Well, that doesn't make any sense. It was overwhelmingly tied into being a Terminator movie from conception to screen, not some freestanding time travel movie that barely referenced the source material. If the story had been written like this but simply omitted the name "Terminator" it would have been sued for copyright infringement. It's obviously a Terminator film down to its bare bones regardless of what one thinks of its quality.
Of course you would have to alter the script dramatically, but someone in peril and someone protecting them isn't something exclusive to this franchise. Not all space based shows have to be Star Trek. Hell, look at Orville. That's a very similar concept but different enough not to infringe.
I don't think this movie would have been MUCH better without the Terminator tie in, but that tie-in definitely hurt more than helped. It rendered the first two films and the importance of John Connor meaningless. That alone makes the movie hard to stomach even if nothing else happened bad.
Plenty of movies took elements from other movies. How many "Die Hard on a X" movies were there?
I just would have like to have seen a situation where John lives but is no longer humanity's savior because of changes in the timeline, and how he reacts to that. Is he relieved to have that weight and lack of choice about his life taken off of him, so he relaxes and lives in obscurity, or does he take up his mother's mantle and act as a mentor and trainer for Dani now that he sees Judgment Day is still coming but with a new leader of the Resistance.
To me, humanity's savior should only be John Connor, because without that, then John's contribution was meaningless. Clearly, despite stopping Skynet, the same thing happened, which would mean that John could still be humanity's hope--just a little later.
But you bring up a very interesting point though, where John may not end up in the same role, but should still be very important.
Maybe John still gets things going, but is too old to be the boots on the ground, and that is where Dani comes in. Have an adult John Connor fighting alongside his mother and grace to protect Dani. All they accomplished in this movie was to substitute John for someone else, and that is what made the first two movies meaningless. Based on this movie, if John dies in the first two, who cares? Someone else will take his place.
This didn't render the first two movies meaningless, anything but. A recurring (bum bum) theme amongst the franchise is that Judgement Day keeps coming about no matter the actions of our heroes. It might be delayed, it might take a slightly different form, but it happens anyway. It's not quite predestination in the hard sense but it does present a tension between the evident presence of free will and the inevitability of a future we created.
Stopping Judgement Day was never the mission when the franchise started. It was about protecting John and making sure he fulfills his destiny as the savior of humanity. It wasn't until T3 that they decided that Judgement Day could not be stopped, but, the Terminators came back to kill John in the past because he was not just a threat, he was THE threat. Killing him in their present meant nothing. To simply dismiss that renders those movies meaningless because it renders John's life and accomplishments meaningless. By killing John, the machines changed nothing.
T2's message was there is no fate, but this movie was more of, "there's no point to this fight because no matter what, judgement day happens and someone will beat the machines."
Kyle wan't there because there was no John COnnor to try to train/recruit/develop him.
He wasn't important to history anymore.
It's a missed opportunity. They could have had Kyle in this movie. He could have even been the enhanced human, or someone else important. And we could have explored Sarah dealing with the loss of John, but getting Kyle back.
