James Camer-thon: A Review of "Terminator 2: Judgment Day"

"Arnold, I told you to stop pointing the gun at me. The camera's not even rolling"
- James Cameron (probably)

Look... we all know how this is going to go. We all know Terminator 2: Judgment Day arguably is the greatest movie ever made by mortal men on this Earth and in its filmmaking history, right? All of us know that. This post will not be breaking new ground in saying so. I haven't met a single person who wasn't a contrarian that said "You know I watched Terminator 2 and I just couldn't get into it" or "I thought it sucked". I always argue that there are three movies in our recorded history that every human being must at one point experience: Back to the Future... Star Wars... and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It's weird. The Terminator, the movie that literally started the franchise? It's like a freakin' footnote compared to T2. Reportedly, The Terminator cost $6.5 million to produce IN ITS ENTIRETY... that's salaries, stunts, sets, explosives, everything; the whole schabang. Reportedly, that's only what Arnold Schwarzenegger's trailer on the set of T2 cost alone. That alone should set the stage for what we're about to break into.

"Sorry John, I can't hear you over
the sound of my mullet."

Yes, this is Terminator 2: Judgment Day. A movie that teaches us that a high-budget sequel to a cheap, 80s noire action movie doesn't have to be some lowbrow cash-in but can in fact be endearing, heartwarming, action-packed, balls to the wall, somewhat comedic, full of heart, kind of terrifying, and all around a wildly fulfilling piece of cinema, a pop culture staple, and a wildly incredible masterpiece of film for decades to come... easily 'til film historians in the year 3329 A.D. study it while they wonder why Marvel's Phase Eighty-Six is only is grossing an average of twelve bucks at the box office. Back again is Arnold Schwarzenegger, back again is Linda Hamilton, and joining the cast is a newcomer Edward Furlong before his life fell out of control, playing none other than John Connor! The future savior of humanity no more than a juvenile delinquent. Robert Patrick joins the cast as the T-1000, the most advanced Terminator to date Skynet sends back in time, made entirely of CGI... and Joe Morton as Miles Dyson, the Steve Jobs hell-bent on creating a revolutionary microprocessor that can do everything for humans... including exterminate them! Terminator 2 goes beyond the story of the first film and, quite frankly, surpasses it. Let's step through the plot and learn why! If you need caught up on the story, read my review of The Terminator here before continuing!

*Images that precede unfortunate events*

In 2029, Earth is a nuclear wasteland dominated by the war between the malevolent artificial intelligence Skynet and the human resistance. Skynet, right after sending a T-800 to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, sends a T-1000 (Robert Patrick) to 1995. Instead of Sarah (Linda Hamilton) being the target again, the T-1000's mission is to kill the resistance leader John Connor when he is a pre-teen. To protect Connor, the resistance sends back a reprogrammed T-800 Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a less-advanced metal endoskeleton that is covered in synthetic flesh. In 1995 Los Angeles, John's mother Sarah has been incarcerated at the Pescadero State Hospital for her violent, fanatical efforts to prevent "Judgment Day"... the foretold events of August 29, 1997, when Skynet will become self-aware and, in response to its creators' attempts to deactivate it, incite a nuclear holocaust that eradicates half of mankind. While Sarah's in the nuthouse, John is taken in by foster parents Todd (Xander Berkeley) and Janelle Voight (Jenette Goldstein).

The T-800 and the T-1000 converge on John in a shopping mall and a chase ensues. John and the T-800 escape together. John calls to warn his foster parents but the T-800 deduces the T-1000 has already killed them, using trickery and deceit to fool the T-1000 into giving an inadvertently false answer to a question over the phone. Realizing the T-800 is programmed to obey him, John forbids it from killing people and orders it to save Sarah from the T-1000. The "of course, I'm a Terminator" line cracks me up, cause it feels so much like an ad-lib by Arnold, but no... Cameron wrote the line. Go figure! The T-800 and John intercept Sarah during an escape attempt but Sarah flees because the T-800 resembles the Terminator that was sent to kill her in 1984! That's smart deduction, as the T-800 sent to 1984 was also played by Arnold Schwarzenegger... I don't know I thought I had a joke for that but I lost it. John and the T-800 persuade her to join them, and they escape the pursuing T-1000. Although distrustful of the T-800, Sarah uses its knowledge of the future to learn that a revolutionary microprocessor Cyberdyne Systems engineer Miles Bennett Dyson (Joe Morton) is developing will be essential for Skynet's creation.

"John, I want to shoot this tech-savvy
businessman!"
"Mom, you mess with one tech-savvy
businessman, you mess with all of them!"

Over several days of their time together, Sarah sees the T-800 serving as a friend and father figure to John, who teaches it catchphrases and hand signs as well as encouraging it to become more human-like. May as well get him a t-shirt that says "I may be the Step Dad but I'm the Dad that STEPPED UP!" or some Hallmark shirt like that! *Pause for laughs*. Sarah plans to flee with John to Mexico until a nightmare about Judgment Day (complete with a rather gruesomely accurate vision of a nuclear device striking Los Angeles) persuades her to kill Dyson, whom she assaults in his home, but finds she cannot kill him and relents. Probably because John arrives and reconciles with Sarah while the T-800 convinces Dyson of the future consequences of his work. Dyson reveals his research has been reverse engineered from the 1984 Terminator's damaged CPU and severed arm, cleverly bringing this movie's story full-circle. Believing his work must be destroyed, Dyson, Sarah, John, and the T-800 break into Cyberdyne, retrieve the CPU and the arm, and set explosives to destroy the lab. The police assault the building and fatally shoot Dyson, but he detonates the explosives as he dies. The T-1000 pursues the surviving trio in a wild-as-balls freeway chase, that sees the T-1000 sprout two spare arms and fly a helicopter over an overpass and under an overpass... After wrecking two separate vehicles, the two parties jump into two separate vehicles and the chase continues, with the T-1000 eventually cornering our heroes in a steel mill.

*BANG* *BANG* *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*
... "LAPD, you're under arrest".

If you're exhausted from that, you're still not done. Sarah and John split up to escape while the T-1000 mangles the T-800 hand-to-hand and deactivates it by destroying its power source. The T-1000 assumes Sarah's appearance to lure out John but Sarah intervenes and repeatedly shoots it, pushing it toward the edge of a platform standing above a vat of molten steel, but she runs out of ammunition before it falls. The T-800, having been reactivated using its alternate power source, arrives and shoots the T-1000 with a grenade launcher, causing it to fall into the molten steel and disintegrate. John throws the CPU and severed arm from the 1984 Terminator into the vat. The T-800 explains it must also be destroyed to prevent its CPU from serving as a foundation for Skynet. The pair hug and John tearfully orders the T-800 to stay but it persuades John its destruction is the only way to protect their future. Sarah shakes the T-800's hand, having come to respect it, and in one of the saddest movie scenes I've ever seen, helps lower it into the vat. Before its destruction, the T-800 gives John a thumbs-up as it sinks into the molten steel. As Sarah drives down a highway with John, she reflects on her renewed hope for an unknown future, musing if the T-800 could learn the value of life, so can humanity.

*Wipes away budding tears* Ok so, wow. Terminator 2 is quite the movie, and much like the T-1000 is to the T-800, T2 is a radical upgrade from The Terminator. Wow, this movie packs such a punch and is stuffed full of character development, humor, wit, fear, paranoia, action, suspense, thrills and spills. I was so blown away the first time I saw it as a kid. (Yeah I may have jumped ahead of that R-rating by a few years... lol). There aren't many times you sit in a movie theater or watch a movie for the first time and you feel so moved or changed from the experience. That was what it was like for me when I first sat down and watched Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I mean, it's such a masterfully written story and it brings elements of the first film's story back in such a clever way and brings the entire narrative to a close at the end, all at the same time. First off, Linda Hamilton deserved a damn Oscar nomination in the same way Sigourney Weaver got one for Aliens, I mean maaaaaan was she a badass bitch in this. A definite swap from her meager teeny-bopper girl persona in The Terminator. This Sarah Connor is one you don't want to fuck around with. Also, Edward Furlong nailed the role of the juvenile delinquent at odds with his future role as humanity's savior in 11-year-old John Connor.

"Have you two girls seen my lost puppy?"
"Aren't we supposed to ask you that?"
"RESISTING ARREST!GET DOWN ON THE
GROUND, NOW!"

Arnold is back of course, and I call this his "Terminator prime"... this is where he shines the hardest as the Terminator. In The Terminator he had kind of a prime heyday... he was menacing, imposing, and kind of scary. This one he's tough, stern, but he's also caring, protective, and will stop at nothing to save John and protect him. Plus watching him bond with John in a father-figure sort of way; James Cameron's really a genius writer. You don't want to throw the word "genius" around loosely, but I will. Having the Terminator, something that in its very name implies death and destruction... come back as a protector instead and making him the good guy, was a very noble and noteworthy move by Cameron. So much so that in a ranking by the American Film Institute (AFI) where they did "100 Heroes and Villiains"... Arnold Schwarzenegger came in as the Terminator in both lists. He was ranked #22 as the evil 1984 Terminator in the Villains list, and #48 as protecting 1995 Terminator from the Heroes list.

"Sweet ride, Terminator!"
"Thanks, I beat the shit out of some MAGA
asshole for it!"

So like I mentioned in my post about The Terminator, the whole plot with destroying Cyberdyne Systems in order to prevent the future war with the machines and Skynet's takeover from ever happening was originally in that film, as was the notion of the liquid metal Terminator (which in 1984 would have been done with Harryhausen-esque claymation effects). Due to budgetary constraints and it being his first directing job, Cameron cut a lot of those aspects and saved them should he ever got to make a sequel one day. 

Now we have Terminator 2, and all of those plot elements are again, beautifully portrayed in what feels like a final, desperate battle to save their future. Lastly, I want to briefly talk about Miles Dyson's character. Joe Morton nailed the role of a hapless computer scientist hell-bent on his infatuation with changing the world, outright in love with being humankind's technological Messiah SO MUCH, it in-turn dooms humanity as a whole. The scene where the T-800 lays out what happens over the next three years' future to Dyson to convince him to blow up Cyberdyne and prevent it all from happening is so powerful and Dyson is humanized so well. He's a family man, very wealthy, and does not at all intend humankind any harm; but has no control when his artificial intelligence software becomes self-aware and destroys everything. Such a tragedy, and he fights hard to redeem himself.

"You want a mouthful of lead?"
*Insult subroutine failed to load*
"You will not be laughing when I have a mouthful of
your ass."

The stunts and effects are another huge display in this movie. Some of the wild shit you see people do in this movie is unparalleled and unmatched, in most places even by today's standards. I mentioned the helicopter stunts in the end highway chase. There's a chase just after fleeing the Galleria where the T-1000 gives chase to John and the T-800 chases the T-1000. John's on a dirt bike, the T-1000's in a huge towing-rig semi truck, and the T-800 is on his Harley Davidson Fatboy motorcycle. You see Arnold one-hand spin-reloading a lever-action Winchester rifle, a Harley Davidson jump, the tow truck smashing through brick and crashing into a spillway to keep chasing John. All concluding in a fiery crash that sees the semi truck explode while the T-800 and John make their getaway to safety. The T-1000's effects were completed using George Lucas's highly popular "Industrial Light & Magic" special effects shop. ILM's computer graphics department had to grow from six artists to almost thirty-six to accommodate all the work required to bring the T-1000 to life, costing $5.5 million, and taking eight months to produce, which ultimately amounted to 3.5 minutes of screen time. Isn't that WILD? The other half of the T-1000 was played rather excellently by Robert Patrick, then a relatively-unknown guy. This was his breakthrough role, and he owned it. He was menacing, merciless, threatening, unstoppable at times, determined to kill John Connor by any means necessary, and yet when he spoke to humans; he was unassuming and charming. Again, a very well-played Terminator.

"I said contactless delivery you schmuck! COVID- 19 ain't
no laughing matter! Now leave my Jimmy John's sub on
the doorstep and get the fuck off my property!"

Lastly... I just want to do a brief comparison of the Theatrical cut vs. the Extended cut. The extended cut only adds about 19 minutes of screentime, but what is added back adds lots of value. The scene where they're in the autoshop and the T-800 is explaining about how Skynet has the cyborgs' CPU set to "read only" so that they don't think by themselves is fine on its own in the Theatrical, but the Extended cut adds a scene that shows John and Sarah temporarily deactivating Arnold so they can flip the switch, allowing the viewer to see Arnold becoming a learning machine and start picking up on John's mannerisms. Something that is another genius plot point, and I truly wonder why they cut it out. There's also an added flashback between Sarah and John's now-biological father Kyle Reese (cameo by Cameron's ol' buddy Michael Biehn) in Sarah's dream early on in the film which I think also adds value to the story. So like Aliens, between the two cuts, I prefer the Extended cut. The lore in the Theatrical cut is well presented, but the Extended cut adds so much more.

You need to see Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and if you have already seen it, go watch it again. It is a masterpiece among masterpieces, and easily James Cameron's finest work. It's the perfect cap to the one-two punch with The Terminator. It closes the story so well on a very coda bookend. TOO BAD IT WOULD BE UNDONE, but I got a feeling we'll get to those soon. Seriously though, James Cameron kicked off his career in the 90s with such a high-mark. It deserved more accolades at the 1992 Oscars, I'll even argue for Best Picture... and it's induction into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry is LONG overdue. I salute you, Terminator 2... you glorious treasure of a film.