Terminator 2

[A Black Falcon]

Oh, in more recent movie news, I also saw Wall-E and Mongol (in theaters). Thought about making threads for them too, but didn't get around to it... Wall-E is amazing, Mongol pretty good, if quite overly romantic in comparison to how cruel Ghengis Khan was.

Erm, there is no "predestination paradox", at least in the context of time travel.

If it's a closed time loop, how is that a paradox? I think you don't seem to get what paradox means. It basically is a statement like "This is a false statement."

You're right, it's not a paradox, which is why I said "closed loop". It is really confusing and strange, though... so the thing happened because someone who knew it was supposed to happen sent something back in time to make it happen? That just doesn't quite make sense... I know it does, but... it's a very strange concept. Always is, in sci-fi plots involving time travel (Star Trek does a bunch of this stuff, as you say...).

I kinda hate it when stuff pulls things like that. Is internal consistancy in a time travel mechanic so much to ask? Pick a way for it to work and stick with it. Star Trek is, of course, the biggest offender as it constantly switches between the closed loop and paradox forms. Even Ocarina of Time was guilty of switching it up at least once with the Song of Storms suddenly being a closed loop while all other time travel is in the paradox form.

Yeah, I'd probably agree that in Star Trek it gets pretty close to paradox levels sometimes, with how ridiculous some of the timetravel plots get... but it always makes sense, really! (Okay, sometimes maybe not so much).

At least in T2 they only spent a relatively small amount of time in the avoided bad future, when compared to things like Voyager's final two episodes or Year of Hell, which were pretty much "and then at the end they went back in time and avoided all the bad stuff"...

This basically just says that they changed the future to prevent the robots from existing in the first place, which would thereby prevent Mr T-1000 from coming back to do just that, hence a paradox. They never really addressed how the paradox is resolved though... I suppose we're to assume when someone travels back in time it splits into two realities, and the two robots are basically from an alternate future from the perspective of the humans.

What do you mean, that after the two robots were destroyed all the damage that had been caused in the movie and everyone's memories and stuff like that should have suddenly been changed? Well, that just shows how resilient SkyNet is... even being destroyed utterly can't get rid of it, and they know that. :) Seriously though, obviously here changing the future doesn't change the past -- even though there is no robot to send back, that robot sent back is there anyway, because it was sent back... I think that makes sense. The past has happened, the future hasn't yet... but there are many ways of dealing with this. It could be a split timeline too, they don't specify.

... well, T2 didn't put it that way (its ending implied that it was all really over), but in order to continue, the future works in the franchise did. How much fun would it be if it was all really over there? :) Sure T2 had a great ending, but if they wanted to do a third movie, they had to revoke it...

Oh, and SJ, I haven't seen the Die Hard movies either (any of them). :)