While the original
Terminator was a sleeper hit that found its audience on home video and cable, its first sequel,
Terminator 2: Judgment Day, was a summer movie juggernaut that catapulted director James Cameron to the level of moguls like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. The movie's huge success gave Cameron the clout to undertake massive productions like
Titanic and
Avatar.
By the time
T2 went into production, Arnold Schwarzenegger had become an unlikely superstar and was making plenty of his own action vehicles. In retrospect, he hardly needed to make a sequel to a movie in which he was a glorified stuntman but his role in
Terminator 2 was expanded and in the sequel he played a cyborg that had been reprogrammed and sent back in time to defend a preteen John Connor from another more advanced Terminator model. It was a more heroic role and more in keeping with his new status as the biggest movie star in the world.
T2 ended up being one of his most popular movies and represented the height of his action career.
But most importantly,
Terminator 2 features groundbreaking digital effects that allowed Cameron to pull off mind bending sequences that simply would not have been possible before. The movie is an important milestone in the history of film making and visual effects. The effects in
T2 represent a maturation of technology that had been around throughout the 1980's but which Cameron had nurtured until they were ready for his eye-popping liquid metal T-1000.
Cameron's previous movie,
The Abyss, had featured a similar but much less ambitious effect in its shimmering, shape-shifting aliens that appeared to be made entirely out of water.
Terminator 2 creates a character that is not only made entirely of a liquid metal but also successfully melds it into the performance of a human actor, Robert Patrick. It was a successful first attempt at a CGI creature that not only paved the way for both the photo-realistic dinosaurs of
Jurassic Park and the hybrid CGI/human performances in such movies as
Lord of the Rings and
Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
Shiny deadly people!
While the
Terminator 2 is a historically important movie for its many technical achievements and it is one of the greatest action movies of the 1990's, it does have a few flaws that keep it from greatness.
One of the strengths of the original
Terminator was that despite the hard logic of the time-travel paradox at the heart of its plot,
Terminator was a simple story of fear and pursuit. It was like the elemental nightmare about being pursued by some relentless enemy. It was a lean and mean action movie. By contrast,
T2 is overly elaborate and, at 137 minutes, it is at least a half-hour too long.
Many of us can remember a time when a movie being over two hours long was an unusual thing, reserved for "serious" movies. James Cameron has done more to usher in the era of bloated 2hr+ behemoths than anyone else.
Aliens (though one of my favorite films) also clocked in at 137 and is (arguably) a little bit too long. 1989's
The Abyss plods along at 138 minutes. Cameron was a superstar director by the time his spy movie
True Lies was released in 1994, at that one clocks in at 141 minutes. By 1998, Cameron released the famously lengthy
Titanic, which was two VHS tapes and 194 minutes long, the effect of which is like being forced to sit in a movie theater and watch a miniseries. Cameron spent the next ten years developing new technologies that would allow him make long movies and came up with
Avatar, which, shamefully, is not even three hours long.
James Cameron's need to cram his entire intact cinematic vision into overly-long, sprawling movies is the sign of a director who has way too much power and too few people telling him "no." This is a too-common problem in today's movie industry. Too many directors are treated like auteurs which gives us long and meandering
Star Wars prequels (with twenty minute pod race sequences), a two and a half hour
Transformers movie, and a
King Kong movie that was over three hours long. I would love to go back to the era when a good solid action film is an hour and a half long, like
Terminator. Brevity is a terrific quality in an action movie.
One of the most notable things going between 1984's
The Terminator to 1991's
Terminator 2 is the strange shift in tone. While the original movie had a few tender moments, it was a dark and fatalistic 1980's action movie.
T2, on the other hand, ventures into almost touchy-feely 1990's territory, with its subplot about a grating and adolescent John Connor befriending the Terminator sent back to protect him. It also features many light-hearted "comic" moments in an attempt to keep it in line with the softer direction that Schwarzenegger had taken with his career by this point. While the original Terminator was stone-faced, silent, and deadly, this new Terminator smiles, cracks jokes, struts around to "Bad to the Bone" and complains that he he needs "a vacation." When Schwarzenegger spouts the infamously awful line, "Now I know why you cry," I kinda wished his younger, eyebrow-less self would have shown up to shoot him in the face with his laser-sighted pistol. The movie is rated R but feels much more like a hard PG-13. I'd wager the R has more to do with the liberal use of the word "fuck" than the actual violence.
Terminator 2 only works as well as it does because the T-1000 is lethal enough to make up for the Schwarzenegger's new cuddlier Terminator.
Terminator's right eye is being grossly unprofessional and looking straight into the camera.
THE MONSTERS/EFFECTS
So, apparently they only make a few models of Terminator and a lot of them look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. This one goes up against the T-1000 and gets beat up pretty bad so there are some nice damage effects later in the movie, although there are some wonky metal applications to fleshy parts of the body and Terminator's robot eye suspiciously stops moving as soon as it is revealed.
If endoskeletons are your thing, there is a cool sequence early in the movie that shows a whole squad of them marching into battle. I'm glad we get to see these bad boys in action cause I always liked their demonic robot/skeleton appearance.
The real star is the awesome liquid metal T-1000, a mind-bending creation of James Cameron and probably the most unique and interesting robot in the history of Science Fiction. Let's face it, there is not a lot of novelty or originality in the film industry, but the T-1000 actually presented audiences with something that they had likely never seen or even imagined before: a beautiful quicksilver being that could assume almost any form and for whom the normal rules of combat do not apply. The T-1000 was certainly not going to be stopped by being crushed in a press, that's for sure. It had to be frozen, melted, blown up and pushed into a vat of molten steel in order to be destroyed.
T-1000 has his own brand of liquid metal martial arts and adds an unpredictable element to the usual tired action movie fight sequences. In hand-to-hand combat, he does cool and surprising stuff like when he is slammed face-first into a wall, his back morphs into his front or when punched in the face, his head suddenly changes into his hands. When shot, T-1000 actually shows the ballistic damage on his body, most often in the form of shining metallic craters but when he takes higher caliber damage, his body blows apart in weird and surreal ways that are almost reminiscent of the shape shifting alien from
The Thing.
Finally, the T-1000 is a smarter and more ruthless Terminator than any other. He's also a bit of a bastard, such as when he tortures Sarah Connor to get her to call out to her son. Or when after Connor fails to shoot him off a ledge and into a vat of molten steel he responds with a chilling finger wag. This Terminator, fortunately, will never know why we cry.
MOST MEMORABLE SEQUENCE
When the T-1000 is finally dispatched, the liquid metal robot flails around in the molten steel, reverting back to the forms it had taken over the course of the movie and then finally into a variety of surreal quasi-human screaming forms before he becomes a just a screaming face that folds out of itself and then just a mask that dissolves in the steel. It may be a little
The Mind's Eye but it is still pretty cool.
HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY
T2 is widely available in both DVD and BluRay in many different editions. Most of which feature a longer director's cut of the movie that actually restores a few interesting scenes. There is an interesting scene in which John and Sarah actually access the Terminator's chip and switch it to "read" mode allowing him more independent thought and the ability to learn, presumably about feelings and crying. There are also a couple of scenes featuring the T-1000 in which we see him glitching after having been frozen in the liquid nitrogen and reconstituted. We see him flickering and inadvertently mimicking colors and textures around him.
One downside to seeing the movies on home video and a big TV is that you notice the shockingly awful stunt doubling, such as the apparently 40-year-old man doubling for John Connor and the not-quite-Schwarzenegger Terminator double.
TRAILER
Patrick Garone
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Author of
City of the Gods: The Return of Quetzalcoatl
Death Ghidorah is a bit more interesting as he is a substantially different version of the character than we have seen. In fact, he is not really even King Ghidorah but rather a kind of "Ghidroid," who shares a lot of Ghidorah's characteristics-three heads, wings, a nasty attitude-but has a different body layout and coloration. I, for one, like the redesign as the traditional Ghidorah has always seemed a bit topheavy and awkward, stumbling around on two legs. A four-legged Ghidorah makes a bit more sense. As much as I like the classic golden scaled appearance of the original Ghidorah, I like the rough skin texture and dark color scheme on this one. It's a really good alternate look for the character.
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