History. We might be standing in it, but which direction are we looking?
The Terminator told us he would be back, but the latest version disappointed fans because the Governor of California was reduced to a Computer Animated bit-part. For the Australian, T4 was rescued somewhat by the presence of our own Sam Worthington—but only just!
Even though it struggles a bit with the inherent fatalism of a future that seems to march inevitably towards the present, no matter what is done in the present, a major theme of this series of movies now stretching across a quarter of a century is that the future is not fixed; fate is what you make.
The look towards future history is a strong drive towards present action. Human history continues beyond the present day, and it is shaped by those who live in it at this moment. What are you going to do? Even if you see the world plummeting towards its own destruction, can this be changed? How are you going to change it? Even if the disaster seems to be unavoidable, there is some way around the problem. Will you be the one to find the solution?
The future is in human hands. This is invigorating, inspiring and challenging to those who possess such appendages in the present time.
It is also worrying.
It’s worrying because, when you take your eyes off the future for a second and look the other direction, there is little comfort. Our visionary has to solve the present problems to bring a different future for the world. But isn’t it true that those present problems were actually caused by the visionaries of the past? How advanced it was to develop the technology that is capable of a ‘Skynet’! How advanced it was to build machines capable of learning and change!
Yesterday’s future visionaries are today’s historical morons.
So why do we think the visionaries of today—those ‘leading-edge’ thinkers, the ‘entrepreneurs’ of advance and ever-constant change for the (?) better—will be any different?
The real anxiety about the future is that it appears to rest in human hands, for those hands are sinful, weak and certainly not omniscient. Everyone might like to be a prophet and tell us the way to a better future, but not everyone has stood in the counsels of the heavenly court to gain the necessary qualifications.
It makes me glad that there is a living God who knows what he is doing. It makes me glad that there is a hero even greater than Arnie—perhaps even better than Aussie Sam Worthington!—who, despite being crushed by the entrepreneurial visionaries of his own day, because of his death on the cross, now guarantees a glorious future.
