James Cameron: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

In Hollywood, sequels need to be bigger, badder, and bolder. Terminator 2: Judgment Day is arguably the biggest and baddest sequel ever made. 

James Cameron is no stranger to sequels. As Anton points out in his Aliens review, three of his first five films are sequels and he has time and again defined, and redefined, what it means to make a great sequel. But Terminator 2: Judgment Day is a sequel on a whole other level. Cameron’s first Terminator was a relatively modest film that does a whole lot with a limited budget. T2 is not only an escalation of The Terminator, however; it’s an escalation of the entire mode of popular movie making. Thus, Terminator 2: Judgment Day is the ur-sequel, the cinematic text that shows what is possible not only in sequel cinematic storytelling, but in the blockbuster movie as a whole.

It all starts with something that is the same but different—another Hollywood directive for sequel filmmaking. After the opening credits, we watch a repetition of the iconic opening of the original The Terminator: a secluded street near an industrial urban centre, a bolt of lightning, a buzzing thrum, and a hulking figure appears, naked, kneeling beside the semi which is now missing a chunk of its metal (a visual promise that the special effects in this sequel will be on a whole other level than what we got last time). We recognize the man, or rather, machine, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who seems to be back after dying at the end of the last film. It can’t be the same android from the first film, but we know it’s another of his kind, a T-800, a cybernetic killing machine sent back to do something awful to human beings in Los Angeles in 1995.

We watch the T-800 go into a nearby biker bar and rough up the tough customers. “I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle,” he tells the bikers and they laugh at him, but then he lays waste to them, pinning one to the pool table with his own knife and throwing another onto a burning grill. He doesn’t rip any hearts out, as the T-800 does in the original film, but the scene serves the same function as the opening of the original—this android killer means business and can deliver. Of course, Cameron’s commercial instincts have also progressed since he made the first film, so he has George Thorogood & the Destroyers’ “Bad to the Bone” come onto the soundtrack as the T-800 steps out of the bar. Cameron pans up from the black boots and leather chaps to Arnold’s chiseled face. When the bartender rushes out and blasts a shotgun in his direction, the T-800 turns around and grabs his shotgun and, after a pause, his sunglasses. Why the latter, given that it’s nighttime and he’s a robot? Because it’s badass, of course.

In this opening scene of Terminator 2: Judgment day, there is a clear escalation in not only the scale of the filmmaking—better special effects, more people for Arnold to dispatch—but the scale of the storytelling. This is not just a niche science-fiction feature for gore and genre aficionados. Rather, this is a blockbuster for four-quadrant audiences. Which is why you get the humour in the midst of the action, the brief pause right off the bat, with Arnold posing with his new cool look, to satisfy the populist impulses of the audience.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day is an escalation and encapsulation of what a blockbuster film is. It’s still personal for Cameron, as much a fever dream as the original film. After all, the opening credits of the film are a nightmarish vision of nuclear war, with burning playgrounds and charred skeletons. Cameron was (and continues to be) horrified by the prospect of nuclear war and the vision of nuclear destruction here is based on real studies in an attempt to show the level of destruction that such an explosion would produce.

Cameron, however, is working on a larger canvas here and playing to much broader impulses. Thus, Terminator 2 is perhaps the purest demonstration of Cameron’s ability to cater to general movie audiences. It’s bigger than the original film, but it’s also funnier and a bit friendlier. As Cameron did before with Aliens, he has shifted the genre of a sequel, this time turning from horror action to family action. Despite the R-rating, Terminator 2: Judgment Day is essentially a family film with four-quadrant appeal, which is evidenced by its toy line, marketing campaign, and the simple fact that its main character is a 10-year-old boy. It has big action scenes and broad humour, while still having the anti-establishment messaging and commentary on humanity’s capacity for creation and destruction that are essential to Cameron’s art. And it all starts with a misdirection, which is notable for Cameron, who is usually a remarkably straight-forward storyteller.

All this said, Terminator 2 is not just about giving audiences a bigger version of the original film. It also pivots away from the construction of the original and plays with expectation in order to enthrall the viewer. The structure is the same—chase, fight, retreat, repeat. In fact, it largely functions as a standalone film, with all the necessary information for viewers who haven’t seen the first film. But for those viewers who are familiar with the original, the components have been rearranged in surprising ways.

In the opening, we expect Arnold to be the bad guy because he’s the bad guy in the first film. When we meet the other fighter from the future, Robert Patrick (again a slimmer man compared to Arnold, much like Michael Biehn in the original), we assume he’s the good guy. He’s polite, non-threatening. He even dresses as a cop. But when the two finally meet in battle 27 minutes into the film, we learn that the roles are reversed. Both are Terminators, but the T-800 is good and the other guy, the shape-shifting liquid metal T-1000, is bad. The T-800 has been sent back in time to save John Connor (Edward Furlong). The T-1000 has been sent back to kill him. It’s the same as the original, but different.

The narrative surprises don’t stop with Arnold in the role of the hero. When we last see Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor at the end of The Terminator, she is tougher and grimmer than the wide-eyed heroine we meet earlier in the film, but she is still a world away from the sinewy freedom fighter that she is in Terminator 2. Cameron delays Sarah’s arrival on screen to build suspense. We hear her voiceover and learn that John thinks she’s a nutjob because she’s institutionalized, but Cameron doesn’t bring her in right off the top. Rather, he builds to her reveal in the hospital. The camera pushes in on the back of a figure doing chin-ups in their cell and when they turn around, we’re shocked: it’s Sarah. Cameron is playing on the iconic reveal of the hero, such as you get with Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark or Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in Casablanca. The filmmaking construction is the same, but instead of awe at the cool of the iconic hero, we’re left speechless by the transformation. Sarah is no longer the Mary figure of the first film. And yet, she has become what Kyle Reese’s stories in the first film suggest she would: the ultimate warrior.

Cameron plays with our expectations in other early moments, demonstrating the ways that he has escalated the filmmaking and the excitement that we’re to get on screen. A simple demonstration of this is the speed of the T-1000, who is constantly running after cars or bikes and outpacing normal humans. The Terminator operates largely as a horror film, so it makes sense that the original T-800 is slow and inevitable, operating as a slasher villain like Halloween’s Michael Myers. But the T-1000 is fast and lethal. There’s no time to delay when he appears or you’re dead. And, of course, he’s indestructible in a different way. Unlike the T-800 of the original, which could take a barrage of punishment and bullets and remain standing, the T-1000 shapeshifts and absorbs the bullets. He repairs himself and gets back up to run after you again. He never stops or slows. Only liquid nitrogen can slow him down, as we see during the film’s climax, as the frozen chemical slows his movements and breaks off pieces of his body, like he’s an ice sculpture cracking from the chill. And yet, even then, it’s only a momentary delay. The T-1000 is terrifying because of his inevitability; he is an unwavering, unrelenting, stunningly fast spectre of death.

The T-1000’s ability to shapeshift is a story escalation, but it’s also part of the overall escalation of spectacle in the film. The first time we see him in his liquid metal form, walking out of the semi truck explosion in the waterways of Los Angeles, is an iconic moment in cinema history. It’s the first use of a fully computer-generated character who transitions seamlessly to a real actor in a real location. Cameron is reinventing blockbuster spectacle here, showing that the impossible is possible on screen. The T-1000’s credibility would go on to convince Steven Spielberg that he could make Jurassic Park, which in turn convinced George Lucas he could make the Star Wars prequels, which leads us to our digitized, Marvelized present. It all starts with the silver man walking out of the red flames.

Of course, Cameron is also showcasing subtler mastery of the tools of action filmmaking in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The film’s propulsive narrative, which is essentially a series of chases (again like the original) that escalate in their scale and destruction, allows for inventive action scenes to punctuate the tension, like laughs in a horror film, or cymbal crashes in a thrumming rock beat.

In the opening scenes, the film builds and builds, until the inevitable confrontation between the T-800 and the T-1000 in the hallway of a shopping mall. We see a low angle of the T-800 stalking down the hallway, echoes of the shot construction of the T-800’s massacre at the police station in the first film. We cut to John running. He is trying to flee. We cut back to a slow-motion shot of the T-800 pulling a shotgun out of a box of roses (perhaps a reference to the climax of The Godfather), the flowers falling to the ground. In a master stroke, Cameron adds an insert shot of the T-800’s boots crushing the flowers as he walks. There’s no narrative need for this shot, but it adds the sort of metaphorical flavour that makes scenes like this so iconic. We cut back to John running, the shot now in slow motion. The T-800 gains on him. It seems all over, the inevitable machine of the first film returning from the dead, but then the T-1000 shows up and the T-800 yells “Get down” and shoots the T-1000 instead of John, saving the boy despite his fears.

From here, the film bursts into a series of chases, with escalating environments and actions on screen. A foot chase turns to a motorbike chase to a semi-trailer truck chase that takes us into LA’s famous waterways (a locale echoed most recently in Michael Bay’s Ambulance). Cameron controls the pacing with masterful purpose. For instance, when John thinks he’s gotten away from the T-1000, he stops and looks back. There’s a pause, and he looks up and a semi truck, driven by the T-1000, rams through the side of the bridge and onto the waterway. As the chase progresses, the lane gets smaller and each shot gets tighter. Cameron is using the tools of filmmaking to tighten the vise, but the scene is moving so fast, the shot construction is almost invisible, influencing the viewer purely on the subconscious level. 

For instance, the walls of the lane get tighter, closer to the bike and the semi, which barely fits. The roof is ripped off the semi and it hits the left and right sides of the waterway as it gets closer to John, about to catch him. Just when we think he’s done for, the T-800 arrives to save the day and the semi explodes through the tight lane into the open, wider expanse of the drainage system, where we finally get our first glimpse of the T-1000’s liquid metal form, as mentioned earlier.

The other action scenes in Terminator 2: Judgment Day showcase a similar mastery of action filmmaking, and even incorporate some of the same images from this early sequence. For instance, when the T-1000 shows up to kill Sarah Connor at the mental hospital and the T-800 shows up to save her, Sarah flees the T-800 much like John does earlier. When the T-800 walks out of the elevator in slow motion, it’s as if Sarah’s greatest fear has walked out of her nightmares into her waking life. Cameron uses slow motion to capture the emotional enormity of the situation. The appearance of the T-800 triggers Sarah like nothing else can. He also incorporates a mirror image of the earlier shot of the T-800 stepping on the roses. As the T-800 flees with Sarah and John, the T-1000 shoots him and causes his sunglasses, the ones he took from the biker at the beginning, to fall to the ground. As he follows the T-800, the T-1000 steps on the glasses, and Cameron includes an insert shot of his boots crunching them in slow motion, a reminder that this villain has no interest in being cool. He’s single-mindedly focused on killing John and anyone that stops him from doing so.

In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the action scenes are the scenes of development, because the film is about learning and growing up. At its heart, it’s about the fears of raising a child in an uncertain world and the difficulty of imparting the right lessons to that child, especially in the face of violence and fear and global uncertainty. Right at the beginning of the film, the images of a child, carefree, on a swing set cuts immediately to charred corpses on a freeway and a Terminator endoskeleton crunching human skulls beneath its robotic feet. After the opening scene of the future war, and after hearing Sarah Connor’s voiceover warning us about what’s to come, the opening credits roll. The credits depict the hellfire of nuclear war burning playground items: swings, carousel horses, slides. It strikes at the heart of parents watching the film and poses the question without ever asking it: what kind of world are we making for our children?

The decision to have John be the point-of-view character for the audience, the innocent who has to learn about and experience the dangers of the world alongside the viewer, also makes the film explicitly about childhood. John learns lessons over the course of the film. Cameron’s hope is that the viewer does as well. In essence, the film is a morality play. It presents us with an eschatological vision of the future and invites us to respond on a moral and social level, learning the right way to act alongside John.

John starts the film as a punk, skipping out on school, telling his foster parents off, and playing arcade games with cheat coins. But after the nightmarish appearance of the Terminators and the chase where he narrowly avoids death, John gets his first true wake-up call when he calls his foster parents. The T-800 affects his voice and asks his foster mother about his dog, “Wolfie.” Of course, that’s not the dog’s name, and when John’s foster mother answers that Wolfie’s fine, the T-800 hangs up. “Your foster parents are dead,” he tells John, and we cut to a shot of the T-1000 as John’s foster mother, in which the camera pans right along his metallic arm turned into a blade piercing John’s foster father in the mouth through the milk carton he’s drinking from. It’s chilling and a reminder to John and us that our mundane lives can be ripped apart at any moment. They might seem dull, but once tragedy strikes, we’ll miss them.

At first, John reacts with youthful scorn and skepticism at having his world upended. He tells the T-800, “It’s like everything I was brought up to believe was all bullshit.” But soon, he starts to understand his responsibility and agency in the world. In the film, John might be the victim and the central target of the murderous T-1000, but he’s also the fated hero of the future, the one who will destroy the machines and save the world. He’s the everyman who must learn to become the legend, with the help of a guardian angel of sorts. Cameron knows that the viewers watching Terminator 2: Judgment Day will not be fated to such glory as John, but he does make clear that we have a responsibility to the future and the world just as John does. Every person helps determine the future world, create it with their actions, no matter how seemingly unimportant. Understanding this agency is a key part of growing up. The film shows how our present actions determine our future. Cameron’s plea to us is to act accordingly.

John also helps the T-800 grow. Enough cannot be said about how good Schwarzenegger is in the role, providing humour and heroism and emotion through an outwardly stoic and robotic performance. His rapport with Edward Furlong is noticeable throughout the film, showcasing Schwarzenegger’s undeniable skill. It’s cliche to say that good acting is reacting, but it’s true, and Schwarzenegger demonstrates the key element of reacting—listening—throughout the film. Thus, as John teaches the T-800 to grow more human and to learn to control itself and its capacity for violence, the T-800 in turn allows John a patient sounding board. He is the ultimate parental figure, endlessly patient, endlessly protective. And that patience allows John to express himself and flourish.

Sarah notices this in the T-800 in her iconic voiceover:

Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. It would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.

Early in the film, as John spends time with the T-800, he learns he can boss him around and get him to hurt people he wants to hurt. But with that awareness comes an understanding of his responsibility. When John orders the T-800 to beat up some guys on the street, the T-800 immediately acts to kill the men, which John prevents at the last moment. He quickly understands that he has power and with power comes responsibility to the people around him. Power can easily be abused, so rules have to be maintained to protect against that abuse. John is learning responsible leadership, a role he is destined to assume, but Cameron is doing this through character interactions and behaviour rather than lecturing.

Cameron emphasizes the importance of this lesson through a counterexample in the scene immediately following it. In the psych hospital, an orderly puts Sarah back in her cell and restrains her. Once she’s immobilized, he licks her face, insinuating that he frequently sexually assaults her. John learns to restrain power, while the orderly abuses power. Seeing one after the other conveys the lesson doubly.

The film’s lessons about responsibility are also not just individual lessons. They are lessons for society as a whole. As the narrative turns to follow Sarah’s attempts to kill Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), the Cyberdyne director and future creator of Skynet, the T-800 tells John about the steps that occurred to cause nuclear armageddon and the rise of the machines. One is that the American military started using drones, relying on technology in the place of humans. The other is that the military thought they had total control over technology without fully understanding it. The first mistake is key as it shows Cameron’s prescient warning about the state of global warfare. By the time of this writing, the US military has largely switched to drones over manned planes. The second is more important, as humans have a profound arrogance when it comes to the technology they create. You cannot control what you cannot understand.

Once again, it’s important to note how Cameron shares this information and the context of the scene. As the T-800 discusses the future apocalypse, we watch some nearby children in the Mexican desert playing with toy guns, pretending to kill each other. The image is a statement that humanity has a propensity for destruction; even children play at violence. Thus, Cameron is not arguing that humanity’s destructive capabilities are unique to this time and this culture; the film is not a social critique of specifically the early 1990s. Rather, the situation is simply more dire because our technological circumstances have changed, making our capacity to destroy greater than ever.

The scenes that follow demonstrate both a regrettable, although understandable, response to such information, and then a possible path forward. After hearing the news about Cyberdyne, Sarah takes it upon herself to kill Miles Dyson. She goes to his family home and tries to shoot him through the windows. When she fails, she enters the home and hunts him down. Brad Fiedel’s score cues up the sinister tones that are usually reserved for the presence of the T-1000 in the film. The message is clear: Sarah has become a Terminator herself, taking it upon herself to kill a target in order to prevent a possible future. She has become her nightmare.

John and the T-800 arrive just in time to stop her from killing Dyson. John correctly understands that you do not solve humanity’s destructive capabilities by killing people; he earlier scolded the T-800 about the same, saying “Haven’t you learned anything yet? Haven’t you figured out why you can’t kill people?” That approach, while understandable, only leads to more of the same. 

Rather, the film seems to be saying, you must speak to people’s reason and help them to understand their responsibility for the world. Thus, John and the T-800 convince Dyson to help them destroy the technology that will lead to the creation of Skynet. At first, Dyson is skeptical and defensive of his actions. He rebukes them, “You’re judging me on things I haven’t even done yet.” At another moment, he defends himself and his research: “How are we supposed to know?” 

Dyson is making the same defense that scientists throughout the modern era have made when it comes to hydrogen bombs and other weapons of mass destruction. But what Dyson initially fails to realize is that his lack of a full understanding of the consequences of his actions is a central argument against the perusing of such actions; if you cannot control the technology, do not develop it in the first place. The drive to create can be destructive, so it must be guarded against. Pandora’s box should not be opened simply because it can be. Thus, Cameron, a great purveyor of technological development, argues against development for development’s sake.

Dyson makes the correct decision in the end, which leads to his affecting sacrifice, made all the better by Joe Morton’s exceptional performance and the way that he portrays Dyson’s reluctant dignity and heroism. He helps them destroy the remnants of the Terminator from the original film and avoid the creation of Skynet. Dyson is lucky, as is John, that he has the T-800 there to demonstrate the consequences of his actions. He has foresight, which informs his decisions. Most people do not have such a luxury, but that does not excuse them from the responsibility of their actions.

Of course, there are also forces that will stand in the way of such moral actions, individuals and institutions that will force humans down a violent path through institutional inertia or ill intent or selfishness or a combination of all three. Cameron has an anti-establishment streak in his films, despite his affinity for the tools and means of the military and scientific communities. Here, Cameron incorporates that rebelliousness into the film itself. Some of his rebelliousness comes through in visual elements. For instance, John wears a Public Enemy t-shirt throughout the film, a visual gag that is posturing at first, but one which becomes a serious reminder to “fight the power.” John learns what real rebellion means and its great cost. Other elements are key to the narrative, such as the doctors imprisoning Sarah in a psych hospital, misunderstanding her actions for “delusions of persecution.” Institutional authority is made to victimize the heroes throughout the film.

More importantly, the T-1000 poses as a cop throughout the film, co-opting the tools of real life authority to further his murderous aims. Like a serial killer, he latches onto the powers of authority that are easily (and often) abused. It also furthers a conscious critique of law enforcement on Cameron’s part. As Cameron tells Rebecca Keegan in her biography of him, The Futurist, “Cops think of all noncops as less than they are, stupid, weak, and evil. They dehumanize the people they are sworn to protect and desensitize themselves in order to do that job.” The T-1000 embodies a complete dehumanization of an authority figure, where all human consideration is ejected in order to fulfill the mission. The added irony of the film predating the LA police beating of Rodney King and the LA riots lends further weight to Cameron’s critique.

In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, authorities stand in the way and are aligned with the machines, either inadvertently or explicitly. Remember that in the future, Skynet started as a military program. The police, the doctors, corporations like Cyberdyne, they all oppose Sarah and John, oppose the heroes and create the conditions for the end of the world, showing how easy it is for our current systems of power to be abused and work against the betterment of society. Cameron does not argue for burning it all down in Terminator 2; Miles Dyson shows us how institutional figures can be reformed. But he does make it clear that model citizens almost always align themselves with power in the end, forcing outsiders to take the actions on behalf of the whole. It might mean that the rebel has to blow up a warehouse or shoot down a squad of cops—take drastic actions far outside the realm of acceptable civil behaviour.

The sequence where the T-800 blows up the squad cars outside Cyberdyne and shoots all the cops in the knees is a demonstration of Cameron’s rebelliousness. It’s also another clever demonstration of the film’s ability to flip the sequel script on its head. The original has Arnold’s T-800 lay waste to a police station; the scene is a nightmarish vision of evil. The sequel has Arnold’s T-800 shoot down an entire squad of police officers and we cheer him on to do so. It’s easy to undersell how transgressive a moment this is in a blockbuster action film. While the T-800 does not kill the cops, the film does turn the heroes into rebels against the totality of the present, fighting not just isolated bad actors, but the very institutional structures that create the conditions for an apocalyptic future.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Terminator 2: Judgment Day is a fatalistic film because of how clearly it demonstrates the human capacity for destruction. But Cameron is no fatalist, nor is he a polemical filmmaker. In fact, Terminator 2: Judgment Day is rather optimistic, despite its damning statements on humanity. This optimism is born out of John and the T-800’s moral development. Thus, the film becomes a moral fable about humanity.

Things may not look good early on. As John asks the T-800, “We’re not going to make it, are we? People, I mean.” The T-800 responds with a damning clinical observation: “It’s not in your nature to coexist.” But John proves that coexistence is possible. He stops Sarah from killing Dyson. He convinces Dyson to do the right thing and give up his life in the process, which proves the human capacity to improve and walk the moral path. But most importantly, John teaches the T-800 the value of humanity. The T-800 learns to value life just as it has to give itself up to death. He tells John, “I know now why you cry,” demonstrating an emotional understanding that seems impossible for a machine made to kill. John has reformed the killing machine. He has taught him the value of life and an appreciation of humanity. With the proper moral instruction, even machines of death can be made new.

Earlier in the film, while in the Mexican desert, John discovers the liberating promise of an undetermined future. He sees a carving on the picnic table: “No Fate,” which reminds him of his mother’s mantra about the freedom of the unknown, itself an echo of John’s letter to Sarah that Kyle recites to her in the first film: “I can’t help you with what you must soon face, except to say that the future is not set.” And while human beings make weapons, make war, make technologies that are the precursors to Terminators, they also make love, make babies, make art, and make lives. Cameron’s romanticism comes through in the end, his belief that human beings can change their nature, change their fate and escape the Judgment Day warned about in the film’s title. He can no longer abide the fatalism that he ended The Terminator with. He has to turn away from it, embrace the possibility of something more.

The final moments are yet another sequel variation of the same but different. These moments culminate the film’s function as a sequel, how it is bigger in terms of scale, but also in terms of heart. We drive down the highway, but this time, we don’t see the horizon. There is no storm brewing over the mountains, no woman driving into it to face it head on. Rather, there is the dark of the two-lane blacktop, the light of a vehicle cutting through the darkness and charting its own path. Sarah’s voiceover conveys the optimism that lights up such darkness: “The unknown future rolls towards us. I face it, for the first time, with a sense of hope. Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.”

Hope is distinctly human. It’s something we seek and cannot live without. It’s part of why we go to the movies, to feel it, to be inspired by it. We go for the excitement and we go for the escape. Terminator 2: Judgment Day provides both of those things. But we also go for the hope, the reassurance that good can win and that there’s “No fate but what we make.”

10 out of 10

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991, USA)

Directed by James Cameron; written by James Cameron and William Wisher; starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, Edward Furlong, Earl Boen, Joe Morton.

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