The Spoiler Alert: Terminator 2: Judgment Day
The Essentials: Rating: R | Category: Action, Sci-Fi | Director: James Cameron | Writers: James Cameron and William Wisher Jr.|
This was a very spur of the moment viewing of Terminator 2. My husband was flipping through channels and boom, there it was and all of a sudden we were watching and I was taking notes. I was not prepared at all, but I had at least seen the first Terminator, admittedly not too long ago (blew my mind!).
Plot: Following the events of The Terminator, Sarah Connor (portrayed so powerfully by James Cameron’s ex-wife Linda Hamilton) has officially been thrown into the loony bin. I remember telling my husband after the first movie “hope Sarah Connor never mentions this to anyone or they’re going to thing she’s psycho.” He lovingly stopped himself from confirming my suspicions so I could enjoy this cinematic adventure.
John Connor (future hero, played by Edward Furlong) is living with a foster family and basically up to no good. He’s not knocking over liquor stores but it’s clear he doesn’t pay any attention to his foster parents and spends his days doing what youths that don’t go to school do. Namely, going to the mall arcade with Bobby Budnik from “Salute Your Shorts” (Click here for what he and the rest of the gang from the 90’s look like today).
Meanwhile, similar to the first movie, one terminator is sent back in time to kill John Connor (the T-1000 played by Robert Patrick) and another is sent back in time to protect John Connor (buddy Terminator played by Ahnold). Once Arnold finds John Connor and convinces him of what’s up, they bust Sarah Connor out of the mental hospital, narrowly escaping the T-1000’s efforts to kill them.
On the road to hide out at a friend’s house in the desert, Arnold explains everything that’s going to go down with the machines. There’s a scientist dude who, later this year, will create some super technology that will learn from itself and in a few years, the U.S. military will basically let it run itself. Then he utters what to me is THE creepiest line in the entire movie
“It becomes self aware at 2:14 am Eastern Standard Time on August 29.”
*shudder* From there we are informed that the world will go to hell, and this big nuclear holocaust event called Judgment Day will happen where the machines will officially flip their shit on everyone. Like that day the Nazis went into Poland and essentially started World War II.
The crew is now on a mission to stop this scientist, named Miles Dyson and portrayed by Joe Morton, from even creating the technology. But while the rational person might try to look this guy up in the phone book and talk to him about it (seeing as they have a terminator with them as proof), Sarah goes nuclear. She drives to the guy’s house by herself equipped with enough guns to take Panama and just starts shooting at him and his family. Those poor people were just enjoying a nice Friday night.
This is where Sarah Connor kind of lost me. I get that she’s very traumatized, that she’s seen things, but she really seems to forget that a) NOBODY else knows about this and b) it’s really hard to believe on its face. So how can she yell at this guy for being the harbinger of doom when he has no idea wtf is going on?
Suffice it to say, John Connor and Ahnold show up just in time, talk Sarah off the ledge, show the guy the proof, and he’s totally on board to help them, give or take a gunshot wound.
After this, the foursome goes off to blow up the lab and whatnots. They act suspiciously enough to attract police attention and major explosions happen.
(I’d like to point out here that it’s actually pretty lucky for the T-1000 that he took on the identity of a cop, because Sarah Connor and the gang do NOTHING but alert the police to their whereabouts by killing people and blowing things up. All he has to do is literally sit around and listen to the police scanner.)
They manage to elude the police after blowing up the lab, and then go to a warehouse that is basically the same setup as the end of the first movie for the final showdown. Bad Terminator is defeated. And Arnold, good machine, drowns himself in a vat of molten steel and sacrifices himself for the future good. John Connor cries that his friend is gone. Sarah Connor is totally stone faced. Not smiling once the entire movie. The End.
My Personal Thoughts: This movie has a LOT of horror movie elements. We even have the killer who can’t die (à la Michael Meyers) and loves to slo mo follow you like there is no escape while you RUN UP THE STAIRS instead of out the door (Wes Craven, heart always).
Second note: The T-1000 is a dick. Like, an actual asshole.
The thing that makes him a real Sarah Bunting style Jerkweed to me is the indiscriminate killing upon taking over your identity. I get that he’s a machine, trying to accomplish his mission, sent back in time to kill a child that will grow up to kill his race. But when John is talking to his foster mother on the phone, and all of a sudden things seem not quite right, and it pans out and you realize the T-1000 inhabited his foster mother’s voice/identity and BRUTALLY KILLED his foster father, I audibly gasped. I gasped EVERYTIME it happened during the movie and it really made me hate the T-1000. Not only because it was so heartless, but because it was so unnecessary.
Seriously. He inhabits these identities to make it past a security check, or uses someone’s voice to convince someone else to meet him somewhere, but there’s NO NEED to kill because he literally only uses each identiy for about 2 minutes max. Frankly it’s indicative of poor planning (or perhaps poor programming since he is after all, a machine?) on his part. Think about it: you as a human are FAR more likely to panic if you notice a dead coworker than you would if you spoke to said coworker, and then saw them again in a different place 5 minutes later. You’d probably be like “Didn’t I just pass him in the stairwell? déjà vu? Weird….. I wonder what’s for dinner tonight”.
The T-1000 is just the meanest asshole ever. You’d think, since he took on the identity of a cop, instead of killing people he’d use the power that the uniform gave him to solve his problems. Tsk tsk.
The effects of time travel? Am I supposed to assume at the end of the movie that the machines never rise and that Judgment Day never comes to pass? Because *SPOILER ALERT* when Miles the Skynet scientist dies, the research can’t even continue the same way it did, so I suppose that HAS to have at least greatly altered the future?
Furthermore, I’m not sure I’m on board with this gang blowing up the lab in such a haphazard fashion. Once everyone explained to Miles what his research would lead to and he totally agreed with them, THAT also should have caused some kind of ripple effect to take place in the space-time continuum. He promised to stop. Or he could adjust his research. I mean, the main issue here is that the machines become self-aware yes? So maybe, DON’T include that enabling technology in the software and then there’s no need to blow up a corporate park. It’s still science, It’s still advances in technology that could help the world and could have other uses.
Some final thoughts:
— While we’re still talking about the good scientist (RIP Miles), what would he have done after blowing up the lab? He probably would have lived to be sued the crap out of by Skynet for destroying millions of dollars in technology. He was just going to give up science for these clowns? It’s his LIFE!
— The elephant in the room here: Sarah Connor is going to jail isn’t she? Cuz, she’s technically an escaped mental patient who aided the guy wanted for murdering an entire police station back in 1984. And now when they can’t find him, they’re going to assume she knows where he is and probably send her back to jail or the mental hospital, and John will go back to foster care.
— John Connor’s only friend. Is a machine. How ironic.
— Miles’s family is probably going to press some serious charges against Sarah. Or sue the state for allowing her to escape the asylum.
— We are really not that far at all from 2029 AD. And L.A. looks like it’s going to be terrible.
— I bet you didn’t know, this piece of cinema adventure is the winner of four Academy Awards: Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing, Best Visual Effects Editing, and Best Makeup. as well as coming in at #77 on AFI’s 100 Most Thrilling American Films.
— Young Arnold really was fairly nice looking.
Originally published at medium.com on April 1, 2016.
