants. There's no way that would generate that big of a response from the LAPD.

Kyle G.

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: Hardly a plot hole to have him be chased by the police. But they saw a half-naked guy in an alley at night; that's suspicious. He stole a man's pants and ran. Then he assaulted a police officer and took his gun. It escalated pretty quickly.

lionhead

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Mistakes

The Terminator mistake picture

Continuity mistake: When the Terminator says "I'll be back" he walks out of the police station. The cop inside the building looks out of the window, looks very surprised, and you can see the headlights from the car shining on the cop's face. When we see the car just before it comes crashing through the building the headlights aren't on. In the next shot of the cop the headlights are still shining on him. (00:57:25)

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Questions

Question: I know it's not important because the movie would be very short and boring, but there's something I've always wondered. What would have happened to the Terminator had he actually managed to kill Sarah Conner?

The_Iceman

Chosen answer: Since terminators cannot self-terminate, only one very likely possibility comes to mind: it would have hidden itself away somewhere known to have remained undisturbed in the years between the termination of Sarah Connor and the start of the war, at which point it would rejoin the war effort.

Phixius ★

Answer: Skynet knew nothing about Sarah Connor besides what city she was in in 1984 and that she had a pre war leg injury which they could use as a form of identification. However this injury only occurred in the factory at the end of the movie which would mean the terminator would have no way of identifying the real sarah connor before that time. The terminator therefore could've never completed its mission with 100% certainty because it had no idea what she actually looked like, therefore it may have just carried on hunting out Sarah Connors to increase the chances of getting the right one if it was still in good enough condition to move around unnoticed.

Answer: According to the official novelization, the Terminator looked for a specific injury that the Sarah Connor in question had, in order to insure that she was indeed the Sarah Connor that would give birth to John Connor. If any of the Sarah Connors that he killed didn't have that injury, then he knew that none of them were the Sarah Connor that he was looking for, and would move on to the next one. At the end of the novelization, it is revealed that Sarah Connor got the injury during her final battle with the Terminator, meaning that previous time travel loops had already happened that we didn't see or read about (alternatively the events in the first Terminator film are a causal loop that always happened). Since the Terminator wasn't aware that Sarah didn't have the injury at this point in time, this would mean that he would continue to search the world for other Sarah Connors after killing her. It's a piece of horror that unfortunately was cut from the film.

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