When we meet Sarah here, she’s far from the soft-featured club girl of the first film, having turned herself into a lean, mean survivalist with a cold, raspy voice. But the movie’s true power stems from his ability to tap into fears not just of mechanization and dehumanization (notions that Schwarzenegger embodies in his very persona) but also of human obsession and transformation. Yes, there’s the genius of Cameron’s filmmaking, made visceral in this new 4K restoration (which doesn’t gain noticeable extra pop from the 3-D seeing it on a big screen is draw enough). Watching T2 today, you can see why it nevertheless resonated twenty-five years ago.
(This was one of the first widespread uses of computer-generated “morphing” technology, which allowed faces and objects to seamlessly, dreamily transform into other faces and objects.) But to many, the movie was too slick, too eager to please - a big, expensive Hollywood product lacking the allegedly more authentic and sleazy edge of the original. Its critics grudgingly admired the bravura hugeness of its action and its revolutionary special effects. T2, while critically acclaimed and immensely successful at the box office, was thus perceived by some as a kind of impostor cousin to the first film. All the mayhem, none of the guilt.) The bad guy this time wouldn’t be the beefy Austrian but the slender, sleeker T-1000 (Robert Patrick), an even more advanced robot built from “mimetic polyalloy,” able to assume any shape or identity he touches. (Sure enough, the film features a reassuring glimpse of his robot-brain readout informing him that he has inflicted “0.0 human casualties” after mowing down a small army of cop cars. There were reports that he was considering politics. (He did eventually become governor of California that is indeed a thing that happened.) T2 was thus easy to see as image rehabilitation: This time, Arnold would be playing a robot sent to protect Sarah and her teenage son (Edward Furlong) - a terminator under orders not to kill anybody. He’d expanded his, um, “range” with comedies such as Twins (1988) and Kindergarten Cop (1990). Thus did Arnold become an icon of Reaganite, muscles-and-guns spectacle: a terse, emotionless robot racking up an insane body count with an assortment of heavy weaponry.īut by the time T2 rolled around, Schwarzenegger had begun to pursue a softer, cuddlier image. But it worked (and became a hit) because, playing a killer super-robot sent from the future by our machine overlords to murder the young woman (Linda Hamilton) who would give birth to the leader of the human resistance, Schwarzenegger used his considerable limitations as an actor to his advantage. In 1984, Cameron’s original Terminator played a key role in turning Arnold Schwarzenegger into a massive global star, and it was a nasty, brutish little beast of a movie - an R-rated horror flick posing as a sci-fi thriller. This is one of the most upsetting blockbusters ever. Today, however, the overwhelming despair of T2 is impossible to ignore. I distinctly remember Sarah Connor’s occasional ruminations on the fate of the human race eliciting chuckles in my theater at the time. The Iron Curtain had recently fallen, effectively ending the Cold War and seemingly lifting the nuclear threat.
Maybe that wasn’t so clear back in 1991, when it originally came out. And now, back in theaters and converted to 3-D, is Cameron’s classic sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day - not just a movie about fighting to prevent nuclear apocalypse, but a movie obsessed with nuclear apocalypse. The environmental and anti-colonial overtones of Avatar aren’t there merely to provide some character shading they practically take over. The love story in Titanic isn’t just an excuse to stage an extravagant disaster flick it becomes the picture’s raison d’être (and, not coincidentally, a key factor in its success). Whereas most action filmmakers are content to let emotion and morality play second fiddle to the more immediate, commercial elements of their movies, Cameron refuses to relegate such things to the background. Stories of the director’s perfectionism, his control-freak mania, and his sheer drive are legion, but I’m talking about something more fundamental to the work itself. Say what you will about James Cameron, but the man commits.