Plot synopsis
This movie begins with John Connor quoting his mother, Sarah, from the previous Terminator film, “The future has not been written. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” He says, “I wish I could believe that.”
An extremely advanced terminator (TX) comes back from the future to kill the young people who will become John Connor’s lieutenants when he is leader of the human resistance. They, in turn, send back a re-programmed terminator, as before, to oppose it.
John tells the terminator that he should not even exist, as he had stopped Judgment Day (the beginning of a war between man and machines). But the terminator tells him, “You only postponed it, Judgement Day is inevitable.”
They visit Sarah’s coffin, which is full of arms that John could access just in case the robots came back. John realises that she did not fully believe her conviction either.
He finds out more about his future and how he will die, but then gives up the idea of a predestined future. He sets off in a plane with Kate to blow up the supercomputers that he believes control Skynet. John tells her, “We are going to make it Kate – the future is up to us.”
At the end of the film, after John has failed in his mission to destroy Skynet, a voiceover from him explains, “I should have realised our destiny was never to stop Judgement Day – it was merely to survive it together. The Terminator knew, he tried to tell us, but I did not want to hear it. Maybe the future has been written, I do not know.”
My comments
On the eve of the inevitable Judgment Day, destiny is uncovered: nothing can stop the machines from rising. However, the resistance will eventually be led to victory by John, but he will then be killed by a terminator.
Unlike the other Terminator films, we do not have a sense that the characters are creating a future, which makes the film rather pedestrian. Having a plot with a pre-destined future that the audience knows, removes too much suspense from the movie.
Novikov’s Self-consistency Conjecture is in play here. No matter how much they try to change the future, something always conspires to stop them. In order to keep a self-consistent universe. Destiny must remain unchanged.
Summary of time travel
The robots and humans keep changing the past, but whatever they do, the timeline always converges back before the time travel begins, which keeps the storyline self-consistent. After that point, we have to assume the future is fixed, as the Terminator even knows how John will die.
Category of time travel
Science fiction: time-travel transporter.
Model of time
Open past, closed future with a converging timeline.
