Terminator-a-Thon, Part 2 - Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong, Robert Patrick

Country: United States
Rating: R
Run Time: 137 minutes

Making the leap from The Terminator to Terminator 2: Judgment Day is a truly jarring one even after all of these years. Whereas The Terminator was a surprise low budget indie hit, Terminator 2 was an anticipated summer blockbuster event with a massive $100 million budget. Cameron took the same basic premise of The Terminator and amped up both the stakes and the spectacle in order to deliver one of the greatest sequels of all time. Terminator 2 is the ultimate success story. It is an action film so captivating that it became the highest grossing film of 1991, delighted critics with its complex characters and deep themes, and wowed members of the Academy, earning it a whopping four Academy Awards.

Action fans typically regard Terminator 2 as the greatest action film of all time and still do to this day. Whenever it appears on a list of the greatest action films of all time, Terminator 2 is always the film to contend against Die Hard, Hard Boiled, Raiders of the Lost Ark, RoboCop, and The Road Warrior for the top spot. If you have not seen Terminator 2 before, stop reading this review and go watch the damn thing already. Terminator 2 is the reason we keep watching action films. It IS the action genre.

"Welcome to the 90s."

Terminator 2 opens by treating the viewer to another harrowing vision of the future in which mankind battles against SkyNet and its murderous machines. Frustrated at their loss after the events of The Terminator, SkyNet sends an even more powerful Terminator, a T-1000 (Robert Patrick) to be exact, back in time to 1995 in order to kill John Connor directly. However, John Connor and the resistance counter SkyNet's attack by reprogramming a T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and sending it back in time to 1995 in order to protect John from the new and more powerful Terminator. Cameron pulls a real switcheroo on the audience by turning one of the all time great villains, the T-800, into one of the all time great heroes of bad ass cinema.

When John and the T-800 meet, they decide to free Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) from her incarceration at a mental institution. The trio than heads to CyberDyne systems, all the while combatting the unstoppable T-1000, in order to destroy the evidence of the T-800's arm and chip from The Terminator so that SkyNet can never exist. In doing so, the trio will prevent Judgment Day from ever occurring and secure humanity's safety. Talk about a blockbuster plot. Terminator 2 amps up the set pieces and builds upon the original's mythology in order to deliver a bigger sequel that movie goers expect from a second go around within the Terminator franchise.

The opening credits of T2 are utterly bad ass. Brad Fiedel's score, which has been amped up to a full blown orchestra now, plays over slow motion shots of a burning play ground. While these credits do the job of reintroducing the main Terminator theme and naming all of the important players behind the scenes, it also hammers homes the film's themes of lost innocence and impending nuclear doom. James Cameron is such an accomplished filmmaker that he captures the tone and emotional heft of his film within the opening credits for goodness sakes. 

Stan Winston's Terminators are a geek's dream come true.

Terminator 2 is so similar to The Terminator that one could argue that it is a loose remake a-la Evil Dead 2. It has the same basic plot, similar lines, expected story beats, and even duplicated shots. A break down of the film's plot reveals just how similar the two films are: Two men from the future are sent back in time, one to kill *insert first name here* Connor and the other to protect *insert first name here* Connor. The good guys run from said evil Terminator, eventually take on some cops in the second act, and engage in a freeway chase with the evil Terminator that culminates in a showdown at a steel factory. Even though I left out Terminator 2's details, that is the exact same plot as The Terminator. 

However, I must stress that Terminator 2 is not a lazy rehash of its predecessor (that'll be Terminator 3, thank you). Instead, the film duplicates the original's basic plot but leans more towards blockbuster action. Whereas The Terminator was horrifying, Terminator 2 is exciting and crowd pleasing. It has more special effects, more humor, and even less of a body count. It plays more towards younger audiences thanks to the absence of graphic violence and sex. However, T2 is still a bad ass film filled with bad language and occasional gory kills. After all, Terminator 2 is consistently regarded as one of the greatest action films of all time. Therefore, understand that the main reason that Terminator 2 gets away with duplicating its predecessor's plot is because its tone and budget are radically different to the point where the film feels like an entirely new experience.

Terminator 2's extreme similarity to The Terminator started a tradition within the franchise where every sequel to follow began incorporating shots from the original film and doing unique variations on its iconic dialog as well. Lines like "I'll be back" and "Come with me if you want to live" have since appeared in almost every Terminator film in one variation or another. However, Terminator 2 is the only Terminator film to introduce and contain the ultra famous "Hasta la vista, baby" line by Schwarzenegger. And for those who are curious, I think Arnie's delivery of the line, followed by the destruction of the T-1000, is the most bad ass moment in the film.

As I stated already, Terminator 2 leans more towards action than it does horror. The action scenes in Terminator 2 are absolutely bad ass and breath taking; from the canal road chase, to the escape from the mental hospital, to the break in at CyberDyne systems, to the final freeway chase and the ensuing T-800 vs. T-1000 face off. T2 is an action fan's dream come true thanks to its practical vehicle chases, bad ass gun fights, and gripping one on one face offs. Terminator 2 puts the thrill back into the 'chase movie' and cements itself as one of the most thrilling and gripping action films to date.

Poor Don Stanton. Or is it Dan Stanton?

While the special effects in The Terminator can be seen as dated and charming, the opposite is to be said about Terminator 2's special effects. Terminator 2 is a film that will stand the test of time thanks to its perfect integration of miniatures, computer generated graphics, animatronics, body doubles, and stop motion effects. It's clear that Cameron and Winston used every trick in the book when they made T2.

Whereas The Terminator was the perfect time capsule of the 80s, Terminator 2 is the perfect time capsule of the 90s. From John's Public Enemy t shirt, to his Guns N Roses record "You Could Be Mine," to Industrial Light and Magic's early CGI, to the practical stunts, to Arnold Schwarzenegger looking his best, to even the fact that it was one of the highest grossing movies of the 1990s. This. Was. The. 90s. (See how I did that and wrote that paragraph like the one in my other Terminator review? I guess I have a little James Cameron in me).

Terminator 2 is also an excellent sequel because it is a natural continuation of the themes introduced in the first film. T2 hammers home the message that there is no fate but what me make in life. This theme goes hand in hand with the film's belief that the future is not set in stone (at least until Terminator 3, hey oh). Much like The Back to the Future trilogy, Cameron's Terminator films have a positive outlook on the fate of the future even if they exist in a world where machines eventually take over.

Linda Hamilton brings the pain and the badassery to the action genre.

Terminator 2 is a slam bam action masterpiece not only because it kicks ass, but because its characters are fully developed and their arcs explicit and believable. Few Academy Award winning dramas have character arcs and performances as great as the ones found here. The quadruple lead performances by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong, and Robert Patrick are about as great as they come. Each actor gives more or less the performance of their career, with Arnold giving yet another masterful performance amongst his many starring roles.

I forgot to even mention that one of Cameron's masterstrokes with Terminator 2 is that he pulled the ultimate switcheroo on audiences by turning the T-800, one of the all time greatest villains, into one of the all time greatest heroes. In the future, John Connor eventually got ahold of one of the T-800s and reprogrammed it to do his bidding. Therefore, even though the T-800 looks exactly the same as the one from The Terminator, it is a completely new character with none of the same directives as the original. After all, I don't think you could make Arnold a villain in 1991. He was at the top of his game at the time and arguably the biggest movie star in the world. Therefore, it makes sense that Cameron turned the T-800 into a hero in order to reflect Arnold's good guy persona in the public lime light and the rest of his movies.

The T-800, while still robotic and stoic in nature, is now very likable, heroic, and funny. He makes for a great father figure for John too. Cameron even gives the Terminator a character arc for goodness sakes in which he comes to learn the value of human life even though he is not a human himself. This arc alone results in one of the most powerful and sad conclusions in film history. Few films are as bad ass and emotionally powerful as T2 is. Arnold is also the king of cool in this movie thanks to his stylish hair cut, awesome leather jacket, 1887 flip action shotgun, and sick motorcycle. None of his outfit looks dated. He will forever look bad ass.

How can you not love this guy?

The other jaw dropping performance of the film is by none other than franchise veteran Linda Hamilton as the new, improved, and slightly crazier Sarah Connor. Where as Sarah's warrior ways were hinted at by the end of T1, she is in full blown bad ass mode here. Unfortunately, Sarah has been driven so insane from her knowledge of the future that she has forgotten how to have a positive outlook on life and how to love her son. Over the course of the film, Sarah learns to become the loving mother that she never got to be and move past her obsessive protector ways that distanced her from her son in the first place. John also changes from a juvenile child to a mature young man ready to take on whatever the future holds for him. Edward Furlong gives one of the great child performances as John Connor and helps give Terminator 2 much of its comedic relief and accessibility for younger audiences.

While the American Film Institute may say that Arnie's T-800 from The Terminator is one of the all time great villains, I would argue that Robert Patrick's T-1000 is equal to or even greater than Arnold's villainous turn in The Terminator. Patrick gives the role of his career as the menacing and liquid metal T-1000, an unstoppable Terminator who can transform into any solid object and shape shift into anyone it sees. The T-1000 role was a huge opportunity for Patrick who had previously been seen getting shot up by John McClane in Die Hard 2 a year earlier. No longer relegated to being a word less henchman, Patrick was now the lead villain...who also had barely any words to say but that's besides the point.

The special effects used to create the T-1000 were groundbreaking at the time of the film's release, as computer graphics had never been seen on a level of believability like that before. I can honestly say the effects still hold up to this day and look better than all of the effects in Terminator 3, despite Stan Winston's involvement in both films. Stan Winston and Industrial Light and Magic will forever be remembered for the T-1000's perfect and monstrous design.

Possibly my favorite shot within the film.

I am so glad to have rediscovered Terminator 2's charms. If it were not for amazing sequels like Aliens, The Road Warrior, The Godfather Part II, and Empire Strikes Back, than Terminator 2 would probably be the greatest movie sequel of all time. While James Cameron may have proven his worth to cinema with The Terminator and Aliens in the 80s, he cemented his status as a master filmmaker with Terminator 2. James Cameron can go to his grave knowing he created several of the greatest science fiction films of all time and two of the greatest sequels as well. It's possible that Cameron could roll a turkey if the eventual Avatar 2 kicks ass, but we'll wait and see what happens with that. 

As for Terminator 2 though, I highly recommend this film and consider it to be one of the 10 greatest action films of all time. T2 is where where imagination, bad ass stunt work, and special effects perfectly blended to result in a film that the entire planet embraced in 1991 and still does to this day. For all intensive purposes, the Terminator saga ends here. T1 and T2 equal a perfect duo of science fiction entertainment that should have never been followed or continued. However, fate held nothing but trouble for the Terminator franchise, and it has been nothing but the doldrums since. 

Rating: 10/10 - Cameron's sequel is an action masterpiece; a film filled to the brim with great character work, jaw dropping stunts, and an overwhelming powerful story about there being no fate but what we create.

Franchise:

The Terminator (dir. James Cameron, 1984)

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (dir. James Cameron, 1991)

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (dir. Jonathan Mostow, 2003)

Terminator: Salvation (dir. McG, 2009)

Terminator: Genisys (dir. Alan Taylor, 2015)