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Terminator is better than Terminator 2, and as cool as it is Terminator 2 should never have been made (or should have a different script).
I know the mob is raising the pitchfork, but hear me out, there are two main ways time travel can solve the grandparent paradox, these are Singular Timeline (i.e. something will prevent you from killing your grandfather) or Multiple Timeline (you kill him but in doing so you created an alternate timeline). Terminator 2 is clearly a MT model, because they delay the rise of Skynet, but Terminator is a ST movie. The way you can understand it's an ST is because the cause-consequences form a perfect cycle (which couldn't happen on an MT story), i.e. Reese goes back to save Sarah -> Reese impregnates Sarah and teaches her how to defend herself from Terminators and avoid Skynet -> Sarah gives birth to and teaches John -> John uses the knowledge to start a resistance -> The resistance is so strong that Skynet sends a Terminator back in time to kill Sarah -> Reese goes back to save Sarah...
The awesome thing about Terminator is how you only realise this at the end of the Movie, that nothing they did mattered, because that's what happened before, the timeline is fixed, humanity will suffer but they'll win eventually.
If Terminator was a MT then the cycle breaks, i.e. there needs to be a beginning, a first time around when the original timeline didn't had any time travelers. How did that timeline looked like? John couldn't exist, which means that sending a Terminator back in time to kill Sarah was not possible, Reese couldn't have gone back without the Terminator technology, which they wouldn't have unless the resistance was winning, and if they are winning without John, the Terminator must have gone back to kill someone else and when Reese went back he accidentally found Sarah, impregnated her and coincidentally made a better commander for the resistance which accidentally and created a perfect loop so that next time he would be sent back and meet Sarah because she was the target (what are the odds of that). Then why is the movie not about this? Why is the movie about the Nth loop after the timeline was changed? The reason is that Terminator was thought as a ST movie, but when they wanted to write a sequel they for some reason decided to allow changes in the timeline which broke the first movie.
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.
added in T2,
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.
Kyle says that, he also talks about possible futures, but Kyle has no understanding of time travel
He doesn't even know why he has to travel naked, his answer is:
Also the quote you mention is part of the phrase that John Connor made him tell Sarah:
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:
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: