How many times does a Terminator simply kill a human being who is in the way? Skynet and the Terminators just do not care about matters of right and wrong—what we would call moral considerations. Remember the scene in
T2
when John Connor discovers he has his very own private bodyguard? They’re in a parking lot at night, and John makes Arnold stand on one foot, jump up and down, and beat up a couple of guys who inadvertently try to save John from what looks like an attacker. Well, when the two guys intervene, the Terminator pushes them away, draws his gun, and gets a wild shot off as John disrupts his aim, saying:
John: Jesus, you were going to kill that guy.
T-101: Of course. I’m a Terminator.
John: Listen to me very carefully, okay? You’re not a Terminator anymore, all right? You got that? You just can’t go around killing people.
T-101: Why?
John: What do you mean, “Why?” Because you can’t.
T-101: Why?
John: Because you just can’t, okay? Trust me on this. Look, I’m going to go get my mom, and I order you to help me [John hands his gun back to him]. Now, you’ve gotta promise me you’re not gonna kill anyone, right?
T-101: Right.
John: Swear?
T-101: What?
John: Just put up your hand and say, “I swear I won’t kill anyone.”
T-101: I swear I will not kill anyone.
Shortly after this conversation the pair drive up to the security gate at the psychiatric facility where Sarah is kept, and the Terminator shoots the guard in both knees. But that’s okay, because “he’ll live.”
The Terminator can’t get his computerized mind around the fact that human society has developed laws and customs that forbid the exercise of brutal and deadly force. The only limitation on force that Skynet understands is a stronger, more powerful force. The T-101 has to obey John due to programming, otherwise all bets are off. But the justness of a just war requires that the exercise of force derive from a legitimate authority, such as a national government or duly sworn defender. It is just to intervene on someone’s behalf if there is good cause—then you have a legitimate power to act. From this, we can understand why the two guys who were trying to help John in the parking lot were so disgruntled. They thought they were doing the right thing by helping out a kid who was being picked on by a huge, tough guy dressed in black leather. As it turns out, John repaid their good deed by illegitimately exercising his power by having Arnold rough them up.
“I Need Your Clothes, Your Boots, and Your Motorcycle”
In
T2
the T-1000 “liberates” a motorcycle cop’s vehicle and clothes in order to better move about society and accomplish his deadly mission. The Terminator doesn’t really care about whether or not there were other ways of getting clothes or a set of wheels: he takes what he needs. In fact, the T-101 does the same thing in all three movies, and even Reese steals clothes and cars in
The Terminator
. These examples illustrate potential violations of the second major principle of just-war theory: that wars must be
conducted
justly, too.
There is a limit to rashness in war, even this war conducted by the Terminators, so we should do only what’s necessary to achieve our goals in war. Most important, this principle directs military authorities to kill only the people they absolutely
must
kill. It’s a given that killing is bad, so we try to limit it as much as possible. Some philosophers who explore just conduct discuss this principle as one of
proportionality
, in which justice demands that you do not bring a gun to a knife fight, or kill a million people in retaliation for a car bomb. The gist of the argument is that wars ought to be fought fairly.
Now, obviously, Skynet seems to falter on the issue of proportionality. It fears that its human creators will try to pull the plug, thus killing it, so it reasons that the only way to protect itself from humans would be to kill all the humans. Makes sense, I guess, but it’s not really the proportionate response: it might have just killed off the humans in its immediate proximity, or all of us who knew about the existence of Skynet, right? But then it would have to deal with all the other humans who didn’t get the memo that there’s a new sheriff in town, namely Skynet. So, why not skip ahead to the last move of the game and just kill everyone at the beginning? At least that’s what Skynet thinks.
Similarly, in
T3
, Skynet sends the T-X back with both primary and secondary targets. The primary target is John Connor, but the Terminator will settle for a multitude of secondary targets: John’s classmates (who become soldiers in his resistance army) and Kate Brewster’s dad, Robert, in charge of implementing the Skynet program. This targeted hit list has the appearance of proportionality, right? The problem is, Terminators don’t always exercise another component of the just conduct aspect of warfare—
discrimination
.
Discrimination, in this sense, isn’t a bad thing: it’s the act of separating combatants from civilians. You should attack your uniformed enemy but make every reasonable effort to avoid bringing harm to civilians on either side of the conflict. Terminators, as we know, are not very discriminating when it comes to war.
But there does seem to be a method to the madness of the Terminators. In the first movie, Arnold pursues only Sarah Connor. Not until he confronts a roommate and her boyfriend does he kill “innocent” people. Remember, since Skynet is sending the Terminators back from the future, Sarah Connor is judged to be an enemy, so she’s not innocent in the eyes of Skynet. At the beginning of the series, Sarah doesn’t realize why she’s the target of some lunatic who can withstand many, many gunshot wounds. But as Sarah gains knowledge of the future—first from Reese and then from her own Terminator ally—she transforms into a human version of the Terminators.
Ever since the first encounter with the Terminator in 1984, Sarah’s life has been lived under a cloud of doom. She has little hope for the future. She waits and prepares for the day when her son will rise from the ashes of Armageddon and lead a rebellion against the machines. Once she discovers the human who is responsible for the war, and so responsible for making her life a shambles, she acts as coolly and as calculatingly as any machine ever could.
In fact, the parallels are a little scary. Think about the plots of the movies. In
The Terminator
, Skynet sends Arnold back to kill the mother of the leader of the resistance fighters. In
T2
, Skynet sends back the T-1000 to kill the future leader of the resistance fighters while he’s a young boy. And in
T3
, Skynet sends back the T-X to kill John, if it can find him, and John’s cadre of officers in his resistance army. In each case, this is cold-blooded murder. Now, consider what Sarah Connor decides to do at the turning point of
T2
. She finds out that Miles Dyson is the computer programmer who is responsible for developing the technologies that morph into Skynet. Sarah gains knowledge of a possible future and, just like Skynet, acts on that information before the terrible events begin to unfold. Sarah Connor becomes a Terminator, intending to commit cold-blooded murder, too.
The just conduct of war dictates that she, like the T-101, must focus only on targets and exercise due restraint when confronted with noncombatants. Of course, there’s that sticky idea that Skynet deems all humans to be enemies. After Arnold delivers that now-classic line “I’ll be back” at the information desk of the police station, he goes on a killing spree. So it’s a very guilty pleasure we feel in watching the Terminator do his job.
In the second movie, the T-1000 executed its mission with a cold efficiency until it ran into the old T-101. Neither Terminator was unduly reckless in its treatment of noncombatants. Of course, the notion of “being a combatant” must mean that the person actually knows he or she
is fighting in a war
. In fact, the war exists in the future, in 2029, and only by the happenstance of technology does it break through the boundaries of linear time. Skynet doesn’t recognize that it might matter that its enemies don’t even realize that they’ve been targeted as enemies. Skynet doesn’t care about necessity, proportionality, or discrimination. And neither does Sarah as she’s locking her laser sight on the back of Miles Dyson’s head.
“I Almost . . . I Almost . . . ”
Sarah Connor tries to kill Miles Dyson. She shoots a lot of bullets at him and wounds him pretty badly in the process. But even as she’s standing over his body, filled with all the pent-up rage from a life of seclusion and constant fear—knowing now that the man begging her for life is responsible for all of her pain—she can’t kill him. In this way, Sarah reasserts her humanity and her difference from the Terminators.
But the machines don’t mind making killing personal. The T-1000 morphs into a doppelganger and presents a security guard with his mirror image before he pierces him through the eye and brain. He poses as John’s foster mom, and kills her husband because he’s making too much noise (or because he’s drinking milk directly from the carton). And the T-X poses as Kate’s fiancé in hopes of luring her close enough to kill her. For Terminators, “the closer the better” seems to be the general rule.
But Sarah stops herself just as she gets into intimate space with Dyson. His crying family probably helps pull her down from her bloodlust, too. When John and the Terminator show up she can only look vacantly into his eyes and stutter, “I almost. . . . I almost . . . ” The implicit realization that Dyson was indeed innocent—at least in this stream of the space-time continuum—shocked her back to her senses.
As viewers, we have been made to realize something important. “We didn’t care much about the murders of the wrong Sarah Connor [in the first film],” explains Sean French, “but we are now made to feel what it might be to kill someone you don’t know.”
3
In other words, when we watch
The Terminator
we might have derived some vicarious pleasure, mixed with a little slasher-movie horror, when Arnold killed anonymous people. But, in
T2
, Cameron brings us into the equation and makes us feel the fear, the anxiety, and the hopelessness that we didn’t necessarily identify with during the original movie. We now know what it’s like to be the target of unprovoked violence
and
what it’s like to inflict such violence.
We stop and think that, oh man, I’ve just been identifying with the main character, and she was trying to assassinate an innocent man. When we identify with Arnold’s Terminator in the first movie, we don’t make the same connection because we know he’s the bad guy—we’re not going to idealize his actions. But here, looking at things from Sarah’s perspective, she’s almost killed a man, when her enemies are the machines.
“The Battle Has Just Begun”
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
closes with these words, spoken by John Connor: “Maybe the future has been written. I don’t know. All I know is what the Terminator taught me: never stop fighting. And I never will. The battle has just begun.” Just-war theory sets forth the rules by which we can legitimately enter into war, with the understanding that its ultimate purpose must be peace. War is not something to stumble into. It’s a last-ditch measure that aims to subdue an enemy so that peace may be restored. As of yet, this aim hasn’t been successfully achieved in Cameron’s world of Terminators, John Connor, and Skynet.
The final phases of just-war theory describe the just resolution of wars, how the victors should work to establish peace and reconcile any lingering injustices for the sake of fostering goodwill among people who were recently enemies on the battlefield. Examples of these ideas put into practice would be the Marshall Plan in the wake of World War II, or war-crimes tribunals that seek reconciliation for atrocities beyond the scope of the necessities of war. The idea here is that even after the conflict is over, justice must be sought and attained or else the seeds of future conflict may be sown. Most important, of course, the underlying causes of a war need to be set right in order to prevent history from repeating itself.
How could such ideas be enacted in John Connor’s future? Will there be an occasion when humans have defeated all the machines and Skynet surrenders? Will John sign a peace treaty with Skynet? It’s doubtful that such a situation will come about. If the war is ever resolved on the big screen, it will most likely end with the total destruction of Skynet. Connor would need to worry about fostering justice only if there were survivors who might feel unjustly treated. But if all his enemies were dead, there’s no need to worry about such things, which might explain why we see such a predilection for genocide in the world.