Throughout all of the Terminator movies, there has been the recurring idea of free will versus destiny. Personally, I believe that it has always been both Sarah and John Connor’s fate that their lives would end up the way that they did.
Both characters express their discontent with the situations that they’ve been put in, yet both can’t seem to escape it no matter how much they want to. I feel that Sarah is more accepting of her fate than John is, especially in Terminator 3 when John becomes extremely frustrated and keeps on questioning his mission and his ultimate purpose in life.
I feel that the example in class about the “never-ending cycle of John’s life” pretty much summed it all up. John’s fate is virtually inescapable because he can’t break the cycle. He will forever have to be the “protector of the universe” and will forever have to try and win the battle against Skynet because that’s what he was destined to be, and the pressure of having to fulfill the task of saving the human race will always lie with him.
Thus, John has absolutely no free will in the choices that he makes. Whatever he does or has done in the past to try and change the future (or prevent it from happening entirely) ultimately doesn’t work because everything that was said to happen ends up happening anyways despite any attempt at postponing Judgment Day or eliminating it completely. The nuclear war is completely and utterly inevitable, and John has to come to terms with the fact that he cannot physically change what is supposed to happen (which I feel he does in Terminator: Salvation).
The only thing that is left for John to do is to continue on in the only way that he knows how to do: fight the war against the machines and further rescue and revive the human race.
A Penny for Your Thoughts 