Schwarzenegger hit his apex as a movie star and an actor in the record-breaking Terminator 2
Image: Gif: Jimmy HasseScreenshot: Terminator 2: Judgment Day Film Features The Popcorn Champs
For someone who’s been in movies for the past 50 years, Arnold Schwarzenegger has never really been an actor. Instead, he’s been a presence—a looming, smirking slab of tendon and tissue so unrealistic that it drags everything else into an otherworld. Schwarzenegger didn’t get his breaks in stage roles or bit parts, though he did a few of the latter. Instead, he captured imaginations as a bodybuilder, sculpting his own mass to be as absurd and exaggerated as possible. Even in Pumping Iron, the documentary released after he’d only racked up a few film credits, Schwarzenegger is a strangely entertaining force, in part because his outsized persona is all tied up with his even more outsized physicality.
It took Schwarzenegger years, but he figured out how to turn this presence into something resembling old-school movie-star charisma. Along the way, he made smart decisions and had good luck. Schwarzenegger’s first real box office breakout, 1982’s Conan The Barbarian, required him to flex and scream and swing a sword—all of which were entirely within his skill set. In his first truly iconic role, the implacable mechanistic killer of 1984’s The Terminator, Schwarzenegger has a built-in excuse for his stiff awkwardness and even his thick Austrian accent: He’s a futuristic robot who only barely passes as human. The T-800 isn’t especially worried about fitting in; he only has to seem vaguely convincing for as long as it takes to kill someone.
The Terminator was a surprise low-budget hit that gained steam on video, especially as its lead actor and director both became big names. When Schwarzenegger and James Cameron returned to the Terminator story seven years later, things had changed. Terminator 2: Judgment Day had a nearly unlimited budget: something on the order of $100 million, by far the most expensive movie that had ever been made. It had a grander scale, a more ambitious premise, and a small army of stunt professionals and special-effects technicians. And it had Arnold Schwarzenegger, at his peak, playing the role that he could play better than anyone else.
Schwarzenegger’s ’80s movies were almost always hits, and they established a whole iconography. This gigantic muscle-beast with the thick accent was fully comfortable with the absurdity of his hyper-violent roles. (I always loved how Schwarzenegger would be willing to play someone like the small-town sheriff of 1986’s Raw Deal, and how the movie would make no attempt to explain how this giant motherfucker with the accent ended up there.) He’d even started to make sly comments on his own stock role. Just before Terminator 2, Schwarzenegger made two Ivan Reitman family comedies, Twins and Kindergarten Cop, and one berserk Paul Verhoeven sci-fi splatterfest, Total Recall. All of them had fun with the Schwarzenegger persona. All of them were huge hits.
Terminator 2 takes every possible advantage of Schwarzenegger’s fame, using both his strengths and his deficiencies in the best possible ways. If 1984 Schwarzenegger was perfect in the role of an unstoppable murder-bot, 1991 Schwarzenegger was perfect as an unstoppable murder-bot who is nice to a little kid and sometimes tells jokes—the kind who will say, “I need a vacation,” after he’s been battered and mangled, even though robots don’t take vacations. And Cameron accomplished something huge by just making the dumbest, most obvious adjustment from the original movie: This time, Schwarzenegger was the good guy.
Schwarzenegger’s T-800 trudging naked into the biker bar at the beginning of Terminator 2 is one of the all-time great babyface turns in cinematic history. If you walk into Terminator 2 cold, knowing only the first movie, then it makes sense that this villain is beating up bikers: throwing one onto a hot stove, tossing another through a window, pinning another to a pool table with a knife. But you’d instinctively cheer for him anyway—partly because you would’ve spent years seeing Schwarzenegger as John Matrix and Alan “Dutch” Schaefer, and partly because he’s just so much fun to watch. (Anyway, nobody walked into the movie cold; anyone who’d seen one TV ad knew that Arnold was the good guy now.) The T-800 emerges from that bar as the platonic ideal of Arnold-ness: chilly, expressionless, leathered-up head to toe.
In the years before Terminator 2, big hit movies had been moving toward spectacle, away from intimate personal drama. That had been the case with Batman and Home Alone, the biggest hits of the two previous years, and it was cranked up past 100 in Terminator 2, in part because Schwarzenegger himself is such a spectacle. Around him, Cameron builds a real circus: motorcycles roaring, helicopters swooping, buildings exploding, bullet shells clinking onto pavement, blobs of shiny liquid suddenly reverting to human form. Almost nobody has ever done spectacle-first moviemaking better.
Much of the success of Terminator 2 is in the elegance of the storytelling. Cameron sets it all up beautifully, introducing all his key characters one by one, slowly pushing them all to the point where they’ll intersect. Schwarzenegger’s foe, the shape-shifting T-1000, is understated but deadly compelling. Robert Patrick’s face is all planar surfaces, he runs with a freaky sense of focus, and he projects a dispassionate authority that allows him to slip through society more easily than Schwarzenegger.
Sarah Connor, the previous movie’s hero, has had a rough time since we’ve seen her pregnant, driving off into an electrical storm. She’s all hair sweat and sinew and feral intensity. She’s been committed to a mental institution because she won’t stop telling everyone that the end of the world is coming, but also because she’s legitimately disturbed and unstable. Whenever Linda Hamilton goes full-tilt in T2, it’s magic: holding the Drano-filled needle to the psychiatrist’s neck, scolding her son for being dumb enough to come save her, screaming cuss words at the family of the man she’s just shot. Hamilton should’ve won the Oscar that year. She wasn’t even nominated.
John Connor, the resistance leader who hasn’t even been born yet in The Terminator, has turned into a smarmy little punk. Edward Furlong had never acted before when he was cast in T2, and he went on to a relatively short career and a long stretch of news stories about addiction and domestic-abuse arrests. Every time I watch T2, Furlong’s performance grows a little more grating. It’s not entirely his fault. The movie asks him to do a lot, and the writing does him no favors. Furlong has to carry the emotional weight and spout exposition and take part in risky espionage operations and teach a robot ’90s slang terms that nobody has actually ever said in real life. It’s rough. The character and the performance are the weakest things about the film.
Furlong’s presence underlines something about Terminator 2 that might not have been fully apparent at the time: It’s a kids’ movie. T2 is rated R, and it’s full of face stabbings and cops getting their kneecaps blown off, but it’s got an approachable sort of hyper-violent intensity. The robot says one-liners. John orders the robot not to kill. Much of the action is bloodlessly kinetic. In the end, a family comes together to defeat the bad guy. We see a lot of it through the eyes of a child who, at least theoretically, wasn’t yet old enough to go see T2 by himself. (Anecdotally, at least, little kids were a lot more likely to go see R-rated movies in the early ’90s. I burned with jealousy at all the kids I knew who saw T2 in the theater, and I finally saw it at a sleepover after it had been out for less than a year. My daughter is 11 now, and she’s never so much as asked to see anything grimier than Avengers: Infinity War.)
After the tremendous success of Home Alone, the theaters of 1991 were full of kid-centric fare: Hook, The Addams Family, family comedies like City Slickers and Father Of The Bride. Kevin Costner had one of the year’s biggest hits when he turned Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves into a not-that-grisly action epic. Disney snared an unprecedented Best Picture Oscar nomination with the fairy tale Beauty And The Beast. If you count its theatrical re-releases, Beauty And The Beast has actually slightly edged out Terminator 2 as 1991’s highest-grossing film. At the time, though, the R-rated fairy tale reigned supreme.
You got your money’s worth with Terminator 2. The early CGI got a ton of press at the time, and it remains weirdly impressive and uncanny even though the technology has been obsolete for decades. We only see little flashes of the T-1000 oozing into alien shapes or shifting into different identities, and it’s still a compellingly eerie sight. I love how all the actors who portray the T-1000 cock their heads to the side, like curious dogs, whenever they stab someone. And the sight of the killer cop-blob freezing and then being blown into splinters remains etched into my brain.
But today, the effects aren’t nearly as impressive as the wild stunt work: The motorcycle jump! The cops fleeing from exploding cars! The helicopter flying under the highway overpass! Today most of that would be CGI. In 1991, real people had to do all of it, and that, combined with Cameron’s skill for staging clean and legible action scenes, gives T2 a physical immediacy that its stylistic descendents simply don’t have. Those scenes look dangerous, at least in part, because people really were in danger.
Schwarzenegger anchors the whole spectacle with that presence. He turns his death machine into a clueless, befuddled lummox who just wants to keep a kid safe—a true dad. It remains the best, most effective performance that this non-actor has ever given. Playing an inhuman character, Schwarzenegger uses his physicality, his established screen persona, and his innate charm to provide human stakes to what might’ve been the biggest, loudest movie that anyone had ever seen. It’s quite a trick.
Terminator 2 was the absolute apex for Schwarzenegger. In the years that followed, he would only make a couple more huge hits, and his grip over the American dream-life would slowly slip away—at least until he moved into another medium and used that movie-star power to become governor of California. These days, he makes bad Terminator sequels and low-budget action flicks that might as well go straight to Redbox. Weird career. James Cameron, on the other hand, would go on to make a couple of movies that were even bigger than Terminator 2. He’ll show up in this column again.
The contender: The Silence Of The Lambs, Jonathan Demme’s grim and gut-churning serial-killer thriller, came out in February and proved to be a surprise success in every conceivable way. It swept the Oscars, becoming the last movie ever to win all four major awards. It pulled in $130 million, big enough to make it the number four film of the year. And it made a cinematic icon and franchise anchor out of an effete, cold-blooded flesh-eater.
Demme directs The Silence Of The Lambs with total confidence and precision, showing some gruesome sights but letting our imaginations do most of the work. He builds symphonies out of shifting conversational power dynamics and slight tweaks of facial expression, and then he reverts to his Roger Corman exploitation-flick roots and gets into some real nasty fun whenever the moment calls for it. The film almost immediately entered the pop culture lexicon, and it basically set the template for today’s true-crime boom.
Next time: The Disney renaissance kicks into overdrive with Aladdin, which changes the game by bringing a genuine movie star into the realm of animation.
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Of course what also followed were a bunch of weird Terminator comic book crossovers.Like Robocop vs TerminatorSuperman vs TerminatorAlien vs. Predator vs. TerminatorAnd recently Transformers vs. Terminator
They ever done Judge Dredd vs. Terminator?
Not from what I can tell. But here are a few crossover Judge Dredd has had:Judge Dredd vs AliensPredator vs. Judge DreddPredator vs. Judge Dredd vs. AliensAnd four separate crossovers with Batman.
My god there’s some weird shit out there.
P.S:Cybernetic Dawn and Nuclear Twilight were damn fine comic sequels to T2:https://terminator.fandom.com/wiki/Terminator_2:_Judgment_Day_-_Cybernetic_Dawnhttps://terminator.fandom.com/wiki/Terminator_2:_Judgment_Day_-_Nuclear_Twilight
Drokk!!
Judge Predd was *right there*
It does not appear so, he did fight the Predator though, but that isn’t saying much. The Predator is the comic book worlds village bicycle. Everyone got a ride
Hell, Marvel’s now gearing up for some Alien and Predator crossovers now that Disney owns Fox.I half expect Marvel to phase out The Brood and replace them with Xenomorphs.
Before now has there ever been a Predator/Marvel cross over. I can name a bunch of DC cross overs and bunch of smaller publishers but I just realized that Marvel never jumped on that train until now I guess
Oh man, I really want to see some Predators take The Avengers apart.
Considering the in-canon origins of The Authority over at Wildstorm I wouldn’t put it past Marvel to have the Xenomorphs physically turf the Brood out in a book.
I hope not.
I know that the Brood were/are the most obviously of Alien rip offs, but their still pretty good X-Men villains and I’d like to see them in live action form.
Dammit “they’re” not “their”
The voice in my head that devoured comics in the 90s can’t wait for the inevitable Aliens vs Predator vs The Punisher vs Wolverine.
…..vs Archie.
Wildstorm did it first! (with Aliens, that is) The xenomorphs being canonically responsible for the formation of The Authority (at least at first; maybe they’ve changed it since) was always very fun to me, since they decided to make one of these weird crossovers actually matter to that comic line’s overall continuity.
The Brood are actually sentient and can talk, so I can see them doing Aliens vs. the Brood.
Proof:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_vs._Predator
The RoboCop vs Terminator tie in video game was probably the most frustrating game that I ever played. When I was about 9 that was the rare game that I rented for the weekend but only played for about an hour (and I played multiple rounds of the SNES version of Clue where the AI solved the mystery after five turns no matter what). There was either a gameplay mechanic that I didn’t understand, or it was just stupid hard. In fact, has there ever been a really good Terminator game?
I have fond memories of the T2 arcade shooter. I can’t really think of any for home consoles.
I remember the Terminator 2029 game for PC being very well done. It was an early first-person shooter set in the future Skynet world.
Of course now we can recreate the magic in Mortal Kombat 11
I can’t call it very good but I have fond memories of playing The Terminator platformer on the Master System.
I mean…. these are all brilliant ideas.
One of the stupidest conversations I ever took part in (at work of course, slacking off) was who would win, The Terminator or Mighty Mouse. No conclusion was reached! Apparently we should’ve pitched this to Dark Horse or something.
Mighty Mouse is a cartoon. The Terminator is a real guy.
I seem to remember that the first Batman vs. Predator series wasn’t too badly written. I was very young at the time, though, so I may have activated the rose-colored tint on my Predator helmet.
wtf that Robocop vs. Terminator book is by Frank Miller and Walt Simonson. Two of the most legendary comic creators ever combining on an obvious cash grab movie tie-in. How does something like that even happen?
frank miller wrote robocop 2 and 3
I fondly remember Robocop vs. Terminator as way, way better than it should have been. Also AvPvT was amusing, if silly.
Most comic books are dumb.
When do we get Terminator vs. KISS?
Kramer vs. Kramer vs. Terminator.
Wait, wait! Don’t forget:
On the subject of Terminator comic books, they made a sequel to Terminator Salvation which was shockingly good (I guess not so surprising as J. Michael Straczynski wrote it).First two issues can legally be read for free here.https://io9.gizmodo.com/a-terminator-the-last-battle-bombshell-plus-read-two-1636523202Ties together all the movies out at the time about as well as anyone possibly could have and it’s a great story in its own right.
Robocop vs Terminator is superb. Robocop turns out to be one of the precursors TO the Terminators!
And let’s not forget the OG Terminator comics license: NOW Comics! Tropical Terminators!
Darn it. My picture didn’t upload.
It’s actually spelled “f-u-c-k-i-n-g a-w-e-s-o-m-e”, not “w-e-i-r-d”. Just FYI.
Obligatory Top 10 Highest Grossing Movies Of 1991 Post:The Numbers1 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, TriStar/Carolco, $201,858,7462 Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, Warner Bros., $165,493,9083 The Silence Of The Lambs, Orion Pictures, $130,726,7164 City Slickers, Columbia, $124,033,7915 The Addams Family, Paramount Pictures/MGM, $110,159,2196 Home Alone, 20th Century Fox, $108,806,3807 Dances With Wolves, Orion Pictures, $104,047,9568 Sleeping With The Enemy, 20th Century Fox, $101,599,0059 Hook, TriStar, $91,801,51410 The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell Of Fear, Paramount Pictures, $86,930,411Wikipedia1 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, TriStar/Carolco, $519,843,3452 Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, Warner Bros., $390,493,9083 Beauty And The Beast, Disney, $346,317,2074 Hook, TriStar, $300,854,8235 The Silence Of The Lambs, Orion Pictures, $272,742,9226 JFK, Warner Bros., $205,405,4987 The Addams Family, Paramount Pictures/MGM, $191,502,4268 Cape Fear, Universal, $182,291,9699 Hot Shots!, 20th Century Fox, $181,096,16410 City Slickers, Columbia, $179,033,791
Holy Crap! 1991 is a sneaky good year for movies.Silence of the Lambs and T2 are classics. City Slickers is a fun comedy, Cape Fear is a great remake, Hot Shots! and the Naked Gun 2 1/2 are really fun ZAZ comedies. The Addams Family is an underappreciated gem. Then we get La Femme Nikita, Defending Your Life, The Rocketeer, Point Break, The Fisher King, and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Then we get the masterpiece that was Cool As Ice!
It also gave us Showdown in Little Tokyo, an action movie that somehow manages to be MORE absurd and over the top than T2, despite the absence of killer robots.
Most ridiculous part of the movie is Dolph Lundgren casually introducing the Japanese-style three bedroom retreat he’s built – by hand! – somewhere in the vicinity of LA.
It’s a movie where Dolph Lundgren endlessly scolds the son of Bruce Lee for not being Asian enough.
I mean, do you doubt him?
Cape Fear rules. A remake of To Kill A Mocking Bird where Atticus Finch is a sleazy, womanizing hack and Scout wants to bang murderous psychopath Boo Radley? Sign me up.
“We’re gonna drop some funk-ee lyrics…”
Weren’t Thelma and Louise and Boys n the Hood in ‘91, too? And some really important indies came out that year, too: Slacker, Trust, My Own Private Idaho.
“IF HATE WERE PEOPLE, I’D BE CHINA!”
La Femme Nikita is so good. I forgot about Cape Fear, too. And don’t forget Hook and Boyz in the Hood. I love 1991. If you couldn’t stand Kevin from Home Alone, My Girl took care of him for you. The Last Boy Scout ended up being a better Die Hard 2 than Die Hard 2. And of course the great cinematic question of our times: What About Bob?
Have you seen Cool as Ice? It is not the worst movie ever. It’s goofy and weird, with really interesting cinematography. Seriously: go to IMDb, click on the director of photography, and see what else he’s done.
I’m surprised Robin Hood did so well, because that movie was no fun. It was so clunky in so many places, it felt like it was intentionally sabotaging itself whenever it started building up any momentum. And for a spectacle movie, it felt cheap, like they were always cutting corners on the number of extras they were hiring and the quality of the locations.
Hook was also a surprise. I know it had Robin Williams going for it, but even Spielberg can’t seem to muster anything good to say about it.
The real surprise with “Hook” ended up being the way that it ended up playing second fiddle to “Beauty and the Beast”. The New York Times pointed out in the months that followed that “Hook” could have been the world-beater it was intended as had it not arrived a few weeks after “Beauty”, which was never the #1 film at the box office at any point in its run (it opened the same day as “The Addams Family”) but ran and ran for months and imprinted strongly on critics and audiences, and from there awards groups. I’m kinder to “Hook” now than I was back then, but when you compare it to “Beauty” — which, for starters, is nearly a full hour shorter — it comes up so short then and now as a fantasy family spectacular. As far as that sort of thing goes, Spielberg still had it in him; it’s just that the fantastical island in question was Isla Nublar, not Neverland. But we’ll get there shortly…
Hook was the first movie I consciously remember going to see in a movie theater, so I’ve always had a personal soft spot for it. I’ll concede that it’s lesser Spielberg, but it has its charms.
I rewatched all of Spielberg’s films during lockdown and Hook held up better than I thought it would. Loved it as a kid but it’s incredibly self indulgent and definitely too long (and Rufio is no longer as cool as he was when I was 9. But it’s fun, earnest and whenever Hoffman and Hoskins are on screen it works like gangbusters. It ended up 25th on my Spielberg list, above The Terminal, Lincoln, War Horse, The BFG, Indy 4, 1941 and the truly terrible Always.
I have a soft spot for movies with outdoor scenes that are very obviously shot on a soundstage, like Hook.
Mine was E.T.!
Hook was marketed heavily as another Spielberg classic at the time. I wonder how much of its gross was from the opening weekend before the reviews and word of mouth got out saying it wasn’t that good.
It’s interesting with both Hook and Prince of Thieves that the villains are far and away the only real reasons to bother with the movies. AND ARE SO GOOD
A bunch of drama club friends bought advance tickets. All of us going to the movies together was more fun than the movie itself.
Robin Hood no fun? Alan Rickman was having A LOT of fun! Love his performance.Sheriff of Nottingham : [to a wench] You. My room. 10:30 tonight.Sheriff of Nottingham : [to another wench] You. 10:45… And bring a friend.
I really want to read an oral history on what it was like behind the scenes on Robin Hood. Given the way that movie talispinned in so many directions, it must have been insane.And Hook is one of those movies that everybody knew sucked until all the kids that saw it when they were little got grown up enough to be able to write and suddenly it became a classic. See also Hocus Pocus.
What is with the Hocus Pocus rehabilitation? It’s an unfunny slog of a stinker.
A Halloween movie hitting theaters in summer then home video in January. What the cuss.
Hook has Prince Zuko in the most high-profile role he’s ever had. Other than that, it’s pretty bad.
The Bryan Adams song was everywhere.
Motherfucker – JFK made north of $200 million?!Also, big year for Costner, huh?
City Slickers you say?
I watched the Robin Hood director’s cut. It goes deeper into the Sheriff’s pagan connections and why he wanted a claim to the throne. The pagan subplot nullifies having Prince John as a character. It’s also pretty dumb. So I can see why the theatrical cut minimized it and just made the masked guys who killed Robin’s dad bunch of weirdos loyal to the Sheriff.
Dang, I saw 9 of wiki’s list, skipping only City Slickers. Billy Crystal? Then, now, forever meh.
Obligatory Every Movie Featured In These Articles Ranked From Best To Worst Post:The Godfather (1972)2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)The Exorcist (1973)Jaws (1975)Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)Blazing Saddles (1974)Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)Rocky (1976)The Graduate (1967)West Side Story (1961)Beverly Hills Cop (1984)Back To The Future (1985)Batman (1989)Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi (1983)Spartacus (1960)Rain Man (1988)Kramer VS Kramer (1979)Top Gun (1986)The Longest Day (1962)Three Men And A Baby (1987)Billy Jack (1971)My Fair Lady (1964)Cleopatra (1963)The Sound Of Music (1965)Home Alone (1990)Grease (1978)The Bible: In The Beginning… (1966)Love Story (1970)
Fuck. Most of that movie list is my whole damn life. Except for the 60s and some of the 70s ones.
T2 ranking quite nicely. Little rough on Home Alone. Is Three Men and a Baby really better?
Fuck yeah Terminator 2. I absolutely love this movie. It’s just awesome. I was a kid when this came out and when I was 10 a mate and I watched it dozens of times in a six month period. It was just the best.
Red from OSP once mentioned how this movie works even if you know the early plot twist that the T-800 is there to protect John Conner.
Its interesting because the Arnold had been such a star by then that the marketing pretty much blew the “secret” that he was the good guy this time.
I do find it amusing to watch the movie obviously try to keep it a secret that Arnie’s the good guy even though all of the marketing blew his cover.
I mentioned elsewhere that I showed my kid T1 and T2 as a double feature; he had no idea that Arnold is the good guy in T2, so he was legitimately stunned when he saves John in the hallway. I wish all to hell they’d preserved the surprise when the movie was originally released.
Same wish, and I hope my kid(s) can have this experience when they get old enough for these.
I don’t think it’s really even a plot twist; I honestly can’t remember ever seeing this from the perspective that the T-800 isn’t the good guy. And while the film does echo the whole “which one will find Sarah first” set up from the first movie, I think that lasts maybe 30 minutes at the most.
And here’s another thing. Even if it is a twist, and even if that twist was ruined by the marketing, It doesn’t detract from the fact that T2 is all kinds of awesome.
Yeah, and the movie doesn’t take long to establish that fact. It’s a twist, but a first act one. But anyone who hadn’t seen “Come with me if you want to live” was under a rock for three months.
I’ve always thought of this film as just a much dumber retread of the original with a bigger budget (making me perhaps the only person to prefer the third), and it’s worth noting how truly dumb the in-universe that decision to bring Arnold back is. We know T-800s don’t all look alike, so ones that look like the guy who went on a killing spree directed at the Sarah Conners of L.A would of course be the worst possible choice to send to L.A again to protect her son. The out-of-universe decision to make a Terminator kids movie rivals that.
I disagree because T1 is more of a noir horror movie while T2 is more a straight action movie. Making John’s protector the very unstoppable machine (Or at least a similar model) that tried to kill his parents in the first movie means that the protagonists have a bit more of a level playing field with the antagonist.
Exactly. Same thing with Alien vs. Aliens. Sequels, but the first horror, second action.
And in both cases, the first one is a much better film.
And both franchises never reach the same heights ever again.
I like Alien way more than T1 and T2 more than Aliens but I realize this might make me sound like a hypocrite.
What’s more, the impact of T2 can vary wildly depending on what you know about it going into it. Two years ago I treated my 14-year-old son to a double feature of The Terminator and Terminator 2. He was vaguely familiar with the “the Terminator is an unstoppable killer robot from the future” concept, but unlike all of us when T2 was released, he did not know that Schwarzenegger’s character was a good guy in this one. So the moment in the hallway where he saves John and fights the T-1000 was a literal jaw-dropper for him. Afterward he declared that T2 was now his favorite movie of all time.
That’s just good parenting right there.
I always wondered why they gave away the “Arnold is now a good guy” twist in all the hype leading up to the movie. Maybe the hype was so much that they figured they couldn’t keep it a secret, or maybe they wanted to market Arnold more as a good guy. But it is a pretty great twist.
It would have been difficult to keep it a secret, especially since so much of the movie involves the T-800 hanging out with John and Sarah and not trying to kill them. You wouldn’t be able to use most of the footage in trailers, and publicity interviews and articles would have had a really difficult time talking about the overall premise without revealing the twist. Honestly, as a kid at the time, it didn’t occur to me that it could have been treated at a spoiler; it wasn’t until years later that someone pointed out that what could have been an effective twist was ruined (probably deliberately) by the marketing. I’d be curious to know what Cameron thought of it; for all we know it was his idea.
While I don’t have any evidence to back it up, I just assumed Cameron had the Robert Zemeckis attitude – “I don’t give a shit if the trailers ruin the movie if it makes people see the movie!”
Guns N Roses needed to make a video, man.
Honestly, I think it was just that this was Arnie one year out from Kindergarten Cop. He’d been playing the hero for almost a decade by this point. It would have been a bigger twist if he actually had been the villain again, IMO.
but unlike all of us when T2 was released, he did not know that
Schwarzenegger’s character was a good guy in this one. So the moment in
the hallway where he saves John and fights the T-1000 was a literal jaw-dropper for him.
They really screwed up with that trailer & the pre-release publicity. One of the greatest cinematic reveals, ruined.
Afterward he declared that T2 was now his favorite movie of all time.
It’s still mine, 19 years after seeing it.
That would be the ideal way to watch the movie. Unfortunately, the press blitz in the months and weeks before the movie came out ruined it. But the movie itself keeps the twist close to the vest up until the actual moment. Devoid of “real world” context, it’s great.
You’re a good parent.
That’s just good parenting right there.edit: and now I see bfred made literally the exact same comment, ha! I rmember T2 was the first R-rated movie my parents let me see (to their knowledge) when I was like 8 or 9 years old. They skipped the gorier scenes like T-1000 stabbing people, but they were so impressed by the movie and new I loved sci-fi enough that they let me see most of it and it blew me away.
oh man that’s so cool. you must have had such good secondhand vibes from that.
It made up for when I showed him Star Wars when he was younger and instead of being all excited, he kind of shrugged. That was when I learned not to set my expectations too high for how my kids would react to things that I loved as a kid.
If the good guys win in the first movie, do they really need MORE of an advantage in a sequel? Doesn’t it lower the stakes if we’re not worried about the protector getting killed, as happened with Reese in the original?The original has some horror elements, but I say is ultimately an action rather than a horror movie. If it was just Sarah being chased by a robot, it would be horror, but we also have the POV of Reese, who’s familiar with Terminators, having fought and killed them before (albeit with laser weapons). Plus, it has gunfights, car chases & explosions.
If the good guys win in the first movie, do they really need MORE of an advantage in a sequel?Yes, because in this case the villain also has more of an advantage. It’s not like it was easy the first time around; Sarah Connor barely beat the first T-800 and had to be hospitalised immediately after, and the T-1000 is clearly superior to the T-800 in every way.
Not unlike the difference between Alien and Aliens.
Hey, everybody! It’s that guy!
Except the 1984 T-800 and the 1991 T-800 were sent back from the future right after each other, so no one there knows that “a guy who looks like Schwarzenegger went on a killing spree.”I’ve always enjoyed my head-canon of Skynet saying “hey R&D, we need a robot that can infiltrate human enclaves, move among them without attracting attention for high-profile assassinations.”“You got it boss. How about this 300lb hulking Austrian monster?”“Maybe I wasn’t clear about the goal here…”
There was a deleted scene in Terminator 3 that revealed that the T-800 was modeled after a guy named Sgt. Candy, who was just Arnold dubbed over with a Texas accent.
“I’ll be back … y’all.” ?
I saw that scene. It was deleted? Maybe I saw it on youtube?
I hope you mean ‘dubbed over’ in the literal sense, because there’s an endearing hilarious quality to Arnold Schwarzenegger not being able to act an American accent to save his life, to the point that they just dubbed over it like it was animation.
The ordering of when they were sent back doesn’t entirely make sense, since the first film established that Tech-Com had destroyed Skynet and only one machine was sent back in a last ditch attempt. If they had more machines to send back, they could have done so rather than sending another years later (when if anything technological advances would reduce its advantage). We also know from the original that John Conner DOES know about what Skynet sent back: he picked Reese (and had given him Sarah’s photo earlier) because Sarah knew what happened and told her son.
But the second film retcons the first into “did we say one, we meant TWO!”
They didn’t send them back years later; they sent them all at once, but staggered their arrival at different points in the timeline in case any of the others failed. You gotta think non-linear, baby!
Yeah. If you send them all back at once, then you get a Rick & Morty time traveling snake situation.
Cameron himself has admitted to the casting of Arnold totally undoes the terminator’s effectiveness as an “infiltration” unit, but he felt that was a small price to pay.
That’s the thing with Cameron. He knows. He always knows. He’s an incredibly intelligent filmmaker. But he’s also savvy. Small price to pay is right.
One would hope he’d understand his own mythology at the very least!
I think you may be thinking about it to hard
I have always thought too hard about the killer characteristic of the T-1000 — the liquid metal composite reassembly power it has.I know my problem with T2 is inconsistent with the way I have no problem with all kinds of pseudo-tech, such as Vision in the Avengers movies or the teleporters in Star Trek. But the idea that a liquid could somehow flow and reassemble itself into a cyborg has always made me laugh. As in, somehow I could melt my vanilla fudge swirl ice cream in the microwave and have it refreeze back to exactly the way it was? Definitely impossible unlike the way that dematerializing in a spaceship and rematerializing on a planet’s surface is totally plausible.
What it’s made out of and how it could possibly work is really interesting, because it’s not only as malleable as liquid yet hard when needed, but also has color/texture changing properties as well.
It could not possibly work. It’s nuts, No way. I’ve seen stupid speculation about how it could, but forget it. The most advanced alien civilization ever could not create a ballpoint pen that could be frozen with liquid nitrogen, smashed into a thousand pieces, and then flow back together in the correct clicked or unclicked state.
Of course, I have no problem suspending disbelief and accepting that an alien baby could land on earth and become a flying, unbreakable, super strong, eye laser shooting thing that looks exactly like a human man person. I can’t say I’m consistent.
Nanobots. Or a wizard did it. Or a wizard with nanobots in his mouth and when he casts spells he shoots nanobots at you. Or it was just a robotic Richard Simmons.
I think anything would be frozen by liquid nitrogen, right? So the really remarkable part is that it comes back together once it’s been divided into a thousand pieces. The freezing part is just how the movie achieved that shattering end. Whatever the T1000 is, it doesn’t seem to have a correct state, so the organization/order of it coming back together doesn’t seem to matter. I wonder if “liquid” is just a nickname for whatever the technology is, because of how it looks like when it’s moving. Maybe it’s just actually microscopic nanites?
The only way it vaguely makes sense is if you assume, like you said, that it “doesn’t have a correct state” – any part of the blob can be anything. One of my favorite brief effects gags in the movie is when Arnold slams the T-1000 face-first against a wall, and instead of trying to turn around, it just re-forms with everything facing the other way.That means it doesn’t have a skull with chips in it either, so presumably the whole thing is its brain. Something like that wouldn’t have much in common with the regular robots, which was one of the better ideas in the TV show– Skynet didn’t really understand what it had invented and didn’t have very good control over these things.
The T-1000 starts malfunctioning after the liquid nitrogen scene. It’s shown glitching while it pursues them.
If you are really straining for an “explanation”, just go with “nanotech.” It’s magic technology that an do anything the plot requires!
The original script had terrible pacing issues though. Not to mention that when the T1000 forms a chrysalis and slowly metamorphoses into a new shape it would be rather vulnerable.
A wizard did it.
I don’t know, think about how the gates on a microprocessor are moved with electrical impulses. An infinitely smart AI could conceivably (within movieland) design materials that could align and realign based upon signals from different impulses.We all good with this? Excellent. On with the time-traveling robot show!
Read “the physics of star trek” if you want your “plausibility” shattered on the nature of transporters.
It wasn’t the household buzzword it’s become in 21st century genre fiction, but I’m sure Cameron had nanotechnology in mind as underlying the T-1000. Drexler’s Engines of Creation was published in 1986, and I’m sure Cameron is geeky enough to have heard about it in timely fashion. It may even have influenced his conception of the T-1000’s immediate SFX ancestor, the “water tentacle” in 1989’s The Abyss.The T-1000 is “liquid” in the sense that if flows, but its melting and flowing isn’t chaotic like your vanilla fudge swirl — it’s a mass of microscopic or sub-microscopic machines working in coordinated fashion. That’s why freezing it didn’t destroy it, but throwing it into a mass of molten metal did.As genre rubber science goes, it actually seems a lot more plausible to me than disintegrating and reassembling people over distances of thousands of miles in seconds from a single console in your spaceship.
I think your critique of why it’s an Arnold model again is a bit ridiculous and not worth noting at all. Here’s an easy one for you, maybe it’s the only T800 they had lying around? That they were forced to send a T800 that looked like the model that had terrorized Sarah and wrecked havoc in Souther California a decade earlier really evoked for me the desperation the humans were under in this new front for their future war, and not some plot hole. There’s no way they were going to recast their biggest star, and having him play the hero created so many more cool story moments then having him be the villain again.
Yeah, it’s not like they could stroll into the T-800 showroom and get a deal on a non-Arnie model…
From what I recall this is somewhat the case. Skynet was actually about to lose the war so it sent the T-800 back to kill Sarah Connor and prevent John from being born but it also sent back the T-1000 to kill John. The T-1000 was a prototype and the only one of its kind, which is why one wasn’t sent back to kill Sarah, and the resistance reprogrammed a T-800 because it was all they had. So both sides were a little desperate at that moment.
I liked the third more than most (I am a sucker for depressing ending because the studios rarely let it happen), but there is no way it was better than T2. The effects, the action, even the story is solid. When the T-800 comes back it is like 16 years later, so no one outside of Sarah and a few others even remembers what he looked liked.
There you are!!! It’s Friday! What’s my mirthless little milkshake mad about today?
In T3 it actually makes sense that they’d use the Arnold model: John had positive associations with it (which made it easier for that model to kill him).Terminator 3 came out roughly a decade after T2, which was itself a less delayed sequel. I guess if you add up those two time periods it makes for nearly two decades, but plenty of people would have recognized the T-800 from when he kneecapped all those cops a decade prior in T2.
LOL! I can’t even remember the guy from 3 years ago that killed 50 in the Las Vegas Shooting and I was there! Maybe everyone has a better memory than me.
There you are!!! It’s Friday! What’s my mirthless little milkshake mad about today?
There you are!!! It’s Friday! What’s my mirthless little milkshake mad about today?
I have an appreciation for the twist of outright stating an unexpected ending right away and then slowly building toward the moment where it coalesces. I don’t think I’ve seen T3 more than once, but I remember thinking it did that pretty well.
Skynet didn’t send the T-800 back, the resistance did, and they used the one they had access to. I can’t imagine those things are easy to capture and reprogram.
That’s interesting, because it always struck me how different this film is from the original—right down to the basic mechanics of the sci-fi universe, which are basically incompatible with the original. It doesn’t really make sense to end one movie with the revelation that time travel has only succeeded in bringing about the future you were trying to change, and then have the next movie be about how, never mind, you actually can change the future after all.But that discrepancy highlights the larger thematic difference between the two movies. T1 is very much a film of the late Cold War, about how the future is going to be dark and dangerous and the best we can do is arm ourselves physically and mentally to be ready for it. On the other hand, T2 is the quintessential early-’90s movie, about how, waitaminnit, maybe it doesn’t all have to end with war and destruction, and if we take the time to understand our enemies, maybe they can become our friends.
The context of the Cold War is rather important in that Skynet is supposed to be the result of the defense system going haywire, which was less relevant after the end of M.A.D. T3 tries to explain it as still happening due to runaway A.I.One of the impressive things about the original is how well everything fits together at the end. Which to me makes it extra annoying that the sequel messes that up.
I don’t think that aesop really works for T2: the T-800 isn’t changed by “taking the time to understand it” but some offscreen reprogramming. And the T-1000 doesn’t become anyone’s friend, they just destroy it like in the first movie. The tv series does add some complexity via enemy-of-my-enemy. And now I’m sad again that Josh Friedman was replaced by Graeme Manson on the Snowpiercer series.
Yeah, I didn’t mean to suggest that it was intended as a coherent sociopolitical fable; it’s still an action movie where the good guys have to blow up the bad guys. It’s more just that the film reflected the things that were pinging around the collective unconscious at the time. I think Cameron has even talked about how he knew the original movie ended with the clear message that the future can’t be changed, but as he set about conceiving of the sequel, he had the sense of, like, OK, but what if it can?
And there are definitely echoes of the kinder, gentler ’90s in Sarah’s closing narration: “The unknown future rolls toward us. I face it, for the first time, with a sense of hope. Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.”Agreed about Josh Friedman and The Sarah Connor Chronicles, though. Honestly, I wish we’d gotten the version of that series sans network meddling—where they didn’t have to keep doing Terminator-of-the-week storylines that muddied up the premise, and Friedman was allowed to pursue his original concept of Brian Austin Green’s character, who was apparently originally supposed to be the Kyle Reese from the most recent version of the future. I would’ve loved for the show to explore the time-bending existentialism of a character who has to reckon with the fact that he never got to achieve his destiny or find the love of his life, because a different version of him from another timeline got there first.
I hadn’t heard of that alternate version. But I didn’t mind the version we did get either (although they basically undid Sarah’s arc, making her the least interesting recurring character). And as soon as T2 opened the door to multiple Terminators, why wouldn’t there be a Terminator of the week?
I think I was 17 when T2 came out. Saw it in the theater and as soon as Arnold stepped out of the biker bar, put on his shades and “Bad to the Bone” started up, I remember thinking “Oh no. This isn’t the Terminator movie I want.”
T1 is definitely better, but come on, T3, while not without its charms, is obviously not.And you can chalk up the resemblance to the fact that, sure, while not all Terminators look the same, the resistance didn’t exactly have their choice of models. They grabbed whatever was available and went with that. Silly coincidence, but it hardly breaks the movie’s logic.
To me T2 adds nothing to the original but a bigger budget & special effects, while otherwise making things worse. T3 tries to repair some of the damage done by T2 and does some things slightly different from the prior entries.
T3 deserves more love. It is exactly the 3rd best Terminator movie. It has better action than the sequels that followed it, and a better overarching theme. It also has Claire Danes. She really shouldn’t be in a movie like this, but I’m glad she is 🙂
To me this film is the perfect example of a competent but unnecessary sequel. I really like the first one. Possibly James Cameron’s best film. T2 is bigger and longer, but…is it actually deeper? Does it actually say all that much that the first film didn’t say? Maybe the question as the whether there can be a good terminator is an interesting one, but I still feel like this film doesn’t have enough ideas to justify its existence. But most people I know consider it at least as good as the original and possibly better.As a side note, I watched the first season of T2: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and liked it. I’ll watch the rest when I get the chance.
The second season is longer and more episodic, but still worth watching (even if it the ending is a setup for another season that never happened).
May be missing something but it’s not like adult Jon Connor had full access to the T-800 factory, my assumption had always been that they only had one T-800 that they captured and reprogrammed and that they had to work with what they got.
The third? The third?!?!!?!?!???!?!
Yup. It tries to repair some of the damage done be #2, and zigs where the previous movies zagged, culminating in a very different ending.
James Cameron, on the other hand, would go on to make a couple of movies that were even bigger than Terminator 2.Like T2-3d: Battle Across Time, the last Terminator movie James Cameron ever directed and it was made for a theme park.
I miss T2-3D. It was a lot of fun at Universal.
It’s still at Universal Studios Japan.
I am aware. I am a theme park junky :)But the chances of me getting to Japan soon are very low. My wife and I have a promise to go and do a country wide Saki and theme park tour but it can’t happen until our kids are old enough to be left alone, so I am looking at tens years away at the minimum. I so want to see Tokyo Disney Sea, I hear its amazing
Tokyo Disney Sea is pretty good. It has the best food of all the parks that aren’t EPCOT.
You’re planning to go tour theme parks in a country that’s almost a theme park in itself and you’re leaving the kids at home!?That is probably the coldest thing I have ever heard….
Well it’s the Sake tour that probably won’t be kid appropriate. And I can’t afford a trip to four to Japan. And it’s sorta a planned second honeymoon once the kids are older. And I want to have fun myself dammit!
Ah yes. The T-1,000,000. The Super Duper Liquid Metal Robot Monster.
That was so good I came out and lined up to see it again. And I still have most of the stuff I bought in the souvenir shop. My Cyberdyne mug is my favorite.
Got to agree with Mr. Breihan’s thoughts on Schwarzenegger. He may not exactly be the most versatile actor, but there are very few actors who could play any of his most iconic roles with anything approaching the same degree of physical presence as him.
Yeah, Arnold is an utterly unique presence as Tom has it.
The Rock is a modern day Schwarzenegger with a tiny bit more acting ability.
There you are!!! It’s Friday! What’s my mirthless little milkshake mad about today?
The Rock is probably the only current star I can think of who would make a great Terminator. Makes one wonder…
But he won’t play villains.
It is curious to me that he signed on for Black Adam only if they made the character more of an anti hero. (Who is Shazam gonna fight? DC really needs to get their- getting off topic) That really is a huge shame. The Rock was a brilliant bad guy in wrestling
I would argue he became a pretty capable actor…but there’s *plenty* of other capable actors, very few charismatic Teutonic strongmen.
This may be my favorite Arnold thing EVER. The guy flies through the air to just bounce off, while 70 year-old Schwarzenegger barely moves and just looks more bewildered than anything.
Here’s my favorite:Support a children’s charity by paying money to drive around crushing things with Arnold in his tank!
And it’s pretty much been proven. The Terminator, Predator and Conan movies they tried to make without him as the star, all blew.
I’m not saying this to downplay Arnold’s importance as lead in those franchises, but it’s also true that those non-Arnold sequels were bad movies for other reasons.
I’m going to have to call for an arbitration on Predator 2 because that was still an outstanding B-Movie as thought by many of us out there.
I’d argue that at least one Terminator film they made *with* him managed to be worse than the one they made without him. Don’t get me wrong, Salvation is mostly a dull bore but it at least has Anton Yelchin as Reese. Genysis is just truly fucking awful (I haven’t seen Dark Fate yet).
There are a lot of great actors of limited range. Keanu Reeves, Steve McQueen, and Marilyn Monroe come to mind.
To this very day I still remember where I was when I first saw Terminator 2. I was in a movie theater.
What the hell is a movie theater, grandpa?
That’s where us youths would go to get to second base.
Which at the time was defined as allowing your clothed elbows to rest against each other.
“That could’ve been anyone’s elbow!” ~ Mayor Quimby, 1928
It’s a kind of death factory where you go if you want to die horribly of the plague.
Having been to the movies three times in the last month I don’t think that’s what it is.
Okay, I’ll bite: where the hell are you going to the movies???
I say this as someone who can’t WAIT to get back to the movies. Feels like it’s gonna be a long time yet (here in Portland, Oregon).
The local theater here in north Idaho has been re-opened since mid-June. It’s showing nostalgia stuff; I’ve seen Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Back To The Future, and The Two Towers. The most people at any of the showings was maybe 11 at Two Towers.
Yea it’s great but that kid, so fucking annoying. I got at least 4 Arnie movies ahead of T2.
I remember greatly admiring Furlong’s hair as, topped only by River Phoenix’s in Last Crusade. I looked nothing like those two, so getting either haircut would have been equivalent to all those guys wearing copies of Ryan Gosling’s silk scorpion jacket from Drive.
I always get a chuckle out of River Phoenix in Last Crusade. A teenager in 1912 is going to have THAT haircut? Also apparently he is supposed to be 13 at the beginning. Just like Furlong is supposed to be 10 in T2.
John Connor’s age in T2 really made no sense to me. It never came across clearly that he was meant to 10 in that film. Fun film, but trying to make sense of the timeline was a bit confusing.
Wikipedia says he’s supposed to be 10 and there’s probably a computer readout you can freeze-frame that lists his birthdate as 1985, but I don’t think the story ever reads as him being less than 12 or 13, which lines up with Furlong’s age during shooting. Terminator 3 retcons it so that John’s older during the events of T2, (an 8th grader, instead of the 4th or 5th grader he’d be at age 10).
The movie takes place in 1995.
I just assumed the Jones’ lived in a dusty, remote Utah town with limited access to barber shops.Now why a supposedly renowned university professor was living in a remote Utah village is a mystery the movie fails to explain.
Man, the story of Furlong’s life post-Terminator is real depressing, but at least his hair had that moment of glory.
Did he at least get paid for Dark Fate?
30 years later, that haircut’s now “The Karen”.
As a teen in the early 90’s I DESPERATELY wanted those 90’s swoopy bangs, but I had (and continue to have) corkscrew curls, and my efforts to straighten them just made my head look like a mushroom.
At our age, be thankful for whatever decided to stick around.
I got his haircut after seeing the movie! I also wanted to change my name to ‘Mondo’. Ahh, I miss you, 90s.
Really? I don’t know if I could think of 4 better. Possibly Predator, and I’d say Total Recall is equal, but other Arnie movies don’t seem better to me.
Total Recall is and has been my go-to movie for when I just don’t want to start a new series or film. It’s total brain candy, it’s over the top, and it’s awesome. I swear I have probably had it on the TV/PC at least a hundred times now. T2 is underrated though. Pretty sure I saw it in the theater with my dad when it came out (so I was like 15-16?) and it was everything it promised. Amazingly, it seems like the CGI has essentially held up in the 30 years since it came out. For reference, take a look at Spawn, which came out years later and (aside from the story) the graphics are trash.
your 2 + Conan (Barbarian, NOT Destroyer) would be all I’d need
Predator is not better than T2, but Total Recall definitely is. Terminator 1 is easily superior to T2.
Hard disagree but I think T1 does better with folks who have good taste and are film critics. I realize it might be trash but I loved T2 way more.
T2 isn’t “Trash” by any stretch. It’s very entertaining, but it’s basically a straight up retread of the original with updated effects. No sin in liking it!
True Lies*runs away*
Predator, Commando, Terminator & Total Recall?
True Lies, Twins, Commando and The Last Action Hero.
Yup, can even throw The Running Man in there. It’s so much fun and Dawson is amazing. Jesse the Body, Jim Brown, Mick Fleetwood?! Infinitely rewatchable. T2 was amazing but just doesn’t hold up (for me). Largely due to the kid.
Yeah but how much better would The Running Man have been if they’d just stuck to the original short story? Think about the constant paranoia of trying to navigate the game with literally the entire country trying to kill you. It could have been an incredibly tense, twisty film. Instead you got a video game.
Arnold & Dawson could not have pulled that off. All the characters were cartoons, it had to be a video game. That would make a great movie but would need serious actors.
That’s true – once they cast Arnold there really wasn’t much of an option. Another film wouldn’t have needed Dawson.
COMMANDO? Seriously, Commando? It was entertaining in a “this is completely fucking stupid” manner, but it is nowhere near as good a movie as T2.
I get what you’re saying of course but I’d argue that the time travelling robots movie is actually more stupid 🙂
Yes! Running Man is amazing!“Now just plain zero.”
Yes! Running Man is amazing!“Now just plain zero.”
Total Recall is legit, I can’t argue with anyone who says it’s Arnold’s best movie. I can also see an argument for Terminator and Conan if you prefer the straight forward simplicity of his performances in those movies. I can’t put Predator or Commando over T2 though. IMO both of those are remembered more fondly than they deserve to be (especially Commando). Predator is a decent 80’s action flick but nothing really great, and Commando is fun but absolutely ridiculous. I love it as much as the next 80’s kid, but objectively it’s not a great movie.
I just rewatched Commando the other day and I didn’t see it for the first time until my late 20s, so no kid nostalgia for me — it fucking rules. The violence is casually bloody (as opposed to the squib-happy and also great Total Recall) and lots of fun, the performances may be over the top but are totally appropriate to the tone, and for all its silliness the movie has zero bullshit, it never stops moving and doesn’t waste time on backstory or “developing” character, characters take actions and that’s all the damn development needed. I think it’s the quintessential Arnold movie of the time, as a star he is great in other movies but is heavily complemented by special effects (T2) or a similarly iconic villain (Predator) or a setting/tone that pushes back on his persona (Total Recall), and in the original Terminator he’s the bad guy. Commando is just Arnold kicking ass. I admire its purity.
Commando is a great 80’s action movie, but there are several ways in which it’s clearly inferior to T2. The stunts and effects alone are miles apart in quality. Commando has so many laughably cheesy stunts that they are almost part of the apeal – I’m thinking of stuff where Arnold throws a grenade at someone, there’s an explosion five feet away from him and the stunt man goes flying in the air. The craftsman ship is just not on par with what Cameron did with T2But that said, you are correct, Commando is probaly the most “Schwarzenegger” of all the Schwarzenegger 80’s action flicks, and it has the best cheesy one liners as well. It’s great in it’s own way.
Oh, the stunts in T2 are incredible, as an action movie it’s definitely better than Commando. (Although Commando’s action chops are solid for all their cheese, the fight in the mall is staged a lot more interestingly than your standard shoot-up in an office building, and he gets to chop some dudes up at the end.) Most Scharzenegger is the best way to describe it — in T2, Arnold’s presence is what the effects are hung around, in Commando Arnold’s presence is the effect.
Also the whole end sequence at the end of Commando where Arnold guns down Bennett’s army of mooks is boring/repetitive in its staging. Its one of my go to examples for how NOT to direct an exciting action sequence. He just stands out in the open firing wildly, cut to bad guys falling over, cut back to Arnie firing wildly, cut back to bad guys falling over, repeat for 5 minutes. No use of cover or the environment, no individual stand offs or kills that stick in your mind, no dynamic camera work, just invincible good guy firing infinite bullets until all the generic bad guys are dead.
Thats exactly why my dad has always disliked Commando despite loving Arnie movies. As a kid he said, “Arnold just stands there and mows down dozens of guys without moving and they never seem to get off a shot even close to him”
I hear you, but it’s still hilarious
Also Arnold and that deer!
With you on Commando, but how dare you side-mouth Predator like that. Predator is a fantastic 80’s action flick.
What’s great about ALL these movies are the effects. T2 looks far better than much of what we see today, 30 years later, plus CG still can’t begin to compete with practical. There’s a making of that shows Schwarzenegger and Furlong being lowered on the motorcycle into the drainage culvert, where all they did was speed it up a bit and digitally remove the cables. Honestly, isn’t that easier than some weightless CGI recreation?
Yes, Predator is definitely one the best 8o’s action flicks, I just don’t think it quite matches up with T2. I should probably give that one a re-watch, I think it’s been several years since the last time I saw it.
Commando’s fun, but there’s no way on Earth I’d rate it higher than T2.
Swap True Lies for Commando. Don’t get me wrong, Commando is great fun, but it’s not a great movie.
I like Terminator more, but think the other movies are slightly lesser efforts.
Commando is terrible.
Conan belongs on that list too, although I wouldn’t say its better than T2 ( in fact, I’d only put it ahead of Commando on your list).
Also, all those psychiatrists were absolutely correct to be keeping Sarah Connor in psychiatric care, that woman was nuts.
All these replies and not ONE mention of Hercules in New York?!?! i am disappointed in you all. It was Arnold’s FIRST acting role a full 12 years before Conan and his english was so BAD they dubbed his entire character. I have it on DVD and you can switch between dubed and regular.Now THAT is classic cinema my friends.
Pfft it’s no Stay Hungry.
Last time I rewatched T2 I had forgotten how bad Furlong is in it, and was immediately reminded, but God damn Robert Patrick makes up for it.
Furlong is bad, but before reading this article I never really thought about how impossible it would have been for any tween/teen to play the role as written by Cameron. The script just puts too much on John’s plate. You’re asking a child actor to play all these contradictions simultaneously — he’s both a delinquent and future-Jesus, he’s a walking plot device and exposition machine who’s also supposed to be the heart and soul of the movie, and he’s meant to be relatable to the teens of 1991 but he talks like Poochie because his dialogue was written by a guy in his late-30’s who didn’t have any children at the time of production.It’s an unplayable role. Furlong did better than Jake Lloyd or Hayden Christensen, whose characterizations have the same problem.
Good point, the script does pretty much preclude getting an actually good performance from anyone in the role. That said, Furlong’s complete lack of experience is painfully visible. The weakness of the character as written is compounded by his awful delivery and total lack of presence (which is only further highlighted by sharing the screen with Linda Hamilton’s new physique and Arnold, who is all presence). Furlong would eventually get more comfortable on-camera in later roles but I don’t think his line readings ever improved.
Lloyd and Christensen were also working with a Director with minimal interest in actually directing performances. He didn’t do Natalie Portman any favors either.
Eh, yeah I mean he is annoying, but I can’t imagine this movie without Eddie Furlong. When I was a kid, I thought he was kinda badass. Rode a dirt bike, smoked cigarettes, loved Guns n’ Roses. All very, very cool things to my 10 year old self.
That’s all true but the exact reason it does not hold up for me. It’s a kids movie.
I get some of the complaints about Furlong, and yeah some of the lines were clunky (which the article rightfully points out weren’t his fault)…but I actually still like his portrayal. If I can be a bit snooty, he brought sort of an Italian neorealism-ness to the role.He may not be a polished or accomplished actor, but Furlong absolutely felt like the degenerates I hung with at my local arcade. That “feel” was totally critical to the role for me. He wasn’t acting like a young punk, he was in fact that person. Too many kid actors are too good for their own good. They’re precocious creatures reading grownup lines they could never muster on their own. Even if they do it well, I still prefer a bit more realism.
It’s not just that he’s annoying, but that he also has no arc. Sarah in the original needs to turn into the legendary figure she’s told about but can’t reconcile with the ordinary person she starts out as. John was similarly supposed to grow up to be an important person, but the film is about preventing that future from coming about (which would also mean that the first film couldn’t have happened), so he remains the same annoying kid to the end.
I always stop and watch the original Terminator if it’s on cable but have no interest in ever seeing T2 again. The original is legitimately scary even if I know everything that’s going to happen, the low budget nature just increases the paranoia. That movie succeeds in doing something none of the sequels are able to do which is really make you feel humanity is doomed and the machines will win. T2 just feels pandering, it’s right to say it’s a kid’s movie. It’s as threatening as Home Alone and you know from moment one the characters aren’t in any real danger.
I’m surprised Conan isn’t making any of these top 4 lists though… It’s pretty great for what it is.
4 Arnie movies ahead of T2:Conan the Barbarian
The Terminator
Commando
Predator
Furlong’s voice also changed during filming, and they ended up having to have him re-record all his lines in post. So he starts as an inexperienced actor, and then is forced to be an inexperienced voice-actor and ADR much of the movie. For years, I really hated his performance, and once I found out about the ADR, I understood. Still the worst part about the movie for me, though.
Maybe it’s because of how LA T2 is, but I love T2. One of my middle school years our illegal HBO played it constantly. I wore that movie out that summer and it still stays with me. I love Action Movies for me with Arnold I’d go T2, Commando, The Running Man, Predator, Total Recall, T1.
I also saw T2 at a sleepover less than a year after it came out. My parents had been trying to keep me from seeing too many R-rated movies, but after that they threw their hands up and let me watch pretty much whatever gross shit I wanted.
So Terminator 2, Beauty & the Beast, and Silence of the Lambs all came out the same year?*looks up list of 1991 movies*Huh, that was a pretty good year for the cinema.
The early 90s were great for music too. Gen X finally had its hands on some disposable income.
Yeah, it was an awesome year for the stuff that wasn’t conventional Oscar bait, wasn’t it? That’s definitely one of those years that was stronger on popcorn fare.
Great movie that still could have done with a bit less “now i know why you’re crying” and a lot less “this robot would be the perfect father”. Because, yeah, frankly, no, seriously, I mean.
Not merely “this robot” but “this TERMINATOR”.
(I always loved how Schwarzenegger would be willing to play someone like the small-town sheriff of 1986’s Raw Deal, and how the movie would make no attempt to explain how this giant motherfucker with the accent ended up there.)
See also Sean Connery who has his Scottish accent while playing an immortal Spaniard/Egyptian or a Soviet Lithuanian submarine captain. It was actually a shock in The Presidio where they actually attempted to justify why a US Army officer would have that accent by making him explicitly the son of a Scottish immigrant.
And when he half tries, you get the abomination of his Irish accent in The Untouchables.
Even then…it’s Connery doing his cranky badass thing. That movie’s so fun I barely notice the accent.
My opinion is that T2 may be the best paced(and maybe just best) action movie ever made. It hits the ground running and just moves the whole time. Very little time is wasted and it just moves to awesome set piece after awesome set piece.
I saw this in the theater as part of a birthday party. In 4th grade. All the parents were amazingly fine with it. I had bad dreams about the nuke dream for like a week. Still love this movie.
It had a grander scale, a more ambitious premise, and a small army of stunt professionals and special-effects technicians.
This is true but also confounding, in the wake of what big-budget
movies became after its success.
The two Terminators hunt for John;
having found him, John and the T-800 rescue Sarah; they gear up and
decide to hunt Dyson; Dyson helps them raid Cyberdyne; The team escapes from the T-1000 and wind up
in the steel plant. That’s it! It was the biggest movie ever made, and despite being about two time-traveling robots engaged in mortal combat it has only a handful of plot beats, maybe a dozen named characters and barely leaves LA. In this era where Marvel’s vast pantheon of gods and monsters can’t have an adventure without layovers in at least one American metropolis, Europe and East Asia, T2 seems downright quaint.
The beats are mostly taken from the original film.
On the show they went to Mexico. That’s about as international as Terminator got, lol.
glad you noted it was, for all intents and purposes, a kids movie. part of that weird period where hard r rated movies would have accompanying toy lines for children (this was long before adult toy collecting ubiquity)now, if you were a kid when this movie came out john connor was not annoying – he was the coolest kid alive. the public enemy tee, the army jacket, driving his dirt bike to the mall, the atari computer and the delicious swear words. he was aspirational.
Glad someone else mentioned this. Who could forget this?
It really makes no sense that Skynet would send a T-800 back to kill Sarah, and when they realized that failed (which should have been instantaneous) then they send the much more powerful T-1000 back to kill John. Why not send the more powerful Terminator the first time? What are they saving him for?Of course this has everything to do with moviemaking technology available in 1984 and 1991, but this always stands out to me whenever I watch T2.
The idea for the first movie came long way before the second.
Uh, yeah, I know that when Cameron made T1 he didn’t have T2 planned at all (or know that he would eventually make it). But when he started writing the sequel and knew that the evil terminator here would be more powerful, it would have made sense to come up with a reason within the story why this terminator wasn’t sent back to kill Sarah in 1984.
I always assumed the sequence of events was 1) Skynet queues both the T-800 and the T-1000 to go back in time, 2) the resistance captures the time travel facility and adds Reese and the reprogrammed T-800 to the queue, 3) all four travelers are sent back in time simultaneously, and 4) the resistance destroys the facility. I don’t think there was a point where Skynet was still in control and the first time displacement even had already occurred; if there were, wouldn’t the original T-800 have gotten to the past “first” and wiped out the resistance before they even had the chance to send Reese back?(Now, this is assuming we’re following the “history is mutable” model of the second movie. The first movie suggests that you can’t change history, as your actions in the past will only bring about the original future, in which case Skynet’s actions were always going to be futile, they just didn’t realize it until they sent the first T-800 back and nothing changed.)
The plan should have been “Send the T-1000 to the 1920s to kill Sarah’s grandfather.” Would have been a cakewalk.
In the first movie he didn’t even know who Sarah Connor was, he just started going through the phonebook. And since odds were her grandfather in the 1920s didn’t have a phone and made all his calls on the payphone next to the shoeshine stand in the train station, the Terminator would have had to kill everyone in the station making a call. Very inefficient.The nitpicky problem I have about the first movie is that it was very common for single women to have unlisted phone numbers in the 1980s to avoid getting calls from weirdos, so why was it doing this at all? Seems like it would make much more sense to have a contest with a million dollar prize for the best Sarah Connor, lure them all onto a 747, and then crash it into the Pacific. James Cameron should have talked to me firsr.
I remember I had a Cameron Grand Unification Theory tying “Terminator 2″ and “Titanic” together. The Jenette Goldstein character in Titanic (the poor Irish immigrant mother) was an ancestor of the Connor family (I forget if Sarah Conner and Janelle Voight were related by blood, but let’s go with that). David Warner’s character was murdered and replaced by the Terminator sent back to find her at some point during the movie. Of course all this action took place off-camera but it’s a movie I’d love to see someday.
Skynet also runs the risk of jeopardizing its own future if it goes back too far, though. There’s a fun episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles where a Terminator is supposed to assassinate a guy in a hotel in the 2010s, but he gets sent back to the 1920s by mistake and accidentally kills the guy who was going to build the hotel, so he has to became a developer himself to ensure that the hotel gets built and keep his mission on track.
One of my favorite things about the TSCC series was the way it framed the time-travel shenanigans as a complex strategy game where it’s less about securing one decisive victory that rewrites the entire timeline and more about tweaking both your enemy’s history and your own to gain an advantage in the future.
‘Time wars’ is a fairly common idea in SF, such as Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time and Poul Anderson’s The Corridors of Time.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles had some amazing storytelling vision, especially in how there were multiple human and machine factions with all sorts of alliances including human and machine against other humans and machines. Not to mention all the different agendas each faction had.I always figured in the end Skynet and the humans would have to come to a peace treaty given the number of different timelines there were (and new ones springing up) such that it seemed like there was no way anyone could ever win a decisive victory – especially given how you’d have people and machines from one dropping into the past to keep throwing wrenches into things.
That theory makes sense, but T2 doesn’t agree with you. Sarah’s (?) voiceover at the start of T2 says that Skynet sent a terminator back in time to kill her, and when that didn’t work, they sent another terminator back to kill John as a boy.Yes, this is Sarah as the omniscient narrator, how would she know what Skynet was thinking? I think the film is saying that Sarah’s narration is her talking at the end of the movie, after everything has happened. She would have talked to the T-800 a lot over those days and found out everything she could about Skynet, including their plans for sending these terminators back in time to kill her and John.
I just rewatched the voiceover, and it’s not quite that clear-cut. Sarah says: “The computer which controlled the machines, Skynet, sent two Terminators back through time. Their mission: to destroy the leader of the human resistance—John Connor, my son. The first Terminator was programmed to strike at me in the year 1984, before John was born. It failed. The second was set to strike at John himself, when he was still a child.”So there’s no specific confirmation of cause and effect—Terminator #1 failed, so it sent Terminator #2. Sarah does say right after that, “As before, the resistance was able to send a lone warrior, a protector for John,” which maybe implies a sequential relationship between the two missions, but I don’t have too much trouble just chalking that up to the difficulty of speaking clearly about chronological matters in the context of time travel.
I mean, she says “the first” was sent to 1984, and “it failed”. It seems pretty obvious from what she says that Skynet sent a terminator to 1984, it failed, so they sent a second one to target John.
the T-1000 was a prototype. Surely you don’t send your only test Term back in time with realization you’ll never see it again.
Why not? If the terminator that Skynet sends back first kills Sarah in 1984, then the human resistance never exists and Skynet rules unconditionally. What are they saving the T-1000 prototype for? They have a legion of T-800s waiting in the wings in case the T-1000 doesn’t work.
This was also the movie that got young me into Guns N Roses
This is pretty much peak action movie for me. It’s generally been my answer to “best action movie” and “Sequel better than the original” for decades. The only thing that comes close (and on occasion might better if you catch me in the right mood) is Mad Max: Fury Road – another movie that uses a ton of practical effects (I know T2 was sold on it’s CGI, but as mentioned in the article, the kinetic stunts are the highlights)I’m pretty sure I saw this underage, but I think likely on a Blockbuster UK rental, since I rarely went to the movie theater before I moved to the US.This really is peak Arnie. And Robert Patrick is superb as the main T-1000. He’s physicality is just slightly “off” from what you’d expect from a normal human.
T2 is not by any stretch of the imagination better than Terminator.
Agree to disagree on that one. The Terminator is a smart little sci-fi horror movie, but I prefer the flashy action movie style of Terminator 2. I’m the complete inverse with Alien & Aliens though.
Terminator vs. T2 is like Alien vs. Aliens in that it really comes down to genre preference. As a big horror fan, it’s Terminator and Alien for me, but I can see that someone who prefers action would slot T2 and Aliens ahead of the originals.
And I was going to add to limey’s comment about peak action by noting Aliens. Those two are pretty much the platonic ideal of a perfect action film, and only Fury Road really comes close.
Aliens is more enjoyable than Alien, even if it’s not as good of a film, because an unstoppable rape metaphor tearing through space truckers screwed over by their corporate overlords is not intended to be fun. T2 is not really more enjoyable than Terminator, because it has annoying Eddie Furlong and it it leaves you some treacle about “If a robot can learn to have feelings…”
I’ve come back around to liking the first one better. An evil assassin robot from the future is just more interesting than a good guy assassin robot from the future.
Funny point about it being essentially a kids’ movie and perhaps modern kinds not that curious about movies beyond what they’re getting. People have argued a lot about whether movies get away with more these days in their rating blocks, but I would argue that for action-movie intensity (if not necessarily actual violence, especially gory violence), our old big-budget R-rated movies’ current peers are PG-13 movies like, say, Edge Of Tomorrow. Back then, our PG-13 thrill rides were pretty nerfed for this.
This is a good point. I think “Jurassic Park” getting the PG-13 would solidify the shift to family movies = PG-13 (and help kill off the “kid power” movie trend that’s so embarrassing to look back on now) and more leeway being given to the violence that was acceptable with that rating.
By kid power movies, are you talking about stuff like Blank Check?
Yes.
All I remember about that movie is at one point the kid bribed a full grown woman into going on a date with him. Which, what the FUCK.
For the difference with Termiantor 2, I look to RoboCop, which was also popular with kids, but unlike T2, was definitely not for kids. It contains a toally different flavor of violence, (as a child, I was not ready) and I certainly learned at a young age that not all “R”s are created equal.
Counterpoint: They were equally *awesome*, especially at that age.
T2 is fucking amazing. I was right in the bullseye of the target demographic in 1991: 15-year-old suburban white dude, and I went all-in on every aspect of it. The stunt work and effects (both practical and digital) were unbelievable, and folded into the story so well that your immediate response wasn’t “wow, this morphing animation is incredible,” it was “oh my god, he can just walk right through the prison bars! Run, Sarah, run! “These days, it’s not even my favorite Cameron movie (that’d be “Aliens”) or my favorite Arnold flick (probably “Predator”) but at the time I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was glorious to witness the first time, and it’s one of the few movies of my lifetime that left me with an undeniable obligation to go out and tell everyone about it as soon as possible. I’ve only felt that powerful of an urge, that undeniable NEED to preach the gospel of a movie, a handful of times in my life: T2, the first Matrix, and Fury Road.
I like that you mention Fury Road. As you say T2 is a freaking spectacle of awesome and I remember also being blown away when I originally saw it in theaters. Didn’t felt that way for an action flick again until Fury Road. Also pure amazing spectacle.
I think that’s part of why Fury Road gets the adulation it does – they just don’t make movies that feel like that anymore. The gravity, the danger, the spectacle, all of it. Even the better traditional action movies like John Wick don’t have the scale of Fury Road (or its forefathers like T2).
Miller basically does Arthouse Action.
I can’t believe he didn’t mention the GnR soundtrack!
The whole thing is such a perfect snapshot of the early, pre-Nirvana/grunge 90s.
It also gave me undue optimism for “Use Your Illusion,” which turned out to be terrible.
I was just thinking of a line connecting the peak-action-movie-dots from T2 to The Matrix to Fury Road as well.
I was 11 and saw it in theaters. That year was the last year I felt like a kid. Sure, I was a kid for many years after, but that was the last one it felt like I was just a kid, with no adolescent insecurity.
I was 12 and didn’t GAF about action movies but I loved floppy haired boys. I can’t tell you how many times my BFF and I watched this and the “Living on the Edge” video.
I’m from Colombia. I was 12 when this movie came out. My mother took me to see it and I loved every minute of it. My parents didn’t care about me watching violent movies or tv shows and there wasn’t much control in movie theaters at the time in my country.
I find this movie pretty much unwatchable today because of Edward Furlong. I just can’t stand to listen to him squeal out Bart Simpsons-esque catchphrases. It’s too bad, because Linda Hamilton’s performance was epic.Pointless anecdote about my adolescence: the building they blow up in the penultimate set piece was in my hometown. I went to the same high school as Len Wiseman (he was 2 grades ahead of me and dated my best friend for like, 5 minutes), and supposedly he snuck onto the set with a fake ID, pretending to be in craft services or some damn thing. Of course at the time we all thought that was amazingly cool and hilarious.
Did he invite you to any of his sex parties?
I can only assume I wasn’t cool enough.
“She’s gonna blow him away!” Is especially rough. I actually still really enjoy the movie despite Furlong, which I think speaks to how great the rest of it is.
I wish they had switched the two actors, so Budnick had been John Connor and Furlong his buddy.
Tween girls (like me) would not have been as obsessed with the movie if they made that switch. I watch it now because it’s a badass good time. I watched it then for the floppy haired dreamboat.
And that was the last time Len Wiseman was on the set of a good movie!
HEY-O!
One minor gripe about this movie’s legacy: it was one of the first films to have a director’s cut prominently sold on the shelves. While it was cool to see deleted scenes, it led to these versions somehow becoming the default releases when DVD rolled out, and nowadays it’s tough to find the theatrical (and usually superior) cuts on home video.
Similar to the “unrated” versions of early-aughts comedies. The gags they added in were almost always better left in some bonus feature rather than crammed into the movie itself.
Yeah, but I feel that that reversed in the 2010s. The unrated versions of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and We’re the Millers are two of the funniest fucking things I’ve seen in ages (especially the latter).
Also the extended DVD version of Walk Hard that’s like 20-30 minutes longer is great.
I accidentally watched the DVD cut of “Talledaga Nights” and it’s SO MUCH WORSE.
When I watched the T2 director’s cut, I understood where all the extra subplots in the comic version originated.
What I hate most is the stupid fucking “Skynet presets the switch to read-only” scene, which adds a pointlessly literal step to the Terminator’s development as a character, and is inconsistent with the way the T-800s have been presented as far back as the original film, in that the Terminator is obviously learning from his experiences over the course of his mission. He even updates his dialogue options after Bill Paxton introduces him to the phrase “Fuck you, asshole”! The theatrical cut rightly junks this moment, but later iterations put it back in, so it’s become a generally accepted part of the canon even though it sucks.
I can respect that scene’s technical feats and the idea that it’s a moment where Sarah starts to see John as a leader, but yeah… it was unnecessary exposition and it slows the pace down to a halt. It reminds me of the way John Landis described Aykroyd’s original script for The Blues Brothers, a several-hundred-page tome that insisted on explaining (and overexplaining) everything.
T2’s deleted scenes are great and were only cut due to runtime.
Wasn’t the Abyss director’s cut released before T2? Aliens got its directors cut as part of an anniversary re-release later, IIRC, but I remember that Cameron was really upset about the theatrical cut of the Abyss, and I could’ve sworn that the director’s cut came out really close on the heels of the first video release.
Hmm, maybe. I don’t recall the timeline, but you’re right: there was a dust-up over Cameron’s cut of the film vs the studio’s, and I remember some network (NBC?) making a big deal about getting the “world premiere” of the original version (I don’t know if the term “director’s cut” was in regular use back before Blade Runner was re-released.)
Alan “Dutch” Schaefer?Is that in the movie? I thought seeing Predator 120 times would be enough to cement it my memory but I guess I have to watch it again tonight.
I have never, and I expect I will never, be as blown away by a movie’s special effects as I was by this. It was the equivalent of the Wright Brothers following up their Wright Flyer with a Jet. Not as good a film as the Terminator, but ten times the spectacle.
2001, Star Wars and The Matrix would like a word.
The practical effect of 2001 still make most modern films look like crap. Not bad for a 52 year old movie. I know it is sacrilege, and I usually hate remakes, but a 2001 remake that is stripped of the artsy-farty tangents and using all practical effects would make a ton of money.
2001 came out the year I was born, so although your point about its practical effects’ quality is fair, the first time I watched it I didn’t think it was mind-blowing. Star Wars was probably the first major effects-driven film that I saw on the big screen so I didn’t really have much to compare it to (plus it certainly can’t be viewed as a quantum leap beyond 2001, for the reasons you’ve already raised). I can see your argument on The Matrix, but it came out 8 years after T2, so did it really represent a huge leap, or did it just have some different gimmicks to the ones in T2? Plus, for me personally, I never saw it at the cinema, and these things lose a lot when reduced to a TV screen (especially 20 years ago).So I’ll be standing by my post.
Dude, that’s the fake Lizardo.
Gotta be. Prequel-era Star Wars??? Jesus.
Even if was the real one he’d deserve to be flagged for suggesting 2001 be “stripped of the artsy-farty tangents”
Don’t bother, it’s the fake troll account.
Pretty tame for trolling.
He’ll start screaming about girls or gays or black people in a sec. He’s not very good at pretending to be an actual person.
LOL! He Mad!
There you are!!! It’s Sunday! What’s my wicked little watermelon mad about today?
There you are!!! It’s Friday! What’s my mirthless little milkshake mad about today?
Jurassic Park is the only movie that comes close for me.
That and Lord of the Rings for me.
Yeah, Lord of the Rings still looks really good. Much, much better than the Hobbit movies, which came out a decade later. The Hobbit movies look like shit.
The helicopter flying really made my jaw drop in the theaters. As a teenage flight geek, seeing that helicopter go under the freeway overpass was stunning. I immediately thought “that helo pilot is a crazy badass”.
https://filmschoolrejects.com/terminator-2-helicopter-stunt/Absolutely an amazing piece of work.
I agree with this, and the analogy works for me. It felt like Cameron was reinventing cinema before our very eyes.
You mentioned his good luck and good advice. He didn’t always have good advice. The way he tells the story, everybody told him not to do Terminator because if he wanted to become a brand, a leading man (like Stallone around that time) then he should never play a bad guy.Also, Linda Hamilton was great, but the nominees for Best Actress that year were Jodie Foster (Silence of the Lambs), Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon (Thelma and Louise), Laura Dern (Rambling Rose), and Bette Middler (For the Boys). Failing to nominate any of those would have been a crime.
Hmm, don’t know about Midler in “For the Boys”, which is a pretty boilerplate example of failed Oscar bait…but yeah, otherwise it was a really competitive year for actresses.
Bette Midler was on a career high then, so that was the year to go all-in for an Oscar. She was never nominated again either.
I don’t know about her performance, but whoever was in charge of Midler’s old age makeup in that movie should have been shot:
Maybe her character is Supporting?
It can’t be over-emphasized how many kids wanted to watch this flick when it came out. This might be the first R rated film I can remember where kids wanted to see it on theatrical release, rather than waiting for their older brother to obtain it for them on video.
Yeah my brothers knew plenty about it before they had access to the commercial TV edit and actually saw any of it, IIRC.
I felt like I was the only kid in my 2nd grade class that didn’t see this movie in the theater.I’m pretty sure a lot of them (including my best friend at the time) got to see Total Recall as well, which is, in retrospect, absolutely and utterly insane.
I was 12 when this came out; my dad and I went to see it probably six or seven times in the theater.
I was four years old in 1991 and I remember kids in my preschool class playing with Terminator toys and acting like they had seen the movie. Looking back, I can’t believe that a parent would take a four or five year old to see Terminator 2, but I guess anything is possible.
There seemed to be a general consensus amongst parents in the 80s and 90s that kids could see an R-rated flick as long as there was no nudity (non-sexualized rear ends were somehow OK) and the violence wasn’t of the horror variety. So, by this logic, Rambo and T2 were OK, Revenge of the Nerds and Nigtmare on Elm Street were out.
Well, if YOU want to see Terminator 2, but can’t get a babysitter, what other choice is there?
Yep. “Toyetic” is a term I wouldn’t hear until Joel Schumacher explained wtf happened with Batman & Robin, but T2, where one machine could come with a cool biker ensemble, and the other could basically transform into anything- had those ‘toyetic’ qualities as well. There were videogames and everything. Kids wanted to watch this R rated flick because the studio definitely wanted them to.
I was 9 when this came out, and I didn’t see it until years later. But the late 80’s and early 90’s was the golden age for capitalizing on the appeal that an R-rated movie’s concept would have for kids too young for r-rated movies. Toys, trading cards and comics clearly pitched to kids based on R-rated properties. Particularly SF – Aliens, Terminator, Robocop and Predator are what I remember, not so much Die Hard and Lethal Weapon action figures (though Die Hard was the first R-rated movie I saw that wasn’t edited for TV – had seen part of it on TV, told a babysitter that my little sister and I had already seen it so she rented it for us. A girl who was maybe fourteen, at the small-town video rental store with a couple of under-1o year olds in tow had no problem renting an R-rated movie. I DID NOT REMEMBER THERE BEING THAT MUCH BLOOD ON THE TV VERSION!*). It probably had to be SF because it took too long to explain the overarching idea of something like Die Hard(And I don’t remember that many R-rated fantasy movies, aside from Conan which appeared to early for the phenomenon). You had to be able to sum up ‘why kids would like this’ in two words or less, like ‘Invisible Alien’ or ‘Future Robot’. ‘A police officer is trapped in a…’ would be cut off. Kids under ten would not be able to sit still for an entire sentence telling them about a movie whose toys they would hopefully be their parents for.I don’t know when R movies stopped getting tie-in toys, but the short-lived nature of that beast really seems like a victory of morality over capitalism. (And I’m generally pro-capitalism, but can recognize its shortcomings. It’s like fire, useful but destructive. Its existence is better than a lack thereof but it needs strong controls.)
*I do remember the TV version of Robocop having almost that much blood. Murphy’s death got a lot of cuts, but you still saw a tiny snip of his arm flying off and nearly the full execution barrage, the OCP exec got brutally shredded and Emil’s death by toxic waste and car impact was unchanged. WOW what nasty stuff for a kid to be watching on a Saturday afternoon from a local station!
Can attest. I was 10 when this came out and all I wanted to do was see it in the theater. We were visiting some family down south when this released and a big group was heading out to see it. My parents didn’t let me join, even though I’m pretty sure they’d already allowed me to watch a few nudity-free R movies by then. Forced me to see the Rocketeer instead, which I’ve long despised as a result.
Fun fact about Silence of the Lambs: Anthony Hopkins only had a little over 16 minutes of screen time.
Yeah but the guy sure could chew some scenery.
I’ll see myself out.
Census takers go with chianti, but scenery goes with a dry Riesling.
Should have been “chew some scenery decorators”
“Fuck you”– Harry Connick Jr.
I rank this film among the worst of Anthony Hopkins’ performances, even below his 1978 film ‘Magic’ where he played a nutty ventriloquist. I could never understand the appeal of this film.
It’s not his worst performance as Hannibal Lecter. He got hammier every time they brought him back. Just compare him in Red Dragon to Brian Cox doing (mostly) the same material.
I think he’s great in Silence, but the legacy of the performance suffers from the baggage of 30 years of endless parodies. I can only imagine it’s was much more effective when it was new… Anyone going in to see the movie since 1992 is going to have seen some cultural reference somewhere first, it’s been a constant pop culture reference since then.
And of course Hopkins own self-parody in Hannibal didn’t help..
I love everything about Silence except for Hopkin’s performance.
I rank this film among the worst of Anthony Hopkins’
performances, even below his 1978 film ‘Magic’ where he played a nutty
ventriloquist. I could never understand the appeal of this film.
Wait you actually said two things here. Hopkins’ 16 minutes of screen time weren’t good Hopkins (okay, whatever) but also SotL isn’t a good film?????
I don’t see the appeal either except for it being really, really, really good.
Magic is great! Richard Attenborough directing, Ann Margret, Burgess Meredith, screenplay by William Goldman. Solid movie.
You are quite the contrarian, aren’t you?
I just had an argument last night on my weekly Zoom trivia contest with my friends. The question was “Who was the villain in Silence of the Lambs?” I answered Buffalo Bill, but the host said the answer was Hannibal Lector. I countered that it was Buffalo Bill that was killing all the women, and that Anthony Hopkins was on screen for a relatively short time. But I was shouted down.
It’s one of the the great trick questions. They are wrong and they should feel wrong.
Oh fuck that, what’s the point of even asking that question if its not trying to trip you up and give Hannibal as the wrong answer? If he’s the answer then the question is just “who is one of the most memorable and iconic characters of all time that was in Silence of the Lambs and that anyone over 25 would know?” as opposed to “do you remember enough about this movie to think for an extra second or two and remember the less iconic character that was actually being pursued the whole movie?”…this is why its probably a good thing that I don’t play trivia games with my few friends.
This.
I love a good trivia night. It’s always a weird situation when the really likeable host gets something wrong and nobody wants to kill the fun vibe and those mini half-debates break out between tables, but it’s all good.
Not only are your friends wrong, but Lecter even gets his own villain in the movie, Chilton. There’s a decent argument that Lecter’s the real villain of Red Dragon/Manhunter, over Dollarhyde. In Silence, he’s basically a protagonist, albeit one who murders a couple of cops and an EMT to escape from custody.
Should have been supporting actor!
The only thing I don’t like about T2 is Edward Furlong. That floppy haircut just makes me want to grab some scissors. I remember seeing him in a supporting role in one other movie (forgot which one) and thinking he was equally bad there. The guy just can’t act. But you’re right about him having to deal with some pretty poor dialogue. Still, I keep wondering how much better T2 would be if they’d cast someone with some talent.
I still prefer the original Terminator to T2, but that’s probably because I’m partial to horror films. (By the same token, I prefer Alien to Aliens.) But T2 (and Aliens) are both terrific films, two of the best action films ever made. And kudos to Cameron for that.
I remember thinking he was very good in “Before and After” with Liam Neeson and Meryl Streep. I haven’t seen it since it came out in 1996 though, so who knows.As a fan of John Waters, I’ve also always meant to see “Pecker” which he stars in. Anyone know if that’s any good?
Let’s not forget that the film was also promoted by Guns n’ Goddamn Roses:
Cool story time: in my late teens I briefly dated a guy who made me listen to him practice that final “you could be miiiine!” until he got it. And that, kids, is how I learned to hold a fake smile while a guy did something awkward to impress me.
More like You Could be YIIIIIIIIIIIKES, sounds like
I think that was my first in-theater rated R movie, and I believe my only rated R movie with my mom. I was 16 and we met up with my uncle who really wanted to see it (almost as bad as I did), so my mom acquiesced even though she didn’t know anything about it. To this day, she still talks about how caught off guard she was with all the violence, loudness, etc. Basically, she knew it would be an action movie, but no idea about the level of the sensory overload.
I had a similar reaction with my parents and the French film Baise Moi.As I kept trying to explain to my dad, it wasn’t the violence that was the issue (we actually saw it in the cinema 4 hours after it was banned in Australia).In retrospect, not the greatest choice of films to take your parents to.
Revisiting it now, one of the best things T2 has going for it is its color palette. Without digital retouching to homogenize its look, that slightly flat early 90’s lighting makes it look like all of this mayhem is happening very much in the real world. Combined with smart use of actual color to subtly tell a story about humanity vs machine, red vs blue, and you’ve got an intensely compelling visual experience. Plus the chases are real good.
“But today, the effects aren’t nearly as impressive as the wild stunt work”. Older Gen-Xer here: that was what had us geeking at the time! I vividly remember spending a full day with my fellow übernerds, at my first-year film-school campus, analyzing that chase scene shot by shot, the day it dropped on video, marveling at all the nerves of steel involved (we could’ve been, you know, studying the editing of Oliver Stone’s Citizen Kane of conspiracy-theory culture). Like the lead character you are describing, such classic Cameron set pieces are cold, soulless, and weirdly beautiful, forcing elegance out of what should be caveman clumsy.Stray observation: a blind man in Siberia saw this “contender” coming. Speaking of blindness, seems kinda wrong to devote this many words to T2 without once mentioning– eyeball gouging.
The video for “You Could Be Mine” – not just promoting new GN’R at peak GN’R, promoting this movie, but showing us all (well, a lot of) the craziest CGI effects from the movie that we had no idea could even be done – was and might still be the purest hype object I’ve ever seen.
Well, we also had the “Black or White” Michael Jackson video a few months after…
That was pretty exciting, but I don’t know if it can quite stack up as a hype object – too much of an end result unto itself. It promoted the Dangerous album, and blew our minds, but the visuals didn’t really promise more of themselves the way a trailer or a tie-in video for a movie did.
Though in the short term – a couple of years, I think – it might’ve been more influential about how CGI was used. Morphs everywhere!
Point taken. Maybe the “HIStory” teaser trailer a few years later qualifies better as a pure hype object.
Aso featuring Slash on guitar.
Somewhere in a box deep in the crawlspace I’m pretty sure I would still have cassette single of You Could Be Mine that had Arnold’s T800 posing badassedly on its cardboard slipcover. I damn near wore that thing out back then.
I remember the video well, because Slash played his red BC Rich Mockingbird, instead of his usual Gibson Les Paul.
‘and an actor’This slander against End of Days will not stand!!
Yeh, I though calling this Arnold’s ‘apex as an actor’ was damning with faint praise.
I recall Linda Hamilton once commenting that everybody mentions Schwarzenneger’s muscles but nobody mentions how ripped she got for that role.
I wonder when she said that. I recall everyone madly praising her new T2 physique.
Yeah, it was pretty talked about at the time. Sorry you missed it, Linda!
Her introduction in this movie doing those pullups like a bad ass is one of the best character introductions in any movie ever. It says so much about her characters’ change in just one shot. This is NOT the waitress from the first movie! (and I’d dare that snot nosed litte shit to dump ice cream in her apron now!)
Not until Emily Blunt did that weird curving push-up in Edge of Tomorrow would we see female action movie physique that even approached Hamilton’s rippedness here.
I dunno, I feel like I’ve seen a million mentions of Hamilton being in super tip-top shape in T2. Including in this very article.
It was a huge story leading up to the movie’s release.
I recall EVERYONE mentioning how ripped she got for the role.
Everyone knows Schwarzenegger started out as a roided-up bodybuilder, so while his physique is always something of a marvel, I remember people commenting a hell of a lot more about Hamilton’s transformation.
I don’t know why she would say that. The only other woman that got remotely as much publicity for muscling up for a role was Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby.
She didn’t really even say that, did she
They devoted an entire SNL episode to it.
i think you’re misremembering my guy
I’m guessing she was joking, or you are. The shot where Sarah’s revealed doing those pull ups caused a literal collective gasp in the theater when I saw it, and it was pretty much the only thing reporters asked her about during the publicity tour for the movie. I remembered interviews where she looked genuinely annoyed because she wanted to talk about acting and motherhood, and all the interviewers wanted to know about was her diet and workout regimens.
Sure she did, grandpa.
She is fucking JACKED in T2 holy shit
I recall that being mentioned literally all the time. This strikes me as one of those situations where people just assume there’s some kind of sexist, gendered issue that must be going on, so they raise it without bothering to see if it’s actually happening. Arnold literally broke into acting by being the most successful bodybuilder of all time, so of course his muscles get mentioned a lot, but Hamilton’s physique and how insanely ripped she became for that role was commented on all over the place as well.
I heard James Cameron speak in 93 or 94 and he said his biggest regret was the way T2 was advertised. If you watch the movie it is not apparent that Arnold is the good guy until a good chunk into the movie. It really does spoil a great twist.
T2 is undeniably epic, but I still say the closest Arnold ever came to actual acting was in Cameron’s lesser (for several reasons) but still enjoyable True Lies.
That’s the most recent Cameron film I’ve seen. I think he peaked with the original Terminator.As for Arnold’s acting, I’ve heard he’s actually stretched a bit in the 21st century, but I haven’t seen any of the films described that way.
“even though robots don’t take vacations”
oh now I get the joke
my favorite thing about T2 is how Robert Patrick based his T-1000 on Native American warriors. Apparently he learned to hunt like they did in the old days and patterned the T-1000’s mannerisms after them.
“She’s all hair sweat and sinew and feral intensity.” Linda Hamilton’s performance in T2 was truly awesome, but for the record, hair does not sweat.
This is why we need copy editors. A comma makes a world of difference.
Hair sweat is not sweat from hair, it’s sweat that has soaked into hair.
It was a different time.I mean I even saw Raw Deal in the theaters.
We all wanted to be Eddie Furlong
Too many words about Arnie, not enough about the movie, IMO. T2 is all about Linda Hamilton for me. Great paragraph about her performance, but I would have liked to see more written about the character and the reaction to that character in pop culture. 30 years later we’re still feeling the reverb. T2’s Sarah Conner made a huge impact. Missed opportunity!
Thank you!
Anyway, nobody walked into the movie cold; anyone who’d seen one TV ad knew that Arnold was the good guy now.
The trailer was the worst thing about this movie. It could’ve been one of the greatest movie reveals ever, that hallway scene in the mall, but they gave it away in the fucking trailer. Idiots.
She’s been committed to a mental institution because she won’t stop
telling everyone that the end of the world is coming, but also because
she’s legitimately disturbed and unstable.
Is she, though?
Whenever Linda Hamilton goes full-tilt in T2, it’s magic:
holding the Drano-filled needle to the psychiatrist’s neck, scolding her
son for being dumb enough to come save her, screaming cuss words at the
family of the man she’s just shot. Hamilton should’ve won the Oscar
that year. She wasn’t even nominated.
Agree completely.
Furlong’s presence underlines something about Terminator 2 that might not have been fully apparent at the time: It’s a kids’ movie.
And I loved it as a kid. It’s still my favourite action movie ever.
Kevin Costner had one of the year’s biggest hits when he turned Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves into a not-that-grisly action epic.
I know there’s so much wrong with Prince of Thieves, but I still love that movie.
The helicopter flying under the highway overpass!
This stunt is mind-blowing when you find out the story behind it!An Overpass, a Helicopter, and the Riskiest Stunt in ‘Terminator 2: Judgement Day’
Terminator 2 was the absolute apex for Schwarzenegger.
I agree. And that fact made this scene in Last Action Hero even funnier:
ah I’d forgotten how awesomely hilarious the waitress’s “surprise then ‘aw yeah’” eyebrow arch was when Arnold walked into the bar naked. Great stuff, think I’ll go watch this again.
Arnolds scenes in Terminator Dark Fate were great. He is a capable actor, not just a body.
Well he’s been at it for decades now, he’s had time to get the fundamentals down
I would argue that before Terminator 2, Predator was Schwarzenegger’s best role, imbuing with great sense of character and history among his team, making you want to root for him and everyone else through the whole film, even when the Predator was picking them off one by one.It still held up pretty well as great B-movie style slasher with killer premise that no sequel could ever hope to match.
Terminator 2 started another trend in the ‘90s that always struck me as odd. The, “We’re too cool for the whole name, so we’re gonna use initials” tactic. In all of the marketing, it was T2: Judgement Day. Soon after, all of the Mortal Kombat machines would simply say MK3, Independance Day would be largely marketed as ID4 for reasons I still don’t understand, and Kentucky Fried Chicken would change all of its branding and signage to simply KFC.
Talking out of my ass, but: probably works better internationally if you drop the actual English words.
T2 may well have inspired it, but I read recently that “ID4″ came from a potential trademark dispute over the name “Independence Day,” so the studio was using ID4 to build buzz in case “Independence Day” was ultimately unavailable.
My least favorite was the second X-Men being called X2: X-Men United. Firstly because as you mentioned, the X2 is stupid, especially when it still has X-Men in the title after it, but even more irritatingly the subtitle X-Men United makes no fucking sense. The X-Men are already united, they’re a fucking team. They could have called it “Mutants United” because for part of the movie Magneto and Mystique work with the X-Men against a human threat (Stryker), but they didn’t.
I remember hearing at the time that Fox higher ups forced the United on the makers of the film. It especially doesn’t make sense given Magneto and Mystique turn on the rest at the first available opportunity and try to kill every human on Earth at one point.
It was the first post-9/11 X-Men, they had to through ‘United’ in there somewhere!
Yup. To this day I refuse to use the subtitle. That movie is X2. End of story.
Isn’t it also one of the last few blockbusters to feature a genuine, recognisable, emblematic musical theme ?
Not an actor?!? I mean sure, the quality of an actor’s work is always up for debate, but I feel like you’re saying he’s not an actor strictly because he’s a really big guy. His roles in Kindergarten Cop, True Lies, Total Recall, and even (especially?) The Last Action Hero all definitely required him to ‘act’, if you ask me. Which you didn’t. But still.
“little kids were a lot more likely to go see R-rated movies in the early ’90s…”Because theaters barely ever actually enforced R-rated “restrictions”, especially not on viewers who were at least tweens or young teens.Up until Columbine. Then pearl-clutching reactionaries needed a scapegoat for how “violet kids had gotten”, so they zeroed in on video games and movies.Fortunately, forcing movie theaters to actually adhere to R-rating restrictions resulted in a total lack of school shootings ever since.
Hah, I hear you about the school shootings. From age 12-14 I’d shoot up my school like once a semester. Probably a half dozen times overall. One day, maybe I’d just had too much homework, or got a bad haircut that someone would make fun of, and it was on. I’d walk into class with an assault rifle and just go to town. People would always ask how I kept getting assault rifles. (Spoiler alert: I bought a whole crate when the USSR broke up with birthday money from my grandma.)Anyway, I ran out of assault rifles and then they wouldn’t let me watch Arnold break people’s necks at the cinema anymore until I was 17 and that was that.
I became a regular moviegoer at age 12 in 1986, and the only R-rated movie underage me was refused a ticket sale to was Reform School Girls.
How was it that WB got Schwarzenegger to play Mr. Freeze, the tragic scientist turned supervillain instead of Bane, the muscle bound henchman?
I saw this one with a packed house at the Hollywood Cinerama Dome. I still remember the entire theater shaking from the sound system during the nuclear war sequence and seeing all that amazing stunt work on the huge screen. The ‘morphing’ effects by themselves got as much press as Spielberg’s dinosaurs did a couple years later. I was 14 when the original “Terminator” came out, which my friends and I had all seen on VHS copies passed around between us, so everyone was hyped for this long-in-the-making sequel. This was a capital-‘E’ Event!
The article and comments are way too harsh on Edward Furlong. Yes, he was inexperienced and it shows. I think to say he was so bad that his weak acting almost ruined the movie is an unfair exaggeration. It’s like what people say about Sofia Coppola in “The Godfather: Part III.” He wasn’t THAT bad. His line readings may have been awkward at times, but at least there was a realism and vulnerability to him, which helped me get emotionally invested in the story and family dynamic that develops between John, Sarah, and the Terminator. He’s believably obnoxious as a kid his age with his background would be. At the same time, he does a good job of selling how emotionally attached the boy gets to the Terminator, making the ending bittersweet. The movie does have amazing spectacle, but I’m a big softie and part of why I love this movie so much is because of how much it makes me feel for John and Sarah Connor. Both Hamilton and Furlong deserve credit for that.Ebert nicely gave Edward Furlong some subtle praise in his criticism of “Terminator: Salvation”: “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991) was a fairly terrific movie, set in the (then) future, to prevent the nuclear holocaust of 1997. You remember that. It was about something. In it, Edward Furlong was infinitely more human as John Connor than Christian Bale is in this film.”
Sorry, but his best role of all time is Handsome Stranger in The Villain.
Any fans of the Sarah Connor Chronicles here?
Awesome show, and the strongest of any of the T2 followups. But this is where it gets awkward: Lena Heady is arguably a better actress than Linda Hamilton. But some degree, imo. Does that mean she was the better Sarah Connor?
I really liked The Sarah Connor Chronicles. But I was always imagining Linda Hamilton superimposed over Lena Headey. And I liked Lena Headey as Sarah Connor.It’s an iconic enough role that it’s excruciatingly difficult to recast it – particularly since when you think of Linda Hamilton, you think of Sarah Connor. It’s not like she’s been in a lot of other stuff that you’d think of first.
Probably.
*raises hand*
It’s really solid, and better than any of the later movies.
T2 was great when it came out and remains great, and stands up far better than pretty much any action movie of the same era. Even Edward Furlong, grating though he may be, is far less grating than comparable kid characters in other movies.
Silence of the Lambs, on the other hand, I found to be goofy as fuck upon my most recent re-watch.
“Would you goofy as fuck me? I’d goofy as fuck me.”
This was so, so stupid. I laughed a lot. Cheers to you.
He wasn’t great, but I go easy on Furlong, who actually feels like a kid, and not like an adult in a kid’s body. Thomas Dekker would go on to be the superior version of John Connor on the TV show (basically playing an adult in a kid’s body), but he works for where they are in the story at that point. For this, John needed to be at an impressionable age with an impressionable personality. “Now I know why you cry” doesn’t just work because of the machine. It works because of the kid. (Well, that and Brad Fiedel’s amazing score.)
T2 is rightly praised for its spectacle, but it needs more credit for NOT being a mindless blockbuster. There’s this strained relationship between Sarah and John, and how underneath Sarah’s dogged self-assuredness, is all this doubt. There’s the weight of her responsibilities, and how that compromises her ethics. She will kill 1 to save a thousand. Straight up. Like Ellen Ripley before her, Sarah Connor is one of Cameron’s most complex, 3-dimensional characters (and he had every right to get into a spat with Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins about this). Our female action heroes of today, owe alot to this movie and Aliens, and it is interesting that this was accomplished not by being a sexy badass (an easy counterpart to the macho badass), but by layering in themes like humanity and motherhood.
I think of T2 as a great example of science fiction— how humans interact with technology. T-1000 is basically a gun, and John has to decide how to use it, for good or evil (from Cameron’s own commentary track).This movie is well-paced, great action spaced with needed exposition. T2 and Aliens both had believable extended action endings, before obligatory false endings and surprises became required. Now, you can set your watch to the last 45 min. being one crazy exhausting action sequence, with at least 3 false endings.And even though the nuke sequence is devastating, I had already grown up with the cold war and the Day After, in 1983.
If there were ever a film worth walking in blind without being ruined by the trailers, this is it.Right up to the point where the T-800 tells John to “Get down” in the mall, the entire film leads you to believe that the T-1000 is the hero and that the T-800 is once again the villain. What a mind screw that would’ve been.
I remember this movie so well. Was on an Army base for about 4 weeks straight in July 1991, and we finally got our first day off so the entire theatre that afternoon was 21-year-old soldiers jonesing for some T2. The second the movie started, the place erupted and didn’t let up. Maybe my favorite movie-going experience I’ve ever had (with a close second being Rocky 4 on opening night at the height of the Cold War.) T2 is a great f’in movie and was so damn amazing to see with a hyped-up crowd on the big screen.
One of the unique things about this movie was the teaser trailer with the T800 being assembled in the factory. Pure creaming in the jeans material for the fans. And one of the trailers that stood out by having specially filmed footage just for the trailer.
Wonderful write up on a milestone movie and a path breaking classic of our generation. Linda Hamilton should have bagged the Oscar for her highly stressed performance throughout yet retaining her maternal instincts. Edward Furlong, the cheeky little lad is the epitome of a teenager worthy of idolisation. Cameron had extracted the best from everybody … . .. The classic entry scene backed by the awesome guitar riff sets the mood for the memorable movie… It was a magnum opus in all aspects.Premnath Divakaran (Trivandrum, India)
The Last Stand is one of the most fun action movies of the last 10 years and I’ll defend it to my death!
Life lesson learned during opening credits: judgment only has one “e” in it. I remember staring at the screen and going, “Oh…”
I rewatched this with my son last year, and we both loved it. We watched The Abyss two weeks ago. And I still don’t get why people hate James Cameron so much. The man has made some really good movies.
I’ve always had mixed feelings about T2. It’s quite a spectacle, and I’d agree that it’s Peak Arnold… but to me it’s also emblematic of how James Cameron stopped trusting his audience and felt he had to beat them over the head with every point. (Apologies to anyone who saw it and stopped to think for the first time, “Huh! So thermonuclear war would be bad.”) This trend goes hand in glove with his increasing tendency to go on and on (Titanic took longer to watch than the actual Titanic took to sink, and she went down slow). Now that we are being threatened with multiple Avatar sequels, I wish today’s Cameron could travel through time and reconnect with the maker of the original Terminator, about the most relentlessly efficient 107 minutes I could ever want to spend in a theater.
As a massive Beauty and the Beast fan, I didn’t know its technically higher then T2 when you count showings since 1991. Man, 29 years later and I still dare say no animated film has topped that peak.
How do you get the whole way through a movie write up without even mentioning the insanely kick-ass video for GnRs ‘you could be mine’ and the entire aquaduct chase in general.