First of all, I don't think historians care about the Terminator franchise. Second, to say that one person can't change the world is simply false. Steve Jobs changed the world. The Founding Fathers changed the world. Abraham Lincoln changed the world. People who cured diseases changed the world.
Leaving aside the fact that lots of historians are sci fi fans it doesn't really matter whether they care or not. What matter is they wrestle with much the same questions that are raised by those films and regardless of what you may insist no one yet has ever found a definitive answer. The world isn't clear cut, it doesn't come with an instruction manual and it certainly isn't something we fully understand. What matters is that we try and closing your mind is a surefire way of being stuck in a rut.
As for the Founding Fathers, are you suggesting that without them North America would still be a British Colony? Seems pretty doubtful to me, but you've said it yourself, we don't know.
To simply say "someone else would have done it," has no basis in any studies or evidence, because someone else didn't do it.
Really?
That's quite the bold statement and cuts both ways when you sit back and consider it. I hope you have the academic credentials to back up your position because it's a question that philosophers have devoted a lot of time to debating.
You may believe that to be the case, I'm personally undecided, but the films explore more than one angle and for you to assert they are in some sense inferior for simply not delivering the message you have already decided upon is not only reductive but ignorant.
You cure a terminal disease, you are saving lives and those lives you save also contribute to the world.
Sure, doesn't mean someone else wouldn't have got there at some point, the scientific technique is a wonderful tool and it's frequently very surprising how often world changing discoveries happened more than once, with one party gaining the credit at the expense of others.
More importantly it is very rare for scientific discoveries to come out of the blue, Newtons' famous "If I have seen far" quote was either one of modesty, acknowledging how little of his own work would have been possible without that of others coming first, or spite tormenting Hooke amongst others (including very possibly Leibniz over calculus) for being the one whose publication of a given paper pipped the other to the post or gained greater prominence.
It doesn't matter for our purposes who was right or wrong, what matters is today we remember one man amongst several contenders and call him "great". He is lauded as possibly the greatest scientist and mathematician of his or any other day, but surprisingly little of his work can truly be said to have not been imminent anyway with others working towards much the same goals and with the same hypotheses.
Likewise we laud Charles Darwin, ignoring Alfred Russell Wallace or Patrick Matthew who also published papers proposing natural selection.
We remember Voltaire, most people accepting the myth that he discovered electricity, but forget that Galvani arguably got there first, not to mention Bennet, Cavallo or Nicholson who were all working variously in parallel or alongside the two rivals.
No one is doubting the genius of any of these people, but the assumption that they personally changed history is not as cut and dry as we might assume.
Would WWII have happened without Hitler? Maybe, but all the death and the concentration camps and the horrors probably don't. There was always hate in this world, and what the Germans did was not all on one man, but the sheer evil of the Nazis required the right man at the right time. Hitler was a unique orator that had the ability to unite with hate that probably wouldn't have been so severe without him. I believe millions of lives were lost because Hitler existed. WWII would have happened at some point, but maybe not to the horrible extent where 50 million died.
Many people could orate as Hitler did, the performing arts are full of people with his speaking abilities and the concentration camps were already a well known concept, having been in use since at least the previous century by the British.
Of course, as you say we have no way of knowing how alternate history would have played out, that's why historians play the speculative game to such an extent. Perhaps another player would have opted against throwing his armies into the Russian winter and thus inflicted
more damage. We just don't know.
Yes, sci fi should make us think, but it should do so with intelligent writing and good decisions. Here, we are simply discussing whether or not TDF ruined the significance of T1 and T2 by trivializing John Connor.
It's you making that claim, I'm saying I dont care one way or another about any insult to a fictional character. What I care more about are the concepts being explored and I would suggest based on this exchange that you are falling to recognise that fully. You have a preconception of what "the message"
should be and find fault because it doesn't do as you expected. That's not being thoughtful about the writing and decisions, it's being closed minded.
I believe that's what they did. Ultimately, this movie is trying to say that the first two movies didn't matter. John was not important at all. And if you buy into that message, neither was Dani. The machines would know that their termination of John Connor was successful and now someone else would do what he did, and that also meant that Dani was not important either. So why bother saving her?
Maybe John wasn't important? Maybe Dani isn't? Is that so terrible?
Legion had no way of knowing about John anyway, so had no lesson to learn from his fate, from its' perspective the whole problem was entirely fresh.
We know and
Linda knows, Carl too, but Legion is the successor to Skynet in spirit only, it doesn't have its' memories.
That's not breaking new ground. That's simply saying, "we're telling the exact same story but with a different person."
Yes it is, it's just that you don't like the ground being broken. The new ground is the idea that all of the assumptions drawn from T2 might not be as valid as we thought and there are still questions to be asked. You seem to want those assumptions reinforced in a new story whereas what the film actually did was question them by creating a twist.
