This summers Terminator Genisys, available to own on DVD and Blu-Ray November 10th, has divided fans, critics and general movie audiences with its convoluted use of time travel, which claims to have wiped from existence all previous events depicted in the last four Terminator movies. Although we have argued already in a previous article that a 2004 Judgment Day is unavoidable regardless of any actions taken beforehand, some fans of Terminator Genisys have been using the movies primary phrase of techno-babble, the “Nexus Point”, in defense of the movies narrative.
Terminator Genisys' “Nexus Point” - an event that affects and changes the timeline before and after it - is when the T-5000 attacks and Terminator-ifies John Connor into the T-3000. Fans of the movie and the writers Patrick Lussier and Laeta Kalogridis argue that this event causes the timeline before and after it to splinter into an alternate timeline. The argument stands as thus. Kyle Reese was to be sent back to the 1984 seen in the first Terminator movie, in this known timeline John Connor was killed in 2032 by the T-850 that is subsequently sent to 2004 to ensure his and Kate Brewsters survival. But because, John Connor is attacked by the T-5000, changing John's future it allegedly has an effect on the past, resulting in Kyle appearing in an alternate version of 1984 in which, for 10 years a T-800 and T-1000 have existed and in which Judgment Day will occur in 2017 courtesy of the Genisys app, developed by Miles Bennett Dysons son Danny.
Unfortunately the Nexus Point is logically unsound. Ignoring for a moment the fact that the Terminator franchise has always been set within a causal time loop of events, the whole idea of the “Nexus Point” is logically and technically unsound. John Connor becoming the T-3000 in 2029 only affects events from that point onwards. Thus John Connor would not have sent a reprogrammed T-800 back to 1994, meaning that Miles Bennett Dyson's work into reverse engineering the CPU from the T-800 destroyed in 1984 would have progressed unabated, resulting in a Judgment Day of August 29th, 1997 – 7 years before its original date of 24th July 2004. Starting the war against humankind earlier may prove advantageous to Skynet, but to maintain the events Skynet would need to develop the TDE and the T-5000 to maintain the causal, pre-destination time loop. None of this was explained or seen in the movie Terminator Genisys, because Lussier and Kalogridis didnt examine the timeline of events throughout the franchise.
The main problem with the “Nexus Point” is the theory that an event that occurs in the future can directly alter the past. Only through in-direct action, for example sending something or someone back in time from the future can events in the past be altered, as has been shown time and again throughout the franchise. It is highly possible that after attacking John Connor in 2029 that the T-5000 sent a T-1000 back in time to 1974 to terminate Sarah Connor when she was 9 years old, and that maybe John Connor, before he was completely terminator-ified, sent back a T-800 to protect and raise her. But such action would only result in the events from the first two Terminator movies from having never occurred, and because the second movie corrected the potential timeline changing events instigated because of events from the first movie, Judgment Day was not delayed but reset back to its original date of 2004, as argued in a previous article. Thus when John Connor, now as the T-3000, went back in time from 2029 to 2014 he would have appeared in a post apocalyptic future set four before the events seen in Terminator Salvation.
In short there is no “Nexus Point”, and the latter half of Terminator Genisys is an impossibility, that cannot happen within the confines of the Terrminator franchise. If Skydance Productions and Paramount Pictures really are serious about “learning from the fans” then they should take heed and treat Terminator Genisys in much the same way as Marvel Studios treats Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk movie, and set about producing a proper Terminator sequel that will conclude the story in a future war setting, as it should have been in the first place.
