Classic Movie Review : Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
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Popular culture never quite recovered from Terminator movies. Once the idea of Skynet and a war-torn future dominated by soulless machine entered the bloodstream of internet nerds, no milquetoast sequel would ever be terrible enough to kill it. The franchise arguably had two great movies and peaked in 1991 with James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day. What did this movie do exactly to subdue an entire generation of anxious teenagers?
Terminator 2: Judgment Day is set eleven years after the events of The Terminator. The future leader in the war against the machines John Connor (Edward Furlong) is now a brooding L.A kid and his mother Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) is institutionalized, mostly for being violent and delusional. Little did psychiatrists knew, she was violent but NOT delusional as the machines send a killer robot (Robert Patrick) back in time to kill her son.
Here’s where it starts getting tricky: Sarah’s own son FROM THE FUTURE sends a killer robot that looks exactly like the killer robot who tried to kill her a decade ago (Arnold Schwarzenegger) in order to protect HIS CHILD SELF. A lot of trauma and destruction ensue. That’s about it.
Robots are the new Nazis
If Terminator 2: Judgment Day hit such a nerve in the collective consciousness, it’s because it addresses a lot of our fear and desires with a single aesthetic choice: making robots the antagonist of a war for humanity’s survival. Because we’ve been mass murdering Nazis on screen since 1945, but there’s only so much you can feel about reconquering the past over and over again. Self-aware, homicidal technology is a renewable soulless boogeymen.
Don’t tell me they aren’t. These robots in the first scene look like goddamn animated skeletons from a demented Disney movie, with a coat of shiny paint on. Robert Patrick gets killed over and over by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton and never fucking dies. Because who gives a shit about the rules of basic biology? T-1000s are from the future and they serve no purpose whatsoever, except getting killed over and over again.
I don’t believe there’s a great philosophical argument being made in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Maybe that progress isn’t good and it’s to eventually bite us in the ass, but I haven’t seen a counterargument to it. The Los Angeles Arnie and the T-1000 fight in might not be as desolate as the post-apocalyptic Los Angeles of 2029, but it’s kind of shitty too? It’s all highways and corporate offices. There’s nothing out there that doesn’t deserve to burn.
Sometimes a movie is just about two humanoids from the future facing off like they’re on Monday Night Raw.
So what is the future exactly?
Another great thing about this movie is that it’s based on a future no one involved put any effort into shaping. We got basically two robots punching each other, shooting at each other and using twentieth century technology to terminate one another. One would’ve thought they’d brought back laser guns from the first scene, but no. None of them seems to have any relationship to computers also because no one gave a shit about them then.
But it works. Hindsight has done T2 wonders gave it unexpected documentary depth about pre-Microsoft America. We were scared about weird stuff.
This is not unlike seamen imagining monsters at the bottom of the ocean, you know? If you don’t know exactly what to be afraid of, your mind is going to come up with a familiar (yet most disturbing) answer. In this case, a cold, hard and emotionless simile of ourselves who want to wipe us from the planet. I’m not sure James Cameron ever planned in computers transforming us into lazy, paranoid fuck who deliberately surrendered our lives to them.
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Terminator 2: Judgement Day doesn’t have the grimy edge of its predecessor, but it’s silly and really entertaining in its own explosive way. It’s not exactly brutal, Arnie fucks a lot up shit up and maims undeserving police officers into early pensions BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T THINK ABOUT THAT STUFF THEN. I hadn’t watched it in almost two decades and I have to admit, it was a grand ol’ time. Fighting my own fear of the future has never been more fun.
