TERMINATOR 2 SPOILERS

The best film writing advice I ever read was in The Essentials of Screenwriting, where he says that if you start with a message your screenplay will be terrible, but if you start with the story, your innate values and concerns will surface naturally and you'll end up with a message anyway. He says you can look at pretty much any movie and separate out the ostensible (ideological) message from the real (emotional) one that keeps people watching, eg Terminator 2: ostensible message = the Machine will try to kill us all; real message = love is what makes us human (ie when Arnie becomes able to develop relationships, he becomes 'human' like us).