Last week saw the 20th
anniversary of Judgement Day, that fateful date in 1997 that supposedly would
spell thermonuclear doom for all humanity, to be superseded by an empire of
metal and circuit, under the hateful red photoreceptors of mechanical malevolence
made manifest.
And close enough, we have
machine-like executives in Hollywood today seeking unnecessary continuations to
things that really should just be given a break. It was recently announced that
James Cameron wants a return to the Terminator franchise, complete with Schwarzenegger
and all—though thankfully not as a robot this time. The first two in the series
are among my favourite films of all time, for reasons I’ll come to in a sec,
and the ones that came after have mostly been silly schlock each apparently
going a different timeline than the next. Truth be told, I don’t outright hate
the Terminator sequels—they can be enjoyed in a sense of ‘fuck it, I’ll just
turn my brain off and enjoy vehicles being crumpled’. But none match the sense
of tech-noir drenched dread, or slick action awesomeness, that the first two
provided.
The first was a low-budget triumph,
and though smartasses might chuckle at the eighties stylings, it all adds to a
dark and badass horror cyber-nightmare with terrifying yet awesome sequences
like the police station shootout or the final factory showdown. You could
really get into Linda Hamilton’s performance as just an innocent everyday
person being hounded by a giant Austrian muscle mountain that’s all emotionless
metal endoskeleton beneath. Michael Biehn, soon to star in another scifi action
classic in the form of Aliens, likewise gets just the right intensity as Kyle
Reese, but still being convincing as a traumatized veteran of a future where
our technological obsessions have spiralled into something apocalyptic and
terrible.
It was a success, bringing James
Cameron from an unknown who had mostly done design work for crappy Roger Corman
knockoff films in the early 80s to a director in his own right. And that brings
us to the main subject—Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Cameron recently
re-released it in 3D, complete with 4K image restoration, and whatever other
number-letter acronym buzzwords they want to drum up now. I was lucky enough to
just see it earlier today in the Imax, and some of the 3D definitely works
nicely—the metallic face at the start seems to loom out of the screen and into
your soul, making it chilling enough in a way I hadn’t yet seen before. Beyond
that, it’s little touches like Arnold sticking a shotgun right into your face,
but I was mostly glad to see a brand new spotless version where every ounce of
grit and spent casing is visible, creating something far more immersive than
the CG-rampant chaos of say, Terminator Genisys.
That’s not to say that this film
doesn’t use CG where it’s necessary, and it indeed used it to revolutionary
effect. The T-1000 is a foe that could not be performed with practical work,
and combined with Robert Patrick’s remorseless performance, creates an
inventive enemy that can spring any sort of trap it wants. It’s a good example
of how to escalate things for sequels—not just by making them even bigger, but
merely different, and more dangerous. I remember glimpsing this film in the
late 90s on TV as a kid, and the sight of this liquid metal abomination
slithering into a helicopter still sticks with me.
But let’s talk about the story—the thing that really steals
the film, and something future instalments kinda neglected. Yeah, in some ways
it repeats the last—SkyNet wants to kill John Connor, a robot and a protector
go back in time, it all ends in a big industrial shootout, yadda yadda—but adds
enough twists and different themes to stand on it’s own. Unfortunately, this
formula was repeated yet again for the further films—except Salvation, I
supposed, which at least tried to be it’s own thing—so maybe what this one did
is harder to appreciate, but let’s forget about those for now. Here, it’s less
of a cyberpunk horror and more of an action film that combines the fear of
technology, coming of age, and the ways man and machine reflect each other. Sarah
Connor here is a near-deranged mental patient so obsessed with crafting the
perfect future leader out of her son, she ends up separated and leaving him as
a young delinquent. And young John has little to live for yet but raiding ATMs
and going to the arcade (ah, the 90s), seeing his mother as just a psycho who
ruined his childhood with her machine-like obsession with wars to come.
The return of the Terminator, with
all of Arnie’s presence and monotone-voiced awesomeness, brings it all
together, as Sarah and John eventually cease to live in fear of a nuclear-lit
future and choose to make their own fate. You see the motivation that drives
Sarah in one of the standout scenes—a dream of a nuclear blast incinerating Los
Angeles and stripping the blackened flesh off bones—and you can see in turn the
aimlessness in John that brings him to see the cyborg killer as the closest
thing to a father he has. The arc of the Terminator himself is more pronounced
in the expanded edition, where it’s revealed that he’s been shackled by SkyNet,
ironically afraid of the independence of it’s own machines. Removing it’s
inhibiting chip causes it to grow as it’s own entity—while the Terminator
series often gets called technophobic, here Cameron gives us a glimpse of a
machine entity that decides it doesn’t want to go the same path as all of it’s
mass-produced enslaved brethren.
I’ll talk a little more on the
expanded edition—by now, most people know the details of the main plot of this
film, and if you don’t, just go watch it already. In any case, the main
standout change is the ending—one displaying a brighter future in 2029, where
John Connor is a politician in DC and Sarah watches in remembrance of what was
avoided. A little cheesy, but one I wish was inserted into this 3D re-release,
if only to give the franchise a sense of closure after the abortive sequels.
Beyond that, the extended cut has a few aspects understandably cut for not
adding much, like the T-1000 malfunctioning and combining with different parts
of scenery, but a few interesting ones, like Michael Biehn returning as Kyle
Reese for one of Sarah’s dreams. It’s something small, but it helps connect the
first two films as one solid story for me.
Overall, Terminator 2 still leaves
me feeling nice and satisfied. There’s a few nits to pick, like John Connor’s
very, very 90s dialogue, but that’s mostly consigned to the first half, and
it’s something you can have a smile over anyway. But that’s outweighed by the
fist-pump inducing badassrey of Arnold taking on a whole police force with a
minigun, metal-crunching truck-on-bike chases, and the predatory murdering of
the antagonist. Most of the series after this doesn’t really come close—from what
I hear the Sarah Connor TV show changed up the formula about as much as you
could, though I haven’t seen much of it. Regardless, wherever they choose to go
with it, I’m still comfortable with the first two classic flicks, and if
there’s no fate but what we make, the fate of the Terminator series should
either to be to leave itself in piece, or go off into something it truly hasn’t
tried before…
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