OK so this doesn’t specifically have to do with the last few Terminator films, (Dark Fate, Salvation, etc...) but with the original Cameron trilogy (I realize of course that Cameron had no creative input into T3, but it still exists in the same world as 1 and 2.)
An interesting proposal:
Would Terminator 2 have faded into obscurity if not for Terminator 3?
An unequivocal "YES." (Hear me out!
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Our idea of AI in 1991 was just so unbelievably different than nowadays (or even 2003). With the current looming implications of what artificial intelligence might mean, coupled with our lives being so completely enmeshed with technology, saving the world by throwing a three-inch chip from a monster cyborg into liquid metal lava plus having a pre-Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger sacrifice himself while giving a thumbs-up gesture had the potential to become quite dated, even with the (still) fantastic CGI and extremely moving "human" story. "If [artificial intelligence] can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too," couldn’t be more out of place for the times we currently live in.
Having John Conner actually grow up and be forced into battling Skynet despite everything he’d experienced in T2 ("Our destiny was never to stop Judgement Day...it was merely to survive it,") was actually a brilliant way to cap off the saga while simultaneously preserving the cinematic, narrative and thematic value of T1 and T2 ...John is nothing less than the audience’s stand-in; he basically has to forget everything he’d learned when he was eleven years old. This is why the audience so completely identifies with him at the film’s conclusion. (Being that T3 is nearly 20 years old, many fans nowadays describe the film’s last scene as incredibly haunting, despite following what many consider to be a serviceable but occasionally lackluster story.)
Seeing John Conner finally step up to the plate and take command at Crystal Peak alongside his "future" wife is somehow astoundingly moving, even though it basically goes against everything James Cameron was trying to say at the conclusion of the last film.
Because that 1991 post Cold War era that Cameron penned T2 in is LONG GONE. Cameron’s musings on man’s destructive nature portrayed AI as oddly irrelevant to the world’s real issues despite being the ostensible center of the film. Put it this way: Skynet/AI was basically just another nuclear bomb, a tool made by human beings despite apparently becoming "self-aware." Interesting how T-800 is really the only AI character in the film that really seems "self-aware" at least on some level; neither the T-1000 nor the actual Skynet computer system exhibit any potential for a unique consciousness; they exist almost exclusively in a movie universe and are both completely one-dimensional villains.
And at the end of the day, all our heroes had to do in order to destroy the Skynet supercomputer with the power to launch nuclear weapons was throw the wafer-shaped T-1000 chip into the liquid nitrogen; and then the only truly self-aware AI character in the film sacrifices themselves. This feels very simplistic, because with the exception of Arnie, the AI in Cameron’s script are the basic equivalent of a modern operating system that exists almost exclusively as a plot device and nothing more. Meaning that incinerating Skynet, despite the brilliantly heart-stopping action sequences devised by Cameron, is no more complicated than uploading the virus to the enormous alien mothership would be in Independence Day, another tremendous summer blockbuster released five years later. (By then aliens invasions had VERY much usurped cyborgs as the popular go-to sci-fi villains.)
In contrast, as T3 John is led by the new T-800 not to Skynet’s theoretical control center but a deserted "fallout shelter for VIPs" which, along with the very tellingly outdated computers that are "thirty years old", he finally realizes that defeating Skynet the way he had at age 11 was a dead dream. ("The Terminator knew...he tried to tell us. But I didn’t want to hear it."). It was merely a fantasy, an illusion right from the start.
T3’s last shot of light fading from the mechanical eye of the original T-800 model first conceived for the 1984 film is an extremely effective and very appropriate shorthand symbol for a letting go of the past/embracing an unknown (and most likely hellish) future. Once again, in every way the reverse of Cameron’s vision. Yet it is still an ingenious resolution to a sci-fi trilogy that is equal parts anachronistic and timeless.
You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!
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