[Nerull]

Actually, if you view the first movie, it seems to scream out "the future is set." It was like a big loop (send back Reece, conceive Conner, Conner grows up to send back Reece). Everything from the Polaroid photo on seems to indicate that the future is fixed, and all the time travel did was to ensure that it would happen anyway. If you read the book version (with scenes cut from the movie version), it is even more apparent. One of the parts that they cut out is Arnie cutting open the legs of the Sarah Conners he was killing, looking for pins put in the leg. The reason: there were medical records that Skynet got a hold of that stated that Sarah Conner had pins in her leg from an injury. However, the injury that causes this is the shard of the Terminator that goes through her leg at the end of the movie. Thus, the Terminator came back looking for an injury that its own presence in the past caused.

Personally, T2 was a really good movie, but I feel they could have left the original movie alone. It worked just fine as a single movie; many other movies out there that got sequels really didn't need them (Men in Black, Predator, Alien, etc.). Hollywood knows that people flock in droves to a sequel of a previous hit, so they just keep pumping them out. Is T4 supposed to (finally) show this big war in the future?