15 Terrible Mistakes That Almost Ruined Terminator For Everyone

5. T-850 Overrides Its Programming Because...It Can? (Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines)

After the TX kicks Arnie's head off and changes his programming, he heads out in pursuit of John Connor, and a fight begins. As the T-850 prepares to Terminate John, John asks the machine, "What is your mission?", at which point the T-850 endures a conflict of directives, between its original mission (to keep Connor and Brewster alive) and the new mission given to him by the T-X. Connor manages to appeal to Arnie's "emotional" side, and the T-850 hurls Connor to safety, leading to a corny montage of the machine bashing a car to pieces about 20 times, before he shuts himself down and freezes on the spot with the most hilariously constipated look on his face. It's an extremely tired trope in cinema that the protagonist manages to stop a brainwashed person from killing them by appealing to the deep good inside of them, but this is a machine without any concept of good and bad, and so the whole scene just comes off as lame and silly. If the TX were anywhere near as advanced as it looked, it would have been able to just overwrite his programming without any overlap. Otherwise, if it can be reversed with some manipulative conversation, what's the point?