No fate but what we make up on the fly

I've noticed that there's a new movie in the Terminator franchise being released this month. It's called "Terminator: Salvation" and stars Christian Bale as the oh-so-important John Connor, leader of humanity's rebellion against the machines in the near future. This is the fourth movie in the series so far, though I stopped watching after two. This entry is about why.

Some background on Terminators and me: I liked the first two movies. They were fun action movies that also contained some interesting issues to consider, particularly the second film. Lots of ideas on what it means to be human, whether we are doomed to destroy ourselves, and the nature of fate and inevitability.

As with all franchises of movies, I'm sure there are some people who obsess over the details of the background story of the Terminator universe. There are several different models of Terminator which can and can not do certain things, and it seems tailor-made for hosts of people who like to argue about whether or not a T-1000 could form a crossbow out of its "mimetic poly-alloy" (I'm just enough of a nerd to recall that phrase on demand from memory!). I don't care what the little flying ships in the future are called, I don't think it's significant what age John Connor was during the events of "T-2", and I really don't care what Arnold ate for breakfast while filming.

Being a nerd, though, I have to angrily pontificate on the Internet about *something*. And I choose the concept of free will and destiny, as it relates to Terminatordom.

From the start, the series unfolds in a world with a mutable future. The evil robots send Arnold back in time to kill the mother of the person who's giving them so much trouble in the future. This action would, by the series' logic, prevent John Connor from ever having been born and allow them to chuckle evilly forever (or whatever it is robots do when the rest of life on Earth has been destroyed). Not only do the robots fail, they fail spectacularly: their actions directly lead to the conception of said hero. That seems to suggest that they should have NOT tried to fix it, but then where does the savior of Humanity, Jesus Christ... oops, I mean the OTHER J.C., come from? It's best not to get tangled in the threads of causality too far; that way madness lies.

In the course of the second movie, the angry machines in the future (not quite finished off in the first movie) try to kill John Connor directly. They send Robert Patrick back to do the job and, after much early-years CGI, fleshy goodness triumphs over metallic evil. And, victory is achieved in such a way that the robot-controlled future is averted. The message, iterated by one character, is that "there is no fate but what we make for ourselves". In other words, man has the steerage of his own sails. Despite all the future tourists, the decisions of people in the now decides the ultimate results: our destiny is not fixed and inevitable.

This is a nice life philosophy and reflects a sort of Capra-esque "what you, yes you, do IS important" view. T2 ends with the metaphor of life being an unknown road to the horizon. The fate we made has pointed us towards a different future; deciding not to be a slave to destiny made the difference.

Then comes T3, subtitled "The Rise of the Machines". It turns out all that other stuff is pointless: Judgment Day, in which most of the world is destroyed in nuclear war, happens anyway. The friendly terminator says as much, "Judgement Day is inevitable." Take that, free will! The founding principle of the first two movies, that sending people and terminators back in time may change the future, has been completely invalidated. Instead of "no fate but what we make", it's now "no fate except for the nihilistic one; you have no chance to survive make your time". The Terminator franchise has just be shifted irrevocably into a rigidly deterministic universe.

I'm totally hip to why the studios made more Terminator movies. They make good amounts of money and are reliable. The three movies have grossed approximately $400 million at the box office. I've even got to hand it to the writers of T3 for finding some way out of the robot-free corner that T2 backed them into.

But I don't have to watch or support what they've created. So I don't. Because I'm not interested in something that tosses aside its own logic for convenience. And that, in relation to a future that is now presented as fixed and beyond our control, I object to the philosophical worldview of the Terminator series.

That is certainly a sentence I'd never have expected to say with utter sincerity.