This scene actually confuses me. IIRC, they blow up Skynet in T2 so I guess John doesn't become a leader? There is no Resistance? But then where does this Terminator come from to kill him and why?
you sorta have to hand wave it away as "skynet existed at SOME point, it sent back a bunch of terminators at different timelines (a bunch of T-800s specifically) to kill John Conner, one of them happened to succeed 2 years after Sarah and John finally prevent Judgement Day by (indirectly) killing Miles Bennett. At that point Skynet is no longer created in the future, but the terminators it created already still went back in time. It could have sent 1 million terminators to different points in time and they would have all been sent.
Its real wonky, it doesn't follow the Back to the Future thing where once past events change future events also change and affect past events (Marty starting to vanish) but that movie was inconsistent anyways since later Doc says past events changing create ALTERNATE futures so what you do creates divergent timelines, its sort of the infinite multiverse idea where anything that can possibly happen in any configuration will happen.
My biggest disappointment with the results of the opening, which I thought were GREAT, was that it has no real impact on anything. John Conner dying means the future is REALLY different now, even if Skynet emerges some other way in 20 years it won't be John who leads the fight back. Awesome idea, its fucking tiring to see the same shit of "leader rises up, skynet sends back terminator to kill leader". Oh, wait, you aren't changing a FUCKING THING are you, just swapping John with a new leader? Awesome. It got even more silly when everything in the future is hand waved with one or two lines, "We don't have Skynet we have Legion which is a cyberwarfare AI". Which creates the exact same looking terminators, also creates a time travel machine, which the resistance also manages to infiltrate and use. JESUS CHRIST REALLY?
Its a bit of the Hitler paradox, going back to kill baby Hitler may not change a single thing about the 20th century as another leader may very well rise up and take his place and more or less do the same things. Its sad they didn't reach a little bit more, and have 2 or 3 movies (or a TV show) where an AI realizes that just killing a few people in the past won't change anything for it, and it needs to do something else. What that else is... would be the movie magic. Salvation and Genisys and T:SCC tried to tackle that idea, none of them did it extraordinarily well, but I appreciate that more than Dark Fates which is just a reskin of T2.
