Fictional technology is fascinating in the sense that on one hand, it's pure wish fulfillment -- the writers can create the most awesome devices imaginable and don't have to worry about technical limitations or feasibility. But on the other hand, so much of it is almost laughably flawed. Take movie robots, for instance. They can think and love and perform amazing feats, and every kid wants one. Yet if they were built and sold by a real company, they'd be yanked from the market within minutes due to their glaring design oversights. For instance ...

5 The T-X in Terminator 3 Is a Serious Downgrade from the T-1000

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The T-1000 in Terminator 2 truly has no weak point (in fact, we're not sure where its crucial circuitry even could be, let alone where it might be). This is because it tap dances between solid and liquid form at will, meaning that physical damage is something it hands out like Darfur fliers at a coffee shop but can never actually experience. The only reason Schwarzenegger is able to destroy it is because someone built a pit of lava next to the Los Angeles freeway, a scenario Skynet probably read through streaming tears of hilarity before dismissing it from the T-1000's contingency programming.

So in Terminator 3, the evil robot must be even more hardcore terror-awesome than the T-1000, right? They wouldn't bother to waste our time with a sequel 12 years later without coming up with a cyborg so tit-shatteringly badass that the T-1000 would hang posters of it on its wall, right?



"I'm here to kill John C- why are you laughing?"

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What we got instead was the T-X, a machine utterly inferior to the T-1000 in every conceivable way. Both could change their appearance and deliver menacingly deadpan compliments about peoples' vehicles, but while the T-1000 could shape shift into literally anything it touched of equal mass (even a goddamned patch of floor), the T-X was strictly limited to different variations of the same hot woman. There's even a scene where it inflates its human female breasts to more effectively coerce someone, and while we agree that this can be a useful ability, it maybe isn't as universally effective as being able to dopplegang virtually any person on the planet.

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But that's not even the most severe design regression. The T-X, like Schwarzenegger's moldy old T-800, has a physical endoskeleton. If Skynet can make a time traveling assassination machine out of liquid metal, why would it ever build one out of anything else? The T-1000 could not be harmed by anything -- it shrugs off bullets, grenades and explosions without a scratch. Arnold takes the same abuse, but comes out looking like he got raped by a Tyrannosaurus, because he has a permanent solid-state structure. So why would a sentient supercomputer overlord read the performance reviews of those two models and decide "Whoops, scrap that 'mimetic polyalloy' bullshit, clunky metal horror-bones are definitely the way to go"?