20 Movies Where The Hero Winning DIDN'T Matter

3. The Terminator

There haven't been many time travel films that didn't ultimately get more than a little messy, creating some sort of loop hole or paradox, or failed to get even close to water tight in some cases. Even The Terminator, as strong of an outing as it is, can't evade this scrutiny.

The story seems simple enough. Skynet, the evil sentient supercomputer of the future is on the verge of being defeated by the human resistance, and so sends the Terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), the one-day mother of the human leader, John. John's response is to send one of his best men, Kyle Rees (Michael Biehn), back to the same time to protect her.

Further instalments in the franchise only went to prove that Skynet will seemingly always have an answer in the future no matter what happens in the past, but even in just the original alone, there is enough to question actually how much impact Kyle and Sarah had.

Yes, Sarah ultimately survived the assault from Arnie's T-800, but all this did was maintain the status quo. In the future Skynet would, in theory without the sequels at least, still send the Terminator back in time to kill her, and John would still sent Kyle back as well. It's a loop that wouldn't have ended had Skynet not had other ideas in the subsequent stories.