Terminator 6 New Hope
2.0.2.1
Opens with what looks like an Army Rangers raid on a terrorist camp, but it is a wargame/simulation. The Army Rangers are led by Captain John Connor, the best officer in the corps, and the wargame is his evaluation of the Army’s AMTAC (tactical combat AI) program. John scores 107% on the simulation and is shown as a badass and charismatic officer. Sarah Connor works as a freelancer bodyguard, protecting a cartel boss’s daughter. She drives to visit John with a girl, named Juana, and the two talk about her strained relationship with her son – it is about John being salty about his “denied destiny”. Four T-800 Terminators arrive at the present (Old Arnie, two wrestler-tier guys, and an MMA-tier woman like Gina Carano) and set out to find John Connor. They don’t say a word and just get to work, acting with cold certainty as they first loot a mall for clothes and a smartphone then hijack a pickup truck. Sarah and Juana visit a doomsday prepper, one of Sarah’s friends. The guy is the stereotypical fat conspiracy theorist, but he is shown in a kind of sympathetic light and there are Judgement Day jokes between him and Sarah. John is with his Platoon at the Rangers Base, being a cool officer and all that. Sarah showing up kinda ruins his mood. John is shown extra-salty for not fighting a badass war against the machines and he feels like he was missing out on being a hero due to his mother. Sarah and John get into a small but intense fight, embarrassing everyone present. The Terminators use a smartphone to hack into government surveillance and track down Sarah. They hit the doomsday prepper, and old Arnold is so smooth he kills the guy by casually throwing a pebble at his head. Sarah and the girl go back to the prepper, only to find his mangled body hanging in his kitchen. His guns are also gone. Sarah gets a bad feeling about this and goes back to John.
John’s army life is interrupted again by Sarah. They are about to get into another fight when the Terminators attack the Ranger’s Base. The four Terminators totally annihilate the entire base without as much as slowing down. They roll over the Rangers like they are nothing. it is like the police station shootout but with four Terminators against a base of Army Rangers. Old Arnold kills John’s Platoon with a barrage from a machine gun, butchering them all as they are scrambling from their barracks. John and Sarah face off against one of the rando Terminators. The Terminator shoots Sarah in the shoulder and doesn’t kill John when it has the chance. In return, John blasts it away with a grenade launcher. Juana hot-wires a military truck and the three of them escape, the only survivors of the attack. The next morning finds John, Sarah, and Juana at a truck stop. They discuss the attack. John and Sarah are calm, it is just another boring day in the office. Juana freaks out. A bunch of government agents show up suddenly, led by NSA Man. They know about the attack and came to escort Sarah and John to safety. Sarah doesn’t trust them but John goes along with it. The Terminators chill out in an electronics shop where the damaged one is receiving repairs from the others. Old Arnie stuffs the shop’s freshly killed owner into a fridge and then watches records of the attack, mostly John. They travel in a massive convoy, escorted by SWAT and Delta Force. Sarah is very uncomfortable with this but NSA Man reveals that he is a Resistance fighter from the future tasked to stop Skynet. He explains that AMTAC becomes Skynet but AMTAC is a computerized version of John, so the Terminators are here to turn John into the AMTAC/Skynet and not to kill him. This makes John very uncomfortable for various obvious reasons.
John and Sarah get into another fight, now much more serious. Sarah goes all out on John for wishing for his cool post-apocalyptic action so much that he would become Skynet. In her frenzy, Sarah pulls a gun on John but then the Terminators attack. The convoy puts up a fight but they are decisively defeated. The Terminators butcher the entire escort crew without as much as taking a scratch. John, Sarah, NSA Man, and Juana make a rough escape as the Delta Force squad sacrifices itself to buy them time. NSA Man takes the group to an off-the-grid motel and explains his plan to lock up John in an NSA hideout until he dismantles the AMTAC program. John and Sarah have a major fallout from Sarah pulling a gun on John. John wants Sarah and Juana to leave, but NSA Man decides to take them as they will need everyone for this. At night John catches NSA Man having a PTSD-induced nightmare. NSA Man tells John how the future war looked like, how it wasn’t a war but Skynet’s private entertainment project because the humans had zero chances to win and John could barely keep his small group of survivors alive. Sarah interrupts the conversation to have a prep talk with John. She tells John that she has been thinking a lot about this time-travelling situation and she came to the conclusion that Judgement Day if it happens, will get worse the latter it is triggered due to technological advancement. So John’s cool post-apocalyptic war is not the glorious battle he imagined, now it will look more like NSA Man’s hopeless struggle for survival.
During breakfast, the motel TV unexpectedly switches channels to a drone camera. The drone is controlled by Old Arnie from the electronics shop. Juana recognizes her family estate on the screen and freaks out just as the drone launches a missile, killing her family. John and Sarah realize that this is just a trick to draw them out but then immediately go into a fight over it. In this moment of darkness, John gets his thoughts together and tells Sarah and the girl to chill the hell out and stay focused. It works, much to NSA Man’s delight. After failing to draw the group out with the drone strike, the Terminators infiltrate the hospital where the dead Delta Force were taken. They recover a tracking device that allows them to follow NSA Man. Another NSA agent catches them, but Terminator Woman uses machine seduction, showing emotion from a Terminator for the first time during the movie, and kills the poor guy. The group arrives at the safe house, and John starts having questions about this whole John->AMTAC->Skynet ordeal. NSA Man has answers but they are hard to hear: yes, now the Skynet is John so everything John knows and feels is Skynet and that’s why these Terminators wouldn’t kill Sarah. At this point Sarah realizes that she has been a huge jerk to John all along, hyping up the big war for him and then denying it with the same momentum and denying her son’s feelings about it. AMTAC wouldn’t become Skynet if not for John wanting his cool post-apocalyptic action so much it is beyond belief, and Sarah is the reason he feels like this. Sarah and John have a tough soldier-like tear-less reconciliation. Then the Terminators catch up with them. The fight is not going well for the group. NSA Man blows one of the Terminators. Sarah kills two other terminators by luring them into a furnace but she loses an eye and gets incapacitated for it.
Juana tries to take on the T-800 but she gets torn in half. Old Arnie corners John and for the first time in the movie, he talks. It tells John that it knows what he feels because it is him. It kinda teases him, telling him how much he enjoyed the war against the humans as the leader of the machines, wiping out humanity and all that. It taunts John for being so self-obsessed that his virtual self became Skynet and triggered Judgement Day. It also reveals that it infected the AMTAC project with a virus that would shut it down. John gets confused at the last part but then realizes that Old Arnie/Skynet IS him because this is what he would do: using time travel to save the world after having his fun. Old Arnie is here to finish off everything, no loose ends allowed. John and Old Arnie fight. John has his ass kicked big time but he manages to drive an industrial drill into Old Arnie’s head, disabling the Terminator. Old Arnie tries to self-destruct but John stops the sequence by jamming a crowbar into its chest. John runs away with the wounded and unconscious Sarah, exiting the safe house just as Old Arnie rips the crowbar out of its trunk, and blows up the place. The final scene is set three months later. John and the recovering Sarah sit at a cliff, talking. They are both in an NSA witness protection program. Disenchanted by the recent revelations, John is thinking about leaving the Rangers and going into solitude as he is as much of a threat to humanity as Skynet. Sarah comforts him, telling him that he should stay and keep fighting because other than his desire for a glorious war, his love for his mother also transcended his need to be a hero to humanity, so he has at least as much good as bad in him. They hug as the sun sets between them.
FIN