Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Rated R for strong sci-fi action and violence, and for language
Score: 4 out of 5
Terminator 2: Judgment Day is a film that revolutionized summer blockbusters. Together with Jurassic Park two years later, it popularized CGI, even if it used it surprisingly sparingly in combination with practical effects. It marked Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron at the heights of their respective careers. Despite being very R-rated, it was marketed to children with tie-in toys and other merchandise and with Edward Furlong's "totally rad" John Connor, anticipating the family-friendly blockbusters that took over from the mid-'90s onward. And in comparison to many of its contemporaries, it still holds up twenty-six years later. The special effects (including the CGI) look better than in some big-budget action movies released this year, the cast is still phenomenal, Cameron's direction is as rock-solid as ever, and even the parts that might have been obnoxious and insufferable in 1991 come across as charming and nostalgic in 2017. It is very much a movie of its time, its low points sticking out even more today, but its high points fly so high, and are so numerous, that they make this a film that could just as easily hang tough at the modern multiplex.
This film follows on ten years from the original, in a near-future of 1995 where Guns N' Roses is the biggest rock band in the world, Public Enemy rules the world of hip-hop, and military surplus clothes became the dominant fashion trend. (Yeah... this was definitely made in 1991.) Sarah Connor became a paranoid survivalist after the events of the first film, going on the run with her young son John and running guns for a living while the events of the film were covered up, and then becoming a patient at Pescadero State Hospital after trying to blow up a computer factory. John, meanwhile, has become a juvenile delinquent living in foster care, riding around on a dirt bike with his friends blasting loud music to piss off Janelle and Todd while hacking ATMs to snag money for the arcade. Skynet is still destined to arise in 1997 and try to destroy humanity, and with its first effort to kill Sarah Connor having failed, it decides to cut the crap and just go after John directly, sending back an advanced T-1000 model made of liquid metal that can shapeshift into any human form it makes contact with. The resistance, of course, seeks to save him... but instead of sending back another human soldier like Kyle Reese, it has captured and reprogrammed a T-800 model Terminator, the same type that Skynet originally sent back to 1984, to serve as a protector for John. When the two Terminators arrive in the '90s, all hell breaks loose as John, realizing that his "crazy" mother was right all along, seeks to break her out of the asylum -- and Sarah decides to take matters into her own hands to stop Judgment Day by murdering the people responsible for Skynet's creation.
This was one of the biggest movies in the world back in the '90s, and every cent of the $102 million (adjusted for inflation, that's over $182 million today) that they spent made it up onto the screen. Simply put, this is not a film that looks like it was shot over twenty-five years ago. James Cameron's legendary attention to detail is on full display here, with nearly every action scene seamlessly blending practical and computer-generated effects in very creative ways. Whether it's the opening battle in the future between humans and machines, the canal chase, a nuclear blast scene that stands as one of the most bone-chilling and flat-out terrifying ever put to film, the shootout at Cyberdyne, or the final battle at the steel mill, this is a movie that still stands as one of the best-looking blockbuster action movies ever made. It combines nightmarish visions of nuclear Armageddon with rousing, explosive battle sequences and stellar special effects, all of it set to an iconic score by Brad Fiedel. The quality and seamless integration of the CGI on display demonstrates that it's the artist, not the brush, that makes for truly great computer animation, with nearly everything here still looking absolutely convincing even in an age where advances in technology have left other films from this time looking hopelessly primitive. Only the clothes, the cars, and the slang give away the fact that this is an older movie.
Sadly, that last bit also informs the most serious flaw in this movie: John Connor. Next to the rest of the cast, Edward Furlong's John frequently comes across as a brat, a caricature of late '80s/early '90s "raditude" who feels like a live-action Bart Simpson -- and not in a good way. During the scene where he's teaching his Terminator bodyguard how to speak "normally", including phrases like "no problemo" and "hasta la vista, baby", I was mentally adding "eat my shorts" and "don't have a cow, man" to the list. For those of us who don't remember the '90s, try to picture a John Connor based on, say, Jake Paul or PewDiePie, and you should have a good mental picture of how try-hard John's writing can get here. And yet... watching this film long after the pop culture trends that John was inspired by had grown old enough to become classic, I felt pangs of childhood watching him. The sheer tidal wave of early '90s-ness in John may have come across as pandering then, but now, it's a nostalgia bomb of Buzzfeed proportions. And while the character's attitude may be annoying, Furlong's performance is actually very good, especially when he's required to break out of his too-cool-for-school attitude and show real emotion. It's because of these moments, when he's embracing the Terminator as the father he never had, realizing that his mother is about to kill somebody, or growing into a more responsible person, that I couldn't bring myself to hate him, which makes me wish that much more that writers James Cameron and William Wisher hadn't gone so far out of their way to try and make him "cool". I would've made him like the boy heroes of many an '80s Spielberg/Amblin "kid adventure" film, like Elliott in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial or Mikey from The Goonies, rather than making him "modern" in a way that carbon-dates the film, as there is a lot of good in the character and in Furlong's performance buried beneath all the parts that made me roll my eyes. Make him somebody who, growing up under his mother's paranoid militarism, still lives a regimented life that has crippled him socially, with the friend of his we see early on hanging out with him mainly because he's a walking Anarchist Cookbook. While the film tries to show that Sarah's poor parenting has left John ill-equipped to deal with the real world, making him a slick rebel who kids are supposed to admire undercuts that whole idea. Clearly, if this is what he's turned into, he didn't turn out so bad.
The rest of the cast, lacking the baggage that John was saddled with, had far more opportunity to shine. Arnold Schwarzenegger needs no introduction in any film, and he definitely doesn't need one here, in what is quite possibly his most famous portrayal of his most famous character. The T-800 is a superhuman badass, not indestructible but more than capable of taking down almost anything in its path. Unfortunately for John and Sarah Connor, "almost" doesn't quite cover the T-1000. Robert Patrick made his career in this part, stealing a cop's identity and spending the first thirty minutes looking like he might actually be the hero. While the fact that he's the villain is now common knowledge, what's lost in the big reveal of his true intention is more than made up for in the creeping dread as John's foster parents and other ordinary people trust this handsome, gentlemanly, normal-sized police officer without a thought. He does not look like a killing machine, but he acts like one, and I bought into Patrick's performance right away as a monster capable of murdering efficiently and without hesitation. Whereas Arnold's Terminator in the original film was a blunt-force instrument, Patrick's Terminator is sly. Cameron, of course, also sought to invoke fears of police brutality with the T-1000; a famous anecdote from production mentions how the infamous Rodney King beating happened across the street from a location shoot at a bar, with Cameron saying that the first half of the tape on which that incident was recorded consisted of behind-the-scenes amateur production footage. Patrick looks and feels the part of the stereotypical elitist cop, a cold authority figure who looks down on those around him, relentlessly pursuing John out of a shady motive. In this day and age, the multiple scenes where the T-1000's unearned uniform lets him get away with anything feel even more chilling, in ways that Cameron was probably intending. Whatever went into the part both behind and in front of the camera, the T-1000 is a scary villain, and not just because he can turn his arms into hook-swords.
Sarah Connor, of course, returns with her son John, and Linda Hamilton is almost unrecognizable from the valley girl she was in the original film. Her muscles jacked up and her mind paranoid about the impending nuclear apocalypse and robot takeover, Sarah is assumed to be insane by the authorities who locked her in an asylum -- and watching her, you can't help but feel that, even if she is 100% right, she may well have been driven mad by knowledge of the future that awaited her and her son. Once free, Sarah's singleminded devotion to stopping Judgment Day and rewriting history, to the point of trying to kill the scientist Miles Dyson who leads the project to study the parts taken from the original Terminator, makes her ironically much like the machines sent to kill her and her son. And yet, she is still human, her plan failing when she cannot bring herself to pull the trigger on a kind, gentle, and very scared family man in front of his loving wife and kids, no matter how much she compares him to the good Germans who were "just following orders". Hamilton captures this perfectly, elevating Sarah Connor above numerous other "strong female characters", a phrase that far too many screenwriters seem to think equals "one-dimensional, cold-hearted ass-kickers". She is motivated by righteous rage, yes, but is just as driven by despair at being unable to change the future, and desperation to prove that it can, in fact, be done. While a deeply flawed person, Hamilton's Sarah is an outstanding action heroine, and it's precisely because of her depths.
Finally, we come to the other big T-word that inevitably comes up in discussion of the Terminator sequels: "timeline". (Oh, and spoilers incoming, so if you're one of the only people in the world who hasn't seen this, just skip to the bottom line.) This is a franchise that has, over the course of several films, comics, video games, a TV show, and even an amusement park attraction, grown legendary for having a far more convoluted timeline than you'd expect for a series descended from one little sci-fi horror flick -- but pretty much exactly as convoluted as you'd expect for a long-running series where time travel is a core plot element. And to be honest, all of the series' biggest problems in that department started here. The first film had John Connor being conceived precisely because Skynet sent the Terminator back in time, and while you could argue that this is perhaps a different John Connor than the one who existed originally, the implication was that, overall, history could not be changed. Terminator 2, on the other hand, is about Sarah saying "screw that" and changing history anyway, preventing Judgment Day by ensuring that Skynet is never created at all. It is an awesome middle finger to the idea of destiny, but it created a minefield for every subsequent film to wander into as they tried to figure out how to justify a sequel. Still, watching this film on its own, it works here. It's a spectacular ending to a great movie, and it's one that they should've left well enough alone.
This film follows on ten years from the original, in a near-future of 1995 where Guns N' Roses is the biggest rock band in the world, Public Enemy rules the world of hip-hop, and military surplus clothes became the dominant fashion trend. (Yeah... this was definitely made in 1991.) Sarah Connor became a paranoid survivalist after the events of the first film, going on the run with her young son John and running guns for a living while the events of the film were covered up, and then becoming a patient at Pescadero State Hospital after trying to blow up a computer factory. John, meanwhile, has become a juvenile delinquent living in foster care, riding around on a dirt bike with his friends blasting loud music to piss off Janelle and Todd while hacking ATMs to snag money for the arcade. Skynet is still destined to arise in 1997 and try to destroy humanity, and with its first effort to kill Sarah Connor having failed, it decides to cut the crap and just go after John directly, sending back an advanced T-1000 model made of liquid metal that can shapeshift into any human form it makes contact with. The resistance, of course, seeks to save him... but instead of sending back another human soldier like Kyle Reese, it has captured and reprogrammed a T-800 model Terminator, the same type that Skynet originally sent back to 1984, to serve as a protector for John. When the two Terminators arrive in the '90s, all hell breaks loose as John, realizing that his "crazy" mother was right all along, seeks to break her out of the asylum -- and Sarah decides to take matters into her own hands to stop Judgment Day by murdering the people responsible for Skynet's creation.
This was one of the biggest movies in the world back in the '90s, and every cent of the $102 million (adjusted for inflation, that's over $182 million today) that they spent made it up onto the screen. Simply put, this is not a film that looks like it was shot over twenty-five years ago. James Cameron's legendary attention to detail is on full display here, with nearly every action scene seamlessly blending practical and computer-generated effects in very creative ways. Whether it's the opening battle in the future between humans and machines, the canal chase, a nuclear blast scene that stands as one of the most bone-chilling and flat-out terrifying ever put to film, the shootout at Cyberdyne, or the final battle at the steel mill, this is a movie that still stands as one of the best-looking blockbuster action movies ever made. It combines nightmarish visions of nuclear Armageddon with rousing, explosive battle sequences and stellar special effects, all of it set to an iconic score by Brad Fiedel. The quality and seamless integration of the CGI on display demonstrates that it's the artist, not the brush, that makes for truly great computer animation, with nearly everything here still looking absolutely convincing even in an age where advances in technology have left other films from this time looking hopelessly primitive. Only the clothes, the cars, and the slang give away the fact that this is an older movie.
Sadly, that last bit also informs the most serious flaw in this movie: John Connor. Next to the rest of the cast, Edward Furlong's John frequently comes across as a brat, a caricature of late '80s/early '90s "raditude" who feels like a live-action Bart Simpson -- and not in a good way. During the scene where he's teaching his Terminator bodyguard how to speak "normally", including phrases like "no problemo" and "hasta la vista, baby", I was mentally adding "eat my shorts" and "don't have a cow, man" to the list. For those of us who don't remember the '90s, try to picture a John Connor based on, say, Jake Paul or PewDiePie, and you should have a good mental picture of how try-hard John's writing can get here. And yet... watching this film long after the pop culture trends that John was inspired by had grown old enough to become classic, I felt pangs of childhood watching him. The sheer tidal wave of early '90s-ness in John may have come across as pandering then, but now, it's a nostalgia bomb of Buzzfeed proportions. And while the character's attitude may be annoying, Furlong's performance is actually very good, especially when he's required to break out of his too-cool-for-school attitude and show real emotion. It's because of these moments, when he's embracing the Terminator as the father he never had, realizing that his mother is about to kill somebody, or growing into a more responsible person, that I couldn't bring myself to hate him, which makes me wish that much more that writers James Cameron and William Wisher hadn't gone so far out of their way to try and make him "cool". I would've made him like the boy heroes of many an '80s Spielberg/Amblin "kid adventure" film, like Elliott in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial or Mikey from The Goonies, rather than making him "modern" in a way that carbon-dates the film, as there is a lot of good in the character and in Furlong's performance buried beneath all the parts that made me roll my eyes. Make him somebody who, growing up under his mother's paranoid militarism, still lives a regimented life that has crippled him socially, with the friend of his we see early on hanging out with him mainly because he's a walking Anarchist Cookbook. While the film tries to show that Sarah's poor parenting has left John ill-equipped to deal with the real world, making him a slick rebel who kids are supposed to admire undercuts that whole idea. Clearly, if this is what he's turned into, he didn't turn out so bad.
The rest of the cast, lacking the baggage that John was saddled with, had far more opportunity to shine. Arnold Schwarzenegger needs no introduction in any film, and he definitely doesn't need one here, in what is quite possibly his most famous portrayal of his most famous character. The T-800 is a superhuman badass, not indestructible but more than capable of taking down almost anything in its path. Unfortunately for John and Sarah Connor, "almost" doesn't quite cover the T-1000. Robert Patrick made his career in this part, stealing a cop's identity and spending the first thirty minutes looking like he might actually be the hero. While the fact that he's the villain is now common knowledge, what's lost in the big reveal of his true intention is more than made up for in the creeping dread as John's foster parents and other ordinary people trust this handsome, gentlemanly, normal-sized police officer without a thought. He does not look like a killing machine, but he acts like one, and I bought into Patrick's performance right away as a monster capable of murdering efficiently and without hesitation. Whereas Arnold's Terminator in the original film was a blunt-force instrument, Patrick's Terminator is sly. Cameron, of course, also sought to invoke fears of police brutality with the T-1000; a famous anecdote from production mentions how the infamous Rodney King beating happened across the street from a location shoot at a bar, with Cameron saying that the first half of the tape on which that incident was recorded consisted of behind-the-scenes amateur production footage. Patrick looks and feels the part of the stereotypical elitist cop, a cold authority figure who looks down on those around him, relentlessly pursuing John out of a shady motive. In this day and age, the multiple scenes where the T-1000's unearned uniform lets him get away with anything feel even more chilling, in ways that Cameron was probably intending. Whatever went into the part both behind and in front of the camera, the T-1000 is a scary villain, and not just because he can turn his arms into hook-swords.
Sarah Connor, of course, returns with her son John, and Linda Hamilton is almost unrecognizable from the valley girl she was in the original film. Her muscles jacked up and her mind paranoid about the impending nuclear apocalypse and robot takeover, Sarah is assumed to be insane by the authorities who locked her in an asylum -- and watching her, you can't help but feel that, even if she is 100% right, she may well have been driven mad by knowledge of the future that awaited her and her son. Once free, Sarah's singleminded devotion to stopping Judgment Day and rewriting history, to the point of trying to kill the scientist Miles Dyson who leads the project to study the parts taken from the original Terminator, makes her ironically much like the machines sent to kill her and her son. And yet, she is still human, her plan failing when she cannot bring herself to pull the trigger on a kind, gentle, and very scared family man in front of his loving wife and kids, no matter how much she compares him to the good Germans who were "just following orders". Hamilton captures this perfectly, elevating Sarah Connor above numerous other "strong female characters", a phrase that far too many screenwriters seem to think equals "one-dimensional, cold-hearted ass-kickers". She is motivated by righteous rage, yes, but is just as driven by despair at being unable to change the future, and desperation to prove that it can, in fact, be done. While a deeply flawed person, Hamilton's Sarah is an outstanding action heroine, and it's precisely because of her depths.
Finally, we come to the other big T-word that inevitably comes up in discussion of the Terminator sequels: "timeline". (Oh, and spoilers incoming, so if you're one of the only people in the world who hasn't seen this, just skip to the bottom line.) This is a franchise that has, over the course of several films, comics, video games, a TV show, and even an amusement park attraction, grown legendary for having a far more convoluted timeline than you'd expect for a series descended from one little sci-fi horror flick -- but pretty much exactly as convoluted as you'd expect for a long-running series where time travel is a core plot element. And to be honest, all of the series' biggest problems in that department started here. The first film had John Connor being conceived precisely because Skynet sent the Terminator back in time, and while you could argue that this is perhaps a different John Connor than the one who existed originally, the implication was that, overall, history could not be changed. Terminator 2, on the other hand, is about Sarah saying "screw that" and changing history anyway, preventing Judgment Day by ensuring that Skynet is never created at all. It is an awesome middle finger to the idea of destiny, but it created a minefield for every subsequent film to wander into as they tried to figure out how to justify a sequel. Still, watching this film on its own, it works here. It's a spectacular ending to a great movie, and it's one that they should've left well enough alone.
The Bottom Line
Had they crafted a better John Connor, this would easily have been a 5 out of 5. It's still an outstanding action blockbuster whose best parts hold up beautifully, with sharp writing, great performances, and unforgettable action scenes. Do I even need to tell you to watch this? You probably already have anyway, more than once.
No comments:
Post a Comment