When the old lady goes to toss the gem off the boat, Bill Paxton sees her, and they have a little standoff where she utters these words: “You look for treasures in the wrong place, Mr. Lovett. Only life is priceless, and making each day count.”

Now I’m sort of convinced that EVERY James Cameron movie has a cornball alternate ending out there somewhere.

However, in the movie Sarah Connor knew what was going to happen in future: judgement day. The knowledge she had allowed her to postpone, not avert it. But why? It was not up to her. If people who “released” Skynet knew what were the consequences of their actions, i think they would not do it.

Pepole take actions throughout their lives.. Actions that will cause certain events in future. They all had a choice, and we all have a choice. That is why we sit for hours thinking when we are faced with a tough decision; we want to predict what will happen and direct in the most promising or beneficial way.

We of course can not choose how we want to be born… or do we? There is no evidence to back up that statement, we can only believie that it is true. We do not know if someone had put us in our bodies or we were given a choice between million lives. It is all up to what you believe.

The interesting concept that no one had yet noticed is that the Skynet reflects Sarah Connor. The machines knew the future, therefore they decided to kill John Connor. We fail to look at the story from the perspective of Skynet.

The machines launched a nuclear holocaust because they believed that humans were hazardous for Earth, consequently, we had to be terminated. The machines were programmed to protect Earth, they did not take that assumption from anywhere. What if they were right and we would destroy Earth in future? We do not know yet how would Earth be like if humankind never faced Judgement Day.

Well, if we would win the war with machines and later on destroyed ourselves, there is no fate. Why would God plan the extermination of his own creation? However, if machines would prevail, still there is no fate. We were destined to destroy Earth, we failed to do so; there is no fate but what we make.

Ironically, if there is fate and we were destined to live, why bother? We do not need to fight, we will live anyway. I think I am not the only one who can see the stupidity of this ideology.

The movie ended on a vague note, the war is not over. There is a chance that T5 will come out and it will show us if the movie is behind an idea of “fate” or “no fate but what we make”. If humans win the war and will live on, happy with their lives, the movie promotes fate.

Personally, I refuse to believe that pople all around the globe were destined to live in pain or hunger; I refuse to believe people are destined to be born handicapped; I know Earth is a bad place, but I refuse to believe it is fate that makes it that way.

I do not know if fate exists or we make our own decisions. Maybe, it’s both…

At the end, it is down to what you believe.

Florin Anghel, out. :)

Both Skynet and John Connor essentially send their father’s back in time in order for them to be whilst at the same time fight the last battle of the war.

If Kyle never told Sarah that there was a great war coming than Sarah never would have trained her child (and I REFUSE to accept the “original father” theory. Kyle was ALWAYS the father. It’s a loop.) to be the great leader of man. Telling Sarah who John would one day become is what made her make him what he would become.

I’ve always thought “the future is not set” was John fulfilling his fate. His mother told him the message, so he gave Sarah the exact same message. That was the moment that John accepted it. When John found himself smashing Skynet’s defense grid and seeing that they’d sent the machine back to 1984 it must have finally dawned on him: he now had to do it, accept that he was trapped in a loop and that he had to play it out exactly as he knew it had to. Telling Reese the message and sending him back was Connor’s final acceptance. Ironically, in order for him to fulfill his fate he has to tell his father that there isn’t any.

I totally agree with the commenter above: this is the stuff of the best Greek tragedies. John Connor seeing the time displacement equipment and realizing what has happened is Oedipus tearing his eyes out upon realizing that even though he ran so far, did everything he could not to he still ended up killing his father and marrying his mother.

This is a very silly thing to say. If John Connor had ordered the Terminator to torture and kill a whole class of kindergartners, it would have done it. No hesitation, no remorse.

I completely fail to see how a machine obeying its programming gives Sarah hope for the future. It’s a dumb line, and Cameron should know better.

“Wow. Okay, I really dislike the “open road” ending of Terminator 2 (the Terminator in no way “learns the value of human life”), but it’s way better than the “happy playground” ending.”

The Terminator does learn the value of human life (his CPU is a neural net processor, a learning computer), but only in a binary, non-subtle way. He does NOT learn the value of human kneecaps (and other bones) or state property.

@rockjonny: “Why is it that people will go and watch a film you can tell is going to be terrible, but enough people can’t just pay attention to quality television”

I guess the short answer to this question is that a terrible summer blockbuster is still something of an event and a shared experience, whereas any given episode of a TV show is not. I’m pretty sure G.I. Joe and Transformers 2 are going to be terrible, terrible movies, but I’ll probably go see them just to share in the collective pop culture experience, as much as I’ll hate myself for giving my money to the companies that produced them.