Sarah Connor (fictional character)

Sarah Connor is a fictional character in the Terminator series of films, played by Linda Hamilton. In The Terminator, Sarah Connor is a young woman who finds herself pursued by a relentless cyborg killer, the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 800 Series Terminator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger), for reasons completely unknown to her. She is eventually approached by Kyle Reese, who explains that in the future, an artificial intelligence called "Skynet" will be created by military software developers to make strategic decisions. The program becomes self-aware, seizes control of most of the world's military hardware (including various highly-advanced robots), and launches an all-out attack on human beings. However, a man named John Connor eventually leads the human Tech-Com resistance to victory, only to discover that in a last-ditch effort Skynet had researched time travel and sent a robotic killer back in time to destroy John Connor's family before he can be born. John Connor, of course, is Sarah's future son, and he sends back a trusted assistant (Reese) to protect his mother at all costs.

The plot is summed up by these lines spoken by Reese, who tells Sarah Connor:

"Listen! And understand! That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with! It can't be reasoned with! It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!'"

In the sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day once again, two robots travel back from the future: one to kill Sarah's son John (now a teenager, played by Edward Furlong), and one to rescue him. The twist (given away by the movie's advance publicity) is that this time Schwarzenegger's character (T-800) is the rescuer, having been re-programmed by the resistance to protect John from the more advanced prototype T-1000 (Patrick) that has been sent back to kill him. The newer robot's liquid metal construction gives it the ability to change shape, an ability which was the focus of many of the movie's Oscar-winning special effects.

In some ways, Terminator 2 is a character study of Sarah Connor. She is a quite different person from the frail woman in the first Terminator film; her entire perspective on life has been irreversibly altered by the events in her life. We find her in a mental institution at the outset of this film. The knowledge she has about mankind's future has made her ever vigilant, a trait which perceived as paranoia and psychosis by those around her. It is also the source of recurring nightmares, and a great deal of antagonism, making it even harder for the doctors overseeing her "recovery" to accept the reality of what she has lived through. However, during the escape from the hospital, the lead doctor is stunned to see both Terminators in operation and realizes that Sarah was telling the truth.

She finds it nearly impossible to accept that the Terminator (Schwarzenegger) is benevolent; throughout the film, she remains hostile towards it and what it represents, while her own son develops a bond with it resembling a father-son relationship. In the director's cut of the movie, it is revealed that Sarah has the opportunity to destroy the machine's processor, thus killing it. She nearly does so.

In a moment of desperation, Sarah attempts to murder Miles Dyson, the researcher who is destined to build the neural network that eventually becomes Skynet. Ultimately, Sarah, John, and the Terminator persuade Dyson to stop his research and destroy all recovered remnants of the first Terminator. The Terminator then, with the help of Sarah Connor, destroys himself, despite the protests of the young John. This ending is considered to give "Terminator 2" a more meaningful and emotional end than most action films. The character of Sarah Connor had died in the meantime to the second sequel and doesn't appear in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. She died of leukemia and her ashes were spread at sea.

External links

• Internet Movie Database Terminator page (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088247/)
• Internet Movie Database Terminator 2: Judgment Day page (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103064/)