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Modern Classics: Terminator 2 - Judgment Day
 Thirty years ago the hype surrounding Terminator 2: Judgement Day grew overwhelming. The film dominated all media, and even had a music video featuring Guns N’ Roses. An amazing teaser trailer only fueled the fire. Arnold Schwarzenegger was just a neophyte in the film world when he starred in the 1984 original but by 1991 had become one of the biggest stars on the planet. Like many, I saw the first film on home video and was impressed by what writer-director James Cameron had pulled off with limited resources. I looked forward to what Cameron could do with a larger canvas. All the buildup, especially for summer movies, so often leads to disappointment. Not this time. Terminator 2: Judgement Day exceeded the sky-high expectations. Three decades later I wanted to figure out how the film made good on the hype. Unlike many action movies, T2 invested in character development. Cameron and his co-writer William Wisher took the time to give each of the main characters their own arc. The good Terminator (Schwarzenegger), the T-800, used his ability to learn from humans, especially John Connor (Furlong), the boy he’s been programmed to protect. The Sarah Connor (Hamilton) we see was miles away from the scared waitress in the first film. She’s hard, tough and was a Terminator in her own way, especially when she tried to kill future Skynet creator Miles Dyson (Morton). Sarah traveled her own journey back to humanity, especially in how she treated John. For his part, John started to grow into the leader he’s destined to become. You could argue that Dyson served as the unsung hero of the whole movie, as he’s willing to destroy his life’s work at a moment’s notice to save humanity. For so many summer blockbusters, character development feels nonexistent or perfunctory at best. That Cameron treated it seriously raised the stakes for the story and heightened audience investment. Cameron’s character building would have been futile without his stellar cast. Schwarzenegger always carried an otherworldly manner about him, which helped make the first Terminator such a seminal film. By the end of the 80s he started to show more vulnerability and sharpened his comedic timing, particularly in his prior two movies, Total Recall and Kindergarten Cop. His refined skills came into play with T2, providing as much depth as possible with a cyborg. Hamilton deservedly earned praise for her buffed physique, but that’s just part of what she brought to the new Sarah Connor. In the DVD commentary track, Cameron said that Hamilton only agreed to come back for the sequel if she could play Sarah as a little crazy. She did much more than that, combining a wild, dangerous aura with a steely intensity. Hamilton also showed the pain underneath Sarah’s fierceness. Schwarzenegger may have been the headliner of the first two Terminator films, but Hamilton was their heart and soul. Joe Morton had limited screen time, but made Dyson convincing as a genius but also a good person who has no idea of the damage he’s going to cause. Morton’s likable, everyman quality brought to life what could have been just a functional character. Edward Furlong became a classic Hollywood story (in both good ways and bad). Mali Finn, the film’s casting director, discovered Furlong at a YMCA. He had no acting experience, but stepped up to more than hold his own with Schwarzenegger and Hamilton. Furlong blended a typical rebellious teen attitude with an emerging gravitas needed for us to accept that he will become the John Connor spoken of in the first film. He invested his final scene with Schwarzenegger with such heart and pathos that my eyes got a little watery at a machine’s destruction. Cameron also mentioned in the commentary track that he considered having Schwarzenegger play both Terminators. Wisely he went in a different direction, which aligned with how he originally pictured the Terminator in the first film: Someone whom at first glance seemed unremarkable, who would blend into a crowd. Robert Patrick fit what Cameron needed to the letter. He brought his own kind of menace to the part, not with Schwarzenegger’s robotic manner, but through sleek, precise movements along with piercing eyes that never blinked. Patrick recalled Cameron telling him “You’re going to fight Arnold Schwarzenegger ... and you’re going to win!” Patrick’s determination and fluid physicality gave credibility to that stunning moment in his first clash with Arnold, where the audience realizes that the T-1000 is stronger than the Terminator. To have that happen against Schwarzenegger, who had always appeared indestructible, and have it feel credible, was a minor miracle. That this moment worked made the whole film work, and it’s largely thanks to Patrick. Given the film’s stature as a landmark action film, it’s strange to realize that there are only four action scenes (if you don’t count the prologue):
T2 justifiably garnered acclaim for its pioneering work with computer-generated imagery (CGI), primarily with the T-1000. Dennis Muren, who earlier worked on visual effects for Star Wars, and his team at Industrial Light and Magic created and refined this new technology. Those visual effects still hold up all of these years later, but there was much more in Cameron’s arsenal. As he had with the first film, Cameron hired the great Stan Winston for makeup, puppetry and other practical effects. The “making of” videos on the DVD show how much of the effects thought to be digital were actually done by Winston and his team. The film also boasted superior stuntwork, particularly with the vehicle chases. Another great shot on the DVD shows Cameron planning these chases with Matchbox toy cars. Cameron combined the different types of effects so seamlessly, using whichever tool(s) would work best for a particular sequence. In many ways studios and some filmmakers learned the wrong lessons from T2, thinking that its success was all due to CGI. We still see too many films that hang their hat on digital effects and don’t have much else to offer. Cameron and Wisher made one critical change to the backstory from the first Terminator, which is another reason the sequel worked so well. In the original, the Artificial Intelligence took over as a result of nuclear war. This made sense in the early 80s, when sword-rattling by the US and the Soviet Union made Cold War fears run rampant. By 1991, the Cold War had ended, so Cameron and Wisher modified the narrative so that it was the AI that caused the nuclear holocaust. In the first scenario, the dystopian future was inevitable. In the second one it could be prevented, which drove much of the film’s second half. The updated story gave new resonance to John’s iconic line that “The future’s not set. There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.” Cameron shot a happy ending for T2, with an older Sarah watching her granddaughter play. The war never happened, and John is now a U.S. Senator. Test audiences understandably were cool to this ending, feeling it too warm and fuzzy to fit with the movie. Cameron wisely switched to an open-ended scene of traveling down a road. The future is not set, good or bad. No fate but what we make. The subsequent, vastly inferior and completely unnecessary Terminator sequels stomped all over this ending, going back to a preset doom. So in my mind, the Terminator story ended here, with Sarah and John heading down the dark road to an uncertain fate, but with a ray of hope guiding their path. NOTE: For more on how Cameron and his team made T2, see the excellent oral history on The Ringer website. Adam Spector August 1, 2021 Contact us: |
