What makes a movie enduring depends on the specific person answering the question. For some, it’s technological achievements that change the film industry itself, as the first ‘Avatar’ and the original ‘Star Wars’ have. For others, it could be the themes discussed, and the manner in which they’re explored, like ‘Citizen Kane’ or ‘Taxi Driver’. A different group of cinema fans would identify with spectacular set pieces such as those in ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ or ‘John Wick’. The list of reasons a movie endures in the cultural zeitgeist is as varied as the movies themselves. Knowing all this, what makes ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ an enduring movie? Is it James Cameron’s directing, the straight allegories to the terror of nuclear holocaust and technological enslavement, all the tremendous action sequences, or the Terminator understanding and internalizing humanity? It’s all of it, really. The trick is that it’s all of these things with an added, and crucial, distinction: perspective. We get the all-important perspectives in Terminator 2 from our three protagonists: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 terminator, Edward Furlong’s John Connor, and Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor. How they fit together is a big part of the film. There are three other perspectives from T2 characters that are vital as well, though. Those perspectives come from the T-1000 terminator, researcher Miles Dyson, and Sarah’s psychiatrist Dr. Peter Silberman. Each perspective is valuable when telling a story with the ultra-high stakes presented – the enslavement and/or annihilation of the human race – because they help provide a 360-degree view of the biggest issue with humankind tackling our pressing issues: finding the common ground necessary to solve those pressing issues in a manner that honours humanity. Our six characters give us six different perspectives, but they can be grouped into two sets of three. The first is a group of terminators including the T-800, T-1000, and Sarah (we’ll get back to why that is in a minute). The second is a group of skeptics that includes John, Miles, and Dr. Silberman. Despite having three people sharing each perspective, there are differences between each person in their respective grouping. Perspective alone isn’t enough to make this not only an enduring movie, but one that is truly among the greats from post-Golden Age Hollywood. It is all the things we mentioned earlier, so before we discuss the perspective distinction, let’s discuss everything else.
Technical Achievement
For anyone old enough to remember what computer graphics in movies looked like basically until we get to ‘The Matrix’ in 1999, Terminator 2 still stands out as one of the gold standard in technical proficiency until the 2000s. Even when re-watching in 2023, it doesn’t look bad. There are the typical computer tricks that are still used today – have the actor stand perfectly still with no facial ticks to reduce motion smoothing problems – but even the psychiatric hospital fight still looks recent. Show that scene to a 10-year-old and they might think the movie was released around the time they were born and not 32 years ago. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a big part of the reason why the computer graphics look good was Cameron’s collaboration with Industrial Light and Magic. That collaboration brought audiences motion capturing, as well as the first main computer-generated character, that they had ever seen. An article from The Guardian in 2021 highlights that they had a team of 35 experts (artists, designers, engineers) work 10 months on what ended up being five minutes of screen time. That kind of dedication to the craft is what led to their four Academy Awards, one of them being for Best Visual Effects. What Cameron and his teams produced revolutionized how movies are presented. Their use of motion capture would become the industry standard, and it isn’t hard to draw a line from Terminator 2 to Jurassic Park, to Titanic, to The Matrix, and beyond. These technologies would have come along eventually, but Cameron harnessed, mastered, and showcased their power before anyone else, and we have a lot of classic movies because of it.
Themes
There are not shortage of stories and movies about humans creating the very tools that will eventually destroy us, especially since the advent of the Nuclear Age. Everything from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, ‘WarGames’, ‘RoboCop’, ‘The Matrix’, and so many more, all directly deal with this topic. Given humanity’s history with edged weapons, gunpowder, and nuclear materials, it is hard to disagree. Aside from nuclear annihilation, a crucial theme that ties a lot of this story together is the ability for machines to learn. The obvious example is the T-800 telling John, as he’s about to sacrifice himself into the pool of melted steel, “I know now why you cry, but it’s something I can never do.” This particular terminator has understood human emotions, and what cause them: connections with other people. He will never be able to cry, but his bonding with John over the course of the movie showed him how much those relationships mean. Those relationships are the bedrock of humanity, helping push us towards noble endeavours for the benefit of those around us rather than just ourselves. The T-800’s understanding of humanity as an example of a machine learning isn’t the only one in the movie, though. Much like the T-800, Sarah Connor has one objective throughout the movie: keep John alive. That single-track mind turns her from the caring, compassionate friend she was in the first movie to a human terminator in the second one. She is absolutely ruthless towards everyone in the psych ward on her escape (understandable, really), and excoriates John for putting himself in danger by coming to help her. In the moment, she did not understand that it was the relationships between her, her son, and the T-800 that would enable them to succeed. Their teamwork, if not outright camaraderie, is what eventually takes down the T-1000, not simply a grenade in the chest (though that helps). Sarah closes the movie as the narrator, saying “The unknown future rolls toward 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.” She learned the value of human life when she didn’t kill Miles Dyson, the architect of Skynet. That was reinforced when she saw the budding friendship, of sorts, between her son and the T-800. A better future without slaughter is possible, a notion reinforced by Sarah’s reluctance to kill, and the T-800 following John’s orders to hold off on the murdering.
Set Pieces
At its heart, T2 is still an action movie, and a phenomenal one at that. On re-watch, almost every action scene holds up and a big reason for this is the lack of hand-to-hand combat. Just think of all the major set pieces in the movie:
· Mall shootout that features the hallway fight, but is really just terminators throwing each other through walls. There are no punches or kicks thrown that can make a lot of 80s and 90s action movies look dated.
· Motorbike/18-wheeler chase through Los Angeles. As with a lot of carefully crafted action sequences at the time, the practical effects hold up extremely well and it’s still thrilling to watch. It also features no punching or kicking.
· The psychiatric hospital escape gets close, but a lot of it is running from the T-1000, not fighting it. This sequence is closer to a horror movie than an action movie. The ensuing chase is the same.
· Miles Dyson’s residence is shot up by Sarah and features no hand-to-hand combat. · The T-800 shooting the cop cars with his minigun from Cyberdyne headquarters.
· Freeway chase into the steel mill, leading to the final sequence.
The closest we get to hand-to-hand combat is the mall hallway fight, which was more of a wrestling competition, and then the final steel mill scenes. Even the scenes in the steel mill feature a lot of gun play, and whatever fighting happens is done largely between the terminators, which means fantastical feats of strength and lots of stabbing. There are no fake punches that miss by 6 inches, as happens a lot when watching action features of the era. James Cameron’s understanding of what kind of movie he was making – a sci-fi battle between machines for the future of humanity – got him away from the close-quarters combat that can often not age well. Combine that with a lot of expertly crafted practical effects and we have multiple action sequences that have not only endured for over 30 years, but still provide the blueprint for making a wildly entertaining action movie without people actually fighting.
Script and Scenes
It isn’t hard to go back to 1970-1990 and find a lot of movies that feature a lot of dialogue or scenes that wouldn’t fly with audiences in 2023. This is not to pass judgment on whether that’s good or bad, just simply pointing out the reality of how movies are made in our current decade. Just go watch ‘Three Days of the Condor’ with Robert Redford. It is a good movie, no doubt, but they play Redford’s paranoia into what ends up being a hostage situation where Faye Dunaway’s character is held against her will, by the good guy, at the end of a gun, and with a direct threat of hurting her if she so much as moves while he has her pinned to a bed. Then she’s gagged and tied up, left in her apartment, at which point Redford’s character leaves, returns, and still threatens her with the gun while she’s tied up. He’s the good guy! This certainly isn’t to the level of early James Bond movies having Bond slap around the women in his life, but it’s an example of something that played well at the time – the paranoia of a CIA analyst who had his colleagues murdered – but is inexcusable for a character that is supposed to be the protagonist. That is, quite obviously, something that is absent from Terminator 2, and helps set it apart from its contemporaries. The same can be said of the script. Audiences don’t even need to go back to 1990 for outdated dialogue; just go watch most comedies from the 2000s for your daily dose of homophobic slurs; anyone remember “Paging Dr. F*ggot” from ‘The Hangover’? There was a lot of that. Once again, none of this in Terminator 2. It isn’t hard to draw a line from ‘The Terminator’ in 1984, featuring Linda Hamilton as the protagonist, and Sigourney Weaver’s sensational turn in ‘Aliens’ from 1986, to T2 in order to understand why this happened, at least partially. Cameron’s movies, unlike almost everything else from that era, focused on strong women as the main characters, helped along by Schwarzenegger’s magnetic star power. It isn’t easy to write strong women characters if they’re being held hostage at gunpoint in their own apartment by the ‘good’ guy for helping the ‘good’ guy. As T2 is a story of humanity banding together to recognize, and further, our common humanity, the slurs aren’t necessary. Even if they were acceptable in movies at the time, the themes of the movie dictated that they were not only unnecessary, but antithetical to the film itself. This isn’t a celebration of diversity or a recognition of LGBTQ+ issues or anything of the sort. This was a director understanding the characters in his movie, what his movie was saying, and the best way to convey all of that. Hamilton’s performance, Cameron’s directing, and the script itself all combined to give us a generational action movie whose dialogue holds up no matter what year it would have been released. Well, maybe people from the 1930s would be confused as to what ‘computers’ are, but you get the idea.
Perspectives
To this point, we have pointed out why the themes continue to resonate, why the dialogue holds up, why the set pieces are timeless, and why Cameron’s technical mastery set the tone for the next decade-plus of action movies. If that’s all we had, T2 would hold up as one of the best action movies of my lifetime. But it’s how the characters are assembled, what they believe, and how they progress that sets it apart from everything else of its time. It sets it apart from almost everything since, too. That all-important element of perspective is what elevates T2 from a legendary action movie to an all-time piece of American cinema. The movie has three main protagonists in the T-800, and Sarah and John Connor. There are three secondary characters that are worth discussion as well. The first is the T-1000 sent back to kill John, the second being Dyson, and Dr. Silberman (Sarah’s psychiatrist) as the last. These six characters give us six different perspectives but largely from two points of view: that of a terminator, and that of a skeptic.
T-800 (Terminator): It was a risk to have Schwarzenegger return from the first ‘Terminator’ movie but as the good guy protecting John rather than the bad one trying to kill him. The twist worked, obviously, and it sets the stage for Arnold’s best role. The T-800 is sent back in time to protect John, and that’s his mission. Because this is his mission, everything that he does has to be in service to that. This is the way machines work: they have a top-level priority and if they’re asked to do something that doesn’t jibe with that priority, it’s ignored. However, as the scene in the parking lot with John shows – the scene where John pretends the T-800 is hurting him and they beat up the muscle heads and the T-800 stands on one foot and all that – a parameter of the mission to protect John is to listen to John. The machine can only complete its mission by listening to a human that programmed it. That is how it works in the movie, and that is how it works in real life. It is by listening to John, whether it be learning how to high-five, or early-90s slang, or why he can’t indiscriminately kill people, that the T-800 evolves. He never learns how to cry, but he learns why people cry, and that distinction is what progresses the character. That distinction is what gives Sarah hope about the future of humanity. Machines are nothing more than a reflection of their builder.
T-1000 (Terminator): If machines reflect their builder, then the T-1000 is what happens when the builder has complete disregard for humanity. While it is ostensibly capable of the same learning that the T-800 is, because its mission is to kill rather than to save, it doesn’t get the interpersonal moments that the T-800 gets. Because it is interested in destruction rather than building, any person it encounters is either a means to help complete the mission, or an obstacle to the mission that needs removal, like being stabbed while drinking a carton of milk. That is what makes him different from the T-800. If it didn’t hit home with the hell the T-800 goes through to save John at the steel mill, then the T-1000’s persistence at killing John should highlight the importance of relationships. Because the T-1000 has no other mission than to kill John, and it is nearly indestructible, it will go through any and everyone that stands in its way, because that’s what machines with top priorities do. The T-1000 doesn’t go through a character progression, at least not in terms we think of in most movies, but it does provide a vital mirror to the T-800. It shows the humanity that lacks in a machine and its builder if it has no priority besides eliminating a target; en route to kill John, the T-1000 kills the cop early in the movie, someone in the mall, John’s foster parents, their dog, a guard in the psych hospital, and a truck driver just before the final steel mill portion. Where the T-800 goes to lengths to not kill, at the behest of John, his builder, the T-1000 does the opposite. It is built by machines whose priority is survival, and as such, will kill or enslave the human race to do so. That dichotomy between the T-800 and T-1000 provides the blueprint for how humans should treat computers, machines, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. TBD on how that ends up.
Sarah Connor (Terminator): Sarah is not a terminator in the same way that the T-800 and T-1000 are terminators. But consider that her sole mission is to protect John, and the lengths she goes – in the psych hospital and beyond – to ensure that she completes her mission. Through the first half of the movie, her focus is on nothing but making sure John survives, first by escaping the hospital and then by eliminating the T-1000. She beats orderlies with a billy club, she puts the Drano needle to the neck of Dr. Silberman after breaking his arm, and then makes her escape. After she has her nuclear holocaust dream sequence, she loads up the truck with guns and takes off after Miles Dyson, the father of Skynet. She is ready to kill anyone who might endanger her son. The key with Sarah, though, is that she doesn’t go through with Dyson’s assassination. She has a rifle trained on him, after already shooting him, but cannot finish the job in front of his family. It is at that point that Sarah realizes just how far she’s gone, both in action and in her mind, and she relents. It isn’t quite a breakdown, but a realization that she was about to murder a man in front of his family for something he hadn’t done. At least not yet. Sarah understands, in that moment, that the way through their problems isn’t at the end of a gun, but shoulder to shoulder, even if she’s still a bit reticent. After John and the T-800 show up, they give Miles the exposition that will lead to Skynet and, lo and behold, he agrees to help them, full stop. There are a couple moments where he can’t help but show his excitement about the technology because he’s still a researcher, but he helps them. Had it not been for Sarah’s change of heart, they would have not made it through the Cyberdyne building. Building that bridge got them to the other side faster than swimming through the river’s current. Once she realizes she won’t convince her doctors of what will happen, Sarah is a one-track mind as it relates to John; a terminator of everyone but John. She comes to humanity on her own, showing the change of heart necessary for the resolution of the movie. We are all capable of becoming terminators, and not doing so under the most extreme situations is what’s vital to progress.
Miles Dyson (Skeptic): As for Miles, he starts as a skeptic, of course. He’s a researcher; he’s a scientist. His job is to pursue, to discover, and to educate. His instinct isn’t to destroy technology, it’s to understand and harness it. That aspect is absolutely crucial to controlling technology. The key scene for Miles is the exposition from the Connors and the T-800 at the Dyson house. He says, “You’re judging me on things I haven’t even done yet. How were we supposed to know?”. That is a reasonable position to take, but the easy rebuttal is “how weren’t you supposed to know?”. There hasn’t been a technology invented by human beings that hasn’t been turned into a weapon, or at least attempted to. As soon as humans had farming tools, we had killing tools. It didn’t take long after the invention of gunpowder to turn it into a ranged weapon. As soon as we had nuclear fission, we had Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Biological research into biological weapons, unmanned flights into drone strikes, hell, we strapped scythes to wagons pulled by horses to turn horses into executioners. If humans think it could possibly kill someone, it’s probably been tried. Part of the scientific pursuit is to expand and disseminate ideas and knowledge. That pursuit helps put on blinders to likely outcomes, but it’s also what makes great scientists what they are. It is also what could end modern civilization. Maybe Miles is ignorant of this, but it’s not something that should surprise him. Sarah excoriates him immediately for even asking such a question, and that crystallizes what Miles has to do. Miles, the father of Skynet, is also the key (literally) to stopping it. The team heading to Cyberdyne would not have been able to access the areas they need to without Dyson, or not at least without casualties. His change from skeptic to believer comes only because he sees the machine he will build in the future with his own eyes, but at least he believes. If the people creating the weapon aren’t on board with dismantling it, the hill for everyone else to climb gets much, much taller.
Dr. Silberman (Skeptic): The most minor character in this section is Sarah’s psychiatrist, Dr. Silberman. He is a skeptic that doesn’t believe Sarah’s story about being attacked by the original terminator, in part because the coverup hid all the evidence that remained at the end of the first Terminator movie. Outside of the people involved in that coverup, all that was left was Sarah’s word as to what happened. Try earnestly explaining to a family member that hasn’t seen T2 Sarah’s position, but make it your own, and see if the guys in white coats don’t come for you. That is part of the brilliance of Dr. Silberman’s role in this movie. He acts the way almost everyone would act, and that’s with incredulity. It would be one thing to tell friends and family you had dreams about the apocalypse; given the problems humanity is facing and will face moving forward, it’s not a stretch. But an unrelenting killing machine sent back in time to kill you and the baby you will have, but you killed the machine instead? People would be hard-pressed to find an audience for that, even in this insane world we inhabit. So, when Sarah tries to fake Dr. Silberman about how she’s changed, and he doesn’t buy it, and she freaks out, it all makes sense. As an audience, we know Sarah’s right, but we also know what would happen, and it happens on screen: she’s held down on a table, restrained, and sedated. As this is going on, Dr. Silberman pulls himself away, straightens his tie, looks into the camera recording this therapy session, and says, sarcastically, “Model citizen.” The irony being that given the future situation we know to be true, the psych patient being restrained and sedated is the rational one. Because the story is so fantastical, she’s treated as if she’s truly fractured her mind. The third Terminator movie shows a scene with Dr. Silberman still grappling with the idea of terminators and a nuclear holocaust. Even after seeing the T-1000 turn into liquid so he could slip between a prison door, and the bullets not stopping either terminator, he still can’t believe, not wholly. His mind has been beaten into submission by society so that even when he sees the very thing he was warned about by Sarah, he still can’t believe it.Sometimes, the skeptics don’t come around, and you have to go around them instead, just without putting them in a coffin.
John Connor (Skeptic): The final skeptic is John himself. His friend notes the cool stuff that his real mother taught him, but John calls her a “total loser”. It is hard to blame him; how is he supposed to believe her when everyone else in the world would believe otherwise? It would take a leap of faith, even from a child, that is asking too much. If a parent is taken away to a psych hospital, and the child is told repeatedly by every authority figure that she’s insane, well, it isn’t a stretch to believe he thinks of her as a total loser some years later. Like Miles, it takes seeing the actual T-800 for John to realize what’s going on. His entire life, he had eschewed the role of ‘leader’ thrust upon him by his mom, chalking it up to her craziness. What he doesn’t understand is that he is a leader, even if he’s a misguided youth at the time. Once we get to him in Terminator 2, he doesn’t believe his mom, but he doesn’t trust authority figures, either. He has learned hacking tips that would be very useful in a budding fight against machines. He is the one that befriends the T-800 and turns him from a singularly-focused killing machine into a compassionate parent figure. His ability to disregard those with agendas, to learn new skills, and to show empathy are hallmarks of a good leader. Two of those three character traits are evident before he meets the T-800. John’s turn from skeptic to believer is the most important: one that retains humanity. He understands that wanton violence will not prevent the future they’re trying to prevent – in fact, it may cement it. Violence begets violence, and just killing anyone in the way of your mission is a good way to make a lot of enemies. The most recent allegory for this would be the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For every terrorist killed in a drone strike, many more are created through the anger produced by these drones that cause collateral civilian casualties. One mission completed, and now many more to complete later on. That is how war becomes continuous and could threaten the end of civilization. John knows that they can’t just kill anyone that comes between them and completing their mission. That is why he is the most important character in the movie. John is the bridge between skeptic and believer, between mission and humanity. He understands that we can do both, and that we need to do both, if we not only want to save our world, but leave behind one worth inhabiting. As the T-1000 is chasing them into and around the steel mill, John says, “we have to stick together.” Yes, we do.
Character Progression
It is these six character progressions – two terminators into something more, two skeptics into believers, and two that remain where they are – that separate it from other action movies. Just think of other Schwarzenegger movies from that era: Commando, Predator, The Running Man, or Red Heat. None of them have anything close to that level of character progression. The first Predator movie is a personal favourite, and always will be, but it’s a matter of the action and some nostalgia. It isn’t because it’s a transcendent piece of art. Think of any classic action movies of the last 40 years: The Matrix, Fury Road, Gladiator, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. They are all great movies, and all movies worth re-watching, and none of them have anywhere near this level of character progression from six (well, four) main characters. Gladiator has elements of this with Proximo, but to have similar viewpoints attacked from different directions is an area T2 excelled where few, if any, other actions movies have. When taken in totality, Terminator 2: Judgment Day is an American classic: it has technical achievements that were a marvel and emulated for a decade; it has action sequences that are still thrilling to this day; it has very relatable and timely themes; it has character depictions and a script that would play as well in 1963 as 1993 as 2023. It has all those things, and the cherry on top is the development (or non-development) of the skeptics and terminators that is hard to find outside of an arthouse movie. It isn’t to say that there aren’t action movies where characters develop, but when we look at the problem being tackled, and the two distinct viewpoints with varied lenses employed, it reaches a level few movies ever have. Terminator 2: Judgment Day will stand the test of time because there is not a failing aspect of this movie. It all succeeds together, just like the team of terminators and skeptics that end up killing the T-1000. There are lessons to be learned both in front and behind the camera.
Cliffy's hell-hole 