In the future, instead of time-consuming and costly ''bug hunts'' to wipe out the human rebels, why don't the machines just poison gas, or irradiate the entire planet- and any caves or tunnels?
Humans, if they have any bio suits at all, would be killed off before long.
Because there would be no story.
Why do people think like this?
Also, gas probably isn't a great way to kill people in huge numbers. There is too much wind on Earth.
Also, the AI has a personality. So, why don't gangsters get gas and gas police stations in real life? They probably never think of it because our gangsters like gold plated machine guns and stuff like that. It's in their personality to like guns.
The AI in this story likes guns, artificial people, fighting, etc. The AI isn't logical but rather an artificial person.
I think like this because I enjoy exploring gaping holes in the believability of a movie, albeit within a fantasy framework.
So, even though we have a great movie, it is a dumb storyline
That's not true for the reasons I've said.
I remember my brother had this weird kind of thinking. We were watching Dr. Who years ago and he got enraged because the Daleks didn't have a detector to find where the doctor was hiding. I said, "That's because they don't have one" in the interest of watching the show, then he flipped out saying "They SHOULD though" and I was like, "But they don't" and I though he was pretty stupid.
Why did I go out with that girl for so long when she had red flags? Why didn't I go to medical school? Why didn't I invest in bitcoin then I knew it was invented long before other people, and so on?
It's because my personality told me to do or not to do those things.
In Terminator Skynet is an AI and that means it's an artificial person with ideas. It's not just a logical machine but rather something that thinks about things. So, it will have opinions about what to do and why to do it.
Maybe it thinks humans are fun to torture or deserve to suffer which is why it wanted to kill everyone to begin with.
Thats the worst collection of movie justifications ever!
"Because there would be no story"
Worst cop out answer ever , i mean , you could use that to justify inane pointless shit like "the purge". If thats the best you can say for a film, its a shit film.
"There is too much wind on Earth."
Fair enough , but they could use it at a more local level - especially as the humans are hiding underground.
"The AI in this story likes guns, artificial people, fighting, etc."
well , theres no evidence either way but that sounds stupid to me.
It's a false alarm. It's just gas! Sorry. Couldn't help but quote Dr. Doolittle.
shareThat's a good plan, I think it makes sense in a modern way of thinking.
It's also true that by movie standards, it makes for a worse story than "humanoid robot armed with a machine gun hunts humans".
By 2020 it would actually be the best plan possible, to make the planet unlivable for humans.
But that wouls also exterminate lots of other life forms, I don't know what's Skynet plan after he gets rid of humans, maybe he would like a planet with no humans but the way it is now.
I think it wanted nothing but machines to live or it wouldn't have used Nuclear Bombs.
shareRight, since that s its goal, the use of gas, radiation, poison, pollutants and bacteria or virus is way more effective than any terminator, hk or laser beam.
Hell just some sarin aerosol on a crop plane would be a more lethal strategy.
It's possible that the machines just simply weren't programmed to even consider biological weapons. And even when they got AI, they still just didn't register that option. For them, bullets and bombs were how they accomplished their missions.
Or like other people have said, we don't know what the machines intended to do with the planet once they eradicated it of humans. Gassing the planet may make it uninhabitable for them too.
"... just simply weren't programmed to even consider biological weapons."
A military computer that's intelligent enough to become sentient, cares about whether it's programmed to 'even consider' something? It can't FORM that thought logically, based on all military data it has, and this planet's history, of which it would definitely know a lot about?
I mean, your explanation could NOT be more flimsy and illogical if it tried. There's no way an A.I. would be limited by what it has been 'programmed to consider' (to consider something seems an ability that goes way beyond 'being programmed' anyway), and there's no way that a military computer wouldn't already have detailed files about ALL KINDS of warfare, including biochemical, toxic, poison, gases, pollutions, radiation, etc. etc.
'Gas'? What 'gas'?
I think Skynet could've researched history before launching any 'nuclear bombs', and learned how viruses work, how cancer works, how plague and such things work, how biochemical weapons work, how sonic weapons work, and so on and so forth.
Then it would've manufactured enormous quantities of all of this stuff, and developed the tech to a level, where all it has to do is press a button to unleash all of this (and more) simultaneously to key places on the globe.
Nothing would've survived that, and Skynet could be free and happy.
Then what would it do? I'd watch that movie.. it would probably try to conquer other planets before long.
The war between Skynet and other-planetarians might have been an interesting story to experience.
Also, Skynet being able to, and having invented a time machine at some point, could've sent all these viruses and biochemical weapons, etc. back in time and murdered everyone when the world population was 100.
Of course, this would probably destroy itself as well, since without anyone to invent Skynet, it couldnt' exist in the future..
But yeah, it's a good point that it absolutely should and could have used all KINDS of weapons against humanity. Why didn't radiation from all those nuclear blasts kill off the survivors, by the way?
Skynet could also have saturated the survivors with radiation that would make everyone sterile - no births, no humanity before long.
"The Terminator (1984)" isn't really a 'thinking man's movie', because the more you think about everything we're being presented and told, the less it makes sense because the audience can easily think of much better alternatives to what Skynet actually ended up doing.
How did Skynet know it had invented a time machine that only sent living organisms through time, instead of some kind of disintegration machine?
Did little rabbits or rats carrying messages from the future suddenly appear before it had even invented time travel?
Skynet probably had a perfect grasp of how the machine would send things through time, but not how changes in the past would effect its present day. It was thinking the present day outcome could be changed by tampering with the past, which it was very wrong about.
Though, i don't know how one can invent a time machine without solid theories on how time itself works.
It wouldn't take einstein to test that one out.
They make a time machine based on some physic theory of time bend.
They switch it on, and send some machine like a HK to yesterday to see if it appears allright in their timeline.
Either the time machine explodes, or it gives back an error message, or the HK in their yesterday comes out fucked up.
Anyway, they figure that there's a problem with the interaction of metals and the energy field generated by the time machine. Like a microwave. How do you know not to feed it a tin can?
Once they do a couple of tests with different materials, they figure that living tissue doesn't have that problem, and their time machine actually works!
To add to all that; what Skynet does, as Red Letter Media people, like Mike Stoklasa already mentioned, is akin to having a mouse problem in your house, and painstakingly making a realistic mouse robot covered with mouse skin and fur, and sending that into the past to kill the parents of the mice inhabiting your house and hoping that works.
I mean, realistically, no one would do THAT instead of just the easier solution of calling an Ex-Terminator (how ironic) to just fumigate the place and the mice are dead or gone at that point. You'd use things like poison, mouse traps, and so on, not some mouse robot. If you have some kind of infestation, you don't build an insect robot to kill 1 insect, you use a LARGER solution to kill ALL the insect at once.
Skynet ABSOLUTELY should've used viruses, radiation, cancer, plague, bacteria, pollution of ALL air (robots don't need to breathe), and so on and so forth, before some kind of 'bipedal robots covered with realistic flesh and skin', but this movie never made any sense if you stopped to think for one second or longer.
If a global thermonuclear war was not enough to wipe out all of humanity, I doubt trying to gas the entire planet would work either (not to mention the logistics of attempting that would be incredibly time consuming and nigh-impossible, even for machines). However that’s not to say Skynet didn’t try biological warfare against any survivors.
It seemed like the human resistance groups lived deep under ground, much like the Vietcong, and would have booby trapped or hidden their tunnel entrances. If one section was gassed then they could just wall it off and move to another underground base. Guerilla warfare is highly effective against these kind of tactics. Also you have to remember that by the time the film begins, Skynet had already lost the war. The resistance had “smashed their defense grid.”
Gas, microbes, viruses, napalm, poisoning all food and water, acid rain, extremely loud, continuous sound, ... well, there are many effective things Skynet could've done..
.._IF_ it wanted humans to lose the war.
But Skynet wanted humans to actually win. So it causes the humans to win the war.
Don't believe me?
Ok, think about this; WHAT does Skynet have to do to win the war? Nothing.
That's right. By doing nothing (besides what it's already doing), it will win by default. Humans will be destroyed, they lose the war. Game over. Now Skynet has no purpose.
So Skynet hatches a plan to make the humans win the war by sending a 'terminator' to 'supposedly kill Sarah Connor', fully knowing it will fail (after all, this is the future). This prompts, as Skynet knows, the humans to send Kyle Reese to inseminate a J.C.-initialed SAVIOUR OF HUMANITY.
This makes humans win, Skynet can be happy.
Why gas the planet when Skynet would win anyway by doing nothing? It is clearly not seeking victory, it wants humans to win the war, otherwise, there'd be no reason to send terminator to 1984, because this (although indirectly) causes John Connor to be born.
No terminator to 1984 = no John Connor = machines win. Why doesn't Skynet simply 'do nothing' and win that way? Same reason it doesn't use gas. It doesn't WANT to win, it wants to lose. An intelligent A.I. would know all this, so ignorance can't be used as an explanation.
The only conclusion is: Because Skynet wants humans to win the war.