Terminator 2: Judgement Day
James Cameron’s “Terminator 2” starts off on the most pretentious of notes- voiceover narration over images of epic battles- before hitting the ground running as one of the most astonishingly well-constructed action thrillers of all-time. He took the structure of his 1984 classic, and inverted it, and while some of the material with Edward Furlong’s John Connor teaching the T-101 Terminator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) dates some of the character, the film is a brisk and beautifully-paced action movie that action directors could learn from, in a lot of ways.
The film picks up eleven years after the previous “Terminator,” and John Connor is a troublemaker who has found himself in foster care since he was younger after his mother, Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor, was sent to a psychiatric hospital for breaking into a scientific research facility as a way of stopping Judgement Day from happening. In the hospital, she continues to rant and rave about the night the machines sent the original T-101 back from the future to kill her before she could give birth to John, who would grow up to be the leader of the resistance against the machines. Now, the machines have sent back a new Terminator, the T-1000 (played by Robert Patrick), to kill John, while another protector has been sent back by the resistance, a reprogrammed T-101. Once the machines are on the move in the present day, the film begins the chase, and towards a key moment of discovery towards shutting down the self-aware Skynet system once and for all.
James Cameron is a filmmaker I have mostly positive, but relatively mixed, feelings for. He is one of the greatest technical directors of all-time, and the ways his films have expanded the art of visual effects over the years are unmatched by anyone other than George Lucas and Peter Jackson, in the modern day, but as a storyteller, he’s not always as on-point as he was up to this point. His first four features- “The Terminator,” “Aliens,” “The Abyss” and “Terminator 2”- are all brilliant genre efforts that told compelling human stories and created rich science-fiction landscapes for those stories, but “True Lies,” “Titanic” and “Avatar” all show some limitations in his talents as a writer. Of course, all of those films feel a bit safer than everything he made up to “T2,” as well, and you can’t really blame the fact that he was a solo writer on those last three, because he was also the solo credited writer on “The Abyss” and “Aliens,” as well. The change might have come when the box-office success of “T2” afforded him more freedom, and less of a sense that he needed to prove himself, but rewatching something like “Terminator 2” is a great reminder of why he built his reputation as a great filmmaker, to begin with.
I didn’t dislike either of the next two “Terminator” sequels (although I have yet to watch “Terminator: Genisys”), but Cameron really did close the loop perfectly in this film. While the original film dealt with the paradoxes of time travel in addition to the action elements, “Judgement Day” is more personal, as we get a lot of talk about whether the future is, in fact, written before us, or whether it can be changed. Sarah’s visions of nuclear destruction, her constant thinking about the things she was told about how humanity will destroy itself by Kyle Reese, has her dead set on trying to prevent that future on her own. Having John be the way back in to this story was the smart move by Cameron and co-writer William Wisher, as was showing us Sarah’s life in the mental hospital, and cluing us into the fact that this is not the same Sarah Connor who was frightened in the first one- if she gets out, she’s going to be a force to be reckoned with. She needs to be when her, John and the T-101 are on the run from the T-1000, which is an unstoppable force of shape-shifting magnificence brought to life by the people at ILM, with the “liquid metal” effect they use to create Patrick’s villain remaining a strikingly great creation in the early era of digital effects. The reason we care about this story, however, is the bond created by Hamilton, Furlong and Arnold, who is actually given a great character arc in this film as he learns to be more human through his interactions with Furlong’s John Connor so that, by the time he is lowered into the vat at the end, the film earns the tears shed by Sarah and John in that moment.
“Judgement Day” isn’t perfect. The final scene in the foundry goes on a bit too long, and as I mentioned, John teaching the T-101 some of the slang of the day dates the film, but Cameron’s film more than earns its place as one of the great action movies ever made. The visual effects by Dennis Muren and Stan Winston still hold up well almost 30 years later; the cinematography by Adam Greenberg and editing keep the film tight and dangerous; the music by Brad Fiedel is a great mix of percussive rhythms and thematic writing that propels the action and storytelling; and Cameron gets strong work out of all of his leads, as well as a key supporting performance by Joe Morton as a computer scientist whose research is the key to Skynet’s rise. I get why other filmmakers and studios felt the need to bring this world back in later efforts, but Cameron was correct in his impulse here to bottle the end, and say simply, “Hasta la vista, baby.”
