The time travel plot structure of the first Terminator film is especially nihilist compared to other dark sci-fi and horror stories. The time loop itself implies that near enough everything that happens to humans, as well as the behavioural choices they make, are predefined. They are set in stone as if written by the physical universe only, with human choice having virtually nothing to do with it. The sudden appearance of the Terminator and Kyle Reese from the future in 1984 would actually cause an unfathomable number of alterations to world events.
Most of those alterations would, at a superficial glance, be negligible, but if you follow the logic through, any of them could have massive effects on the world. For example, the punks who the Terminator kills. All of their future behaviour would be erased from the historical timeline. Any kids that they were going to have wouldn't be born, and so the influences of their kids will be erased too. This cop might get fired or demoted for negligence because he allowed a dangerous civilian to acquire his own gun.
This would affect many aspects of how his entire life plays out. Maybe his brother-in-law was going to be a major contributor to AI software, and this guy getting fired or demoted triggered a chain of events to change that. The other Sarah Connors who get killed, their deaths might lead to drastic changes, not the same change that the death of this Sarah Connor would, but who knows, the effects may be just as dramatic in different ways. The cops who all get killed in the cop station later, their families and friends would...
would be affected, which would cause more layers of knock-on effects rippling out across society, and other crime cases they were working on might not get solved. Their collective deaths might trigger a legislative response that alters how police operate across the board. There are endless possible repercussions for every action taken by the Terminator and Kyle Reese in the story. Of course, the time travel element of the film serves practical purposes from a filmmaker's point of view. It sets the story in a time the audience can more easily relate to.
It personalises a complex war so that the final battle occurs just between three characters, Sarah Connor, Kyle Reese and the Terminator, with a few dozen NPCs killed in the crossfire. And it massively saves on the special effects cost of setting the whole film in the future. But, regardless of Cameron's conscious intention, the time loop story element carries strong implication that we humans are living in a pre-programmed reality with every detail of our destiny already decided for us. Even dialogue lines that claim the existence of choice would fall into this pre-decided pattern. I can't help you with what you must soon face, except to say that the future is not set.
There's no fit but what we make for ourselves. There's also an amusing meta-logic aspect to all this. Terminator 2 is basically a remake of the first Terminator film.
Once again, two characters are sent back in time, one the villain, one the saviour. They do battle throughout the movie to determine whether John Connor lives or dies. The villain loses and the hero sacrifices himself. Two movies, same story.
Individual scenes, memorable moments and even specific dialogue lines from the first film are repeated. I'll be back. I'll be back.
And I do suspect that when Cameron wrote that line for the first film, he may well have been teasing Gus with the prospect of an eventual sequel. The remake's structure of the Terminator 2 script in itself is a psychological jump back in time, and the third Terminator film repeats the same pattern, the same story repeating across three films in an ongoing circular time loop. For me, this is funny on several logical levels. Remakes disguised as sequels are very common in cinema, and often we critically look down on the lack of imagination shown by the filmmakers in not having the guts to actually move the story forward in a new direction. Cameron himself showed how a proper sequel should be done when he made the sequel to Alien.
His film goes into so much new territory that Aliens became an iconic standalone piece of cinema in its own right. But with Terminator 2, he gets away with doing a remake for two reasons. First, is that he brought in the incredibly original Liquid Terminator character, one of the greatest screen villains of all time, which allowed for new types of special effects and action scene dynamics that audiences had never seen before. The T-1000 was utterly mind-blowing when the film was released. Without the T-1000, I think T2 would have been a bit of a letdown, unless Cameron had set the film entirely in the future and told the story of Kyle Reese growing up in the war.
That's the sequel I wanted to see, but Terminator 2 did deliver anyway. And second, the remake framing, regardless of filmmaker intention, is psychologically supported by the time loop narrative that was already established in the first film. This movie is chock full of what are now known as callbacks, very obvious references to the first movie.
Drive! Here, drive! Drive!
Now, in terrible sequels like Alien Romulus, excessive unjustified callbacks are a major annoyance. But they actually work in Terminator 2 because they fit right into the time loop logic already established in the first film. Of course, with Alien Romulus, the problem wasn't just that the movie was full of poorly thought out callbacks to all the other classic Alien movies. The major problem is that it had no decent new ideas of its own.
With Terminator 2, another way I find this remake funny is that Arnie originally wanted to play the Kyle Reese role in the first Terminator film, but Cameron gave the role to Michael Biehn instead, stating years later that he didn't feel Arnie had the required acting range when the film was made. I think Cameron was being very diplomatic there. Arnie's high testosterone physique and bulky face made him unsuitable for the Reese role in my opinion.
Although who knows, maybe Arnie might have slammed it. It would be interesting to watch. I mean, I thought he was incredible in Predator. He managed to do tough and smart in equal measures in that film.
In typical steely career determination fashion, Arnie later agreed to come back and star in Terminator 2, in which he gets to indirectly play Kyle Reese, even repeating several of his dialogue lines and action moments. Come with me if you want to live. Come with me if you want to live.
I find this aspect of the film very cute, frankly. Arnie finally got to play the Reese role he originally wanted. Isn't that nice? And I'll bet that he and Cameron had mutually come up with the basic recasting of himself as the Reese clone hero as a condition for Arnie starring in the film. To that effect, Arnie, the actor, basically travelled back in time and changed history.
He did what even the Terminator itself couldn't do within the story. He changed history. He recast himself and the Terminator character. as the hero, Go Arnie, and this change was so effective it was used again in Terminator 3. Such a shame Cameron didn't make that film though. Even a new Terminator babe with the ability to change her physical measurements at will couldn't elevate Terminator 3 to match Cameron's god-tier first and second installments.
And here's something quite personal for Arnie in terms of his own rebirth and the rewriting of his own personal history. In 1979, Arnie had one of the lead roles in an incredibly lame comedy western called Cactus Jack. He played a total buffoon, while Kirk Douglas had the role of the cool guy.
It was a pretty embarrassing role for Arnie, and it showed his desperation at the time in trying to break into the world of acting. He was willing to take an utterly humiliating role just to get his foot in the door. Three years later, he finally got his breakthrough with Conan the Barbarian.
But here in Terminator 2, 12 years after that humiliating comedy western of 1979, Arnie gets the last laugh. His Terminator character takes a symbolic time jump by stopping at a gas station called Cactus Jack's. The time loop element isn't just applied to the recasting of Arnie's Terminator, it was also applied to Sarah Connor. She becomes traumatised and partially dehumanised, just like Reese in the first film, and she repeats several of his scenes, dialogue lines and action moments. like him she is plagued by nightmares like him she is tormented by love for someone who isn't there anymore like him she isn't believed when ranting and covertly filmed interviews she even does similar repeated shotgun blasts again this all fits nicely into the time loop logic set up in the first film and which is now applied at the metalogic level it's very cool going up yet another metalogical level I think there's a core desire in the human psyche for timeline loops.
Our very fears and desires, the things which shape our life decisions, are usually linked to our own past. We have past experiences that we categorize into pleasurable and painful, happy and sad, safe and unsafe, and we spend much of our lives trying to change our present and our future so that we can have the good experiences again while avoiding any repetition of the bad experiences. To that effect, we are psychological time travellers.
But we don't just want to repeat our past positive experiences as absolute carbon copies. We want to experience them again, but with enhancements that make the experience even better. This desire for time-travelling back to the good times, plus enhancements, exists all across the entertainment media we consume, from video games to movies and across most industries. This is why most sequels are basically remakes, and most media, regardless of what official franchise it belongs to, is at least partially a remake of something else that we've already seen elsewhere.
Robocop, for example, has Terminator remake elements. The Thing has Alien remake elements. and the T-1000 has a bit of a remake element in relation to the shapeshifting villain in the thing.
The success of psychological time travel remake media is determined by whether the experience is enhanced to the point of feeling fresh again, or whether it feels like a watered down cheap copy of the original. Terminator 2 relied very heavily on the remake factor, quite blatantly and to the point of self-satire. But it's also a monumental example of how to upgrade and enhance the past experience that is being looped.