I’ll go first. Mine is that I can’t stand the Deadpool movies. They are self aware and self referential to an obnoxious degree. It’s like being continually reminded that I am in a movie. I swear the success of that movie has directly lead to every blockbuster having to have a joke every 30 seconds

  • Pepsi
    1•11 months ago

    i’m like way, way late on this, but i just stumbled on this thread and have to say your analysis is well thought out and you explained time travel narrative structures very succinctly.

    but your analysis completely falls apart because, and i’m not sure how, but you missed the entire fucking point of Terminator 1. In the extended edition of T2 there’s a scene in the first 15 minutes where Kyle explains it again for those in the back.

    "The future is not set.”

    added in T2,

    “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.”

    That’s what Kyle comes back to explain to Sarah. Until she understands that message and acts on it, Kyle is acting in a “ST” structure. Once the terminator is destroyed by Sarah, the MT is opened up. We can speculate that Kyle was supposed to kill the terminator with his last pipe bomb, but really any moment could have caused that schism. What’s important is that Sarah is now self-reliant in terms of killing machines. Fate is what Sarah was fighting, almost a meta-antagonist. That is her struggle through the entire Terminator franchise.

    Terminator 1 is a time travel story that starts as a ST narrative, and by Sarah’s actions in the final act, becomes a MT narrative. T2 just further explores the opened-up MT narrative. There’s no inconsistency between the final moment of T1 and the opening of T2. Your gripe seems to be entirely with the first movie based on a limited understanding of the larger themes and philosophies explored in the narrative.

    Terminator 2 is a damn fine sequel and a hell of a film on its own merit.

    • @Nibodhika
      2•11 months ago

      Kyle says that, he also talks about possible futures, but Kyle has no understanding of time travel

      One possible future. From your point of view. I don’t know tech stuff.

      He doesn’t even know why he has to travel naked, his answer is:

      I didn’t build the fucking thing!

      Also the quote you mention is part of the phrase that John Connor made him tell Sarah:

      Thank you, Sarah, for your courage through the dark years. I can’t help you with what you must soon face, except to say that the future is not set. You must be stronger than you imagine you can be. You must survive, or I will never exist.

      But here’s the thing, John says that to Sarah possibly because Sarah told him about it and how that exact phrase kept her going, knowing that the future was not set.

      I don’t get why you’re speculating that Kyle was to kill the Terminator, but:

      John Connor gave me a picture of you once. I didn’t know why at the time. It was very old. Torn…faded. You were young, like you are now. You seemed just… a little sad

      She was always alone and sad in that photo, Kyle had always died, and she had always run away, to me she always killed the Terminator.

      If you claim T1 is MT, let’s call timeline 1 the one Kyle comes from, and timeline 2 the one we see most of the movie, also there’s a timeline 0 where no time travel happened, with that in mind there are a few questions:

      • How does timeline 1 differs from 2? They can’t be exactly the same otherwise it’s a perfect loop which can’t have a beginning, i.e. if timeline 1 is the same as timeline 2 it’s in a perpetual loop and timeline 3, etc will always be the same
      • What happened on the timeline 0? Why was a Terminator sent to kill Sarah? John didn’t existed in that timeline, or at least not the same John that Kyle knows, he would at the very least be a lot younger (not to mention have a different father). Why was he sent to the 80s? If you’re going to kill Sarah surely you can go to the 70s or 60s, kill a kid or a baby is a lot easier and they know the city she lived in, or go to the 90s or 00s before the rise of Skynet, the internet and more technology would make it easier for them to find her. If T1 is ST it makes sense, because Sarah disappears after the 80s, and possibly erases herself from before that, so Skynet only has a small window that she left open because that’s when Kyle needs to go.