Terminator 2: Judgment Day is Thirty Years Old

[hanselthecaretaker]

I was wondering briefly why it was in the top ten movies on Netflix this weekend. It’s amazing how well it generally holds up to this day, and is a testament to how groundbreaking its audio-visual presentation was back then. Still contains one of the best chase scenes ever put to film.


Everything from the buildup that happens just before to the pacing, score, finale…*chef’s kiss*

It also had weighty dramatic moments


Plus the opening is just pitch perfect

Having said all that, I still prefer the original’s tone, and the fact that aside from the obvious technical improvements of its sequel it was somewhat miraculously as impressive on a fraction of a budget. I mean it’s kinda no wonder the series has floundered ever since these two masterpieces.

 

[happyninja42]

I prefer the second personally, but the first is very good for a lot of other reasons.

The thing that I love the most, about T2, on repeated viewings, is John's personality switch, once he learns the truth.

Up to that point, he was bitter, angry at the world, and especially his mother, for basically abusing him as a child (as he saw it), forcing him into the foster program, and basically fucking up his entire life due to her mental instability. And as someone with a crazy older brother, who wrought so much havoc and chaos on our family, I can empathize with his feelings a LOT. But, then, the moment he realizes it's all true, from that point in the film, his personality switches. He's able to re-contextualize all that he grew up with, realize she's wasn't crazy, and was actually doing her best for him. He becomes way more open, way more empathetic, expressing feelings, and basically just trying to be a regular human. I also loved his zero deaths policy. Like, ok yeah he was a smartass teenager, but that is a HUGE difference from "I'm fine with people dying" and he doesn't even need to like justify it. The film doesn't ask him to come up with some moral argument for why killing people now, might impact the future war, so every life should be preserved (though I think now that John's embraced his mantle of Leader of Humanity's War, that is a part of his internal process). No, it's just a kid, who just empathetically feels that killing people is bad. "You just don't do it ok!?"

Just a really solid film all around.

 

[Gordon_4]

I prefer the second personally, but the first is very good for a lot of other reasons.

The thing that I love the most, about T2, on repeated viewings, is John's personality switch, once he learns the truth.

Up to that point, he was bitter, angry at the world, and especially his mother, for basically abusing him as a child (as he saw it), forcing him into the foster program, and basically fucking up his entire life due to her mental instability. And as someone with a crazy older brother, who wrought so much havoc and chaos on our family, I can empathize with his feelings a LOT. But, then, the moment he realizes it's all true, from that point in the film, his personality switches. He's able to re-contextualize all that he grew up with, realize she's wasn't crazy, and was actually doing her best for him. He becomes way more open, way more empathetic, expressing feelings, and basically just trying to be a regular human. I also loved his zero deaths policy. Like, ok yeah he was a smartass teenager, but that is a HUGE difference from "I'm fine with people dying" and he doesn't even need to like justify it. The film doesn't ask him to come up with some moral argument for why killing people now, might impact the future war, so every life should be preserved (though I think now that John's embraced his mantle of Leader of Humanity's War, that is a part of his internal process). No, it's just a kid, who just empathetically feels that killing people is bad. "You just don't do it ok!?"

Just a really solid film all around.

The first two Terminator movies are to me complimentary. Each has aspects stronger than the other but they both fit together seamlessly.

 

[BrawlMan]

The first two Terminator movies are to me complimentary. Each has aspects stronger than the other but they both fit together seamlessly.

This. Everything else afterward is bad fan fiction. I give some leeway to Salvation for at least trying something different. It's 3rd place in the franchise as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Samtemdo8]

This. Everything else afterward is bad fan fiction. I give some leeway to Salvation for at least trying something different. It's 3rd place in the franchise as far as I'm concerned.

Not for me, I give some leeway to Terminator 3.

I was disappointed with Salvation

 

[BrawlMan]

Not for me, I give some leeway to Terminator 3.

Terminator 3 was a carbon copy of T2, except the one Terminator is female. It feels like someone else's fan fic from the 90s and early 2000s, and makes T1 and T2 pointless. Salvation is not perfect, but at least the attempt is different and did it's own thing. Instead of trying to be T1 or T2, like the other many unnecessary sequels that kept retconning, nonsensical changes, adding next to nothing on the mythos, or undoing the heroes accomplishments in T2. Don't even get me started on the Sarah Connor Chronicles. What of waste of tv air and meaningless fan base pandering that was.

 

[Asita]

The first two Terminator movies are to me complimentary. Each has aspects stronger than the other but they both fit together seamlessly.

At the same time though, they're smarter than their audience tends to give them credit for and consequentially tend to be misunderstood. While there's plenty to criticize about Terminator 3, the big criticism that I just can't stand is that it 'shat on' the "free will" message of T2. And the reason that I hate that criticism is that it shows that the speaker was not paying attention and/or did not account for the possibility of an unreliable narrator. Probably the cleverest thing about the first two Terminator movies is that the writers understood that 'what the characters believe' is not necessarily the same as 'what is true'. Most of the principle characters believe that the timeline is malleable and subject to interference, but the events we see are a long string of bootstrap paradoxes that indicate that they're in a stable time loop where what happened in the film is what made the timeline turn out that way in the first place. What happened in the movies is what happened in the backstory.

John would never have been born if Kyle hadn't gone back to stop the first Terminator. Sarah would not have become the survivalist who took John off the grid and taught him everything he'd need to lead the resistance if she hadn't had to survive being chased by the Terminator. That picture Kyle treasured was taken in the last few minutes of the first movie as she was first getting off the grid in direct response to the events of that movie...while she was making recordings for John about how important it was that he understand that Kyle was his father and needed to be sent back to protect her when the time came.

And then if it were not for the events of T2, John would have been back on the grid and contemptuous of his mother's 'paranoia' and the lessons she taught him. He wouldn't have had that moment that crystalized the value of human life in his mind. He wouldn't have had the experience that would make him realize that the T-800 could be repurposed to be the perfect counter to the T-1000 and help guide his past-self at a critical juncture in his life. And the icing on top of all of this is that by destroying the chip and original terminator pieces during the raid on Cyberdyne, past humanity got robbed of the 'cheat sheet' (in the form of the terminator parts and especially the chip) but still had people who knew about it and would try to replicate it from their limited memory. Ie, instead of reverse engineering SkyNet and improving on the model they had, they're functionally reduced to simply being inspired to make it.

If this last bit is difficult to grasp, imagine if someone dropped a totalled Chevy Tahoe in front of Henry Ford. Left to his own devices? If he tries to reverse engineer the Tahoe, he'll come out of it with a car with design elements that are literally decades ahead of what they should be, which then gets carried down to all future technology based on it...including the Tahoe. But if someone gets rid of the Tahoe and burns all of the notes, prototypes, and blueprints that Ford adapted from studying it? All of a sudden he's working purely off of memory, cannot reproduce it nearly as closely, and must instead draw more heavily on his more familiar paradigms to try to recreate what he saw. So we end up with the Model-T instead of a closer replication of the Tahoe. Apply the same principle to Cyberdyne's robotics and AI development. They can't cross-reference the terminator parts anymore and are instead reduced to trying to recreate something that they know is theoretically possible but no longer have the 'blueprints' for. All of a sudden, SkyNet is no longer on track to being responsible for the creation of SkyNet 1.1, but instead just responsible for its own creation in another bootstrap paradox.

It's actually pretty impressive that they made such a tight narrative with something as notoriously difficult to write (well, effectively write) as time-travel.

 

[Gordon_4]

At the same time though, they're smarter than their audience tends to give them credit for and consequentially tend to be misunderstood. While there's plenty to criticize about Terminator 3, the big criticism that I just can't stand is that it 'shat on' the "free will" message of T2. And the reason that I hate that criticism is that it shows that the speaker was not paying attention and/or did not account for the possibility of an unreliable narrator. Probably the cleverest thing about the first two Terminator movies is that the writers understood that 'what the characters believe' is not necessarily the same as 'what is true'. Most of the principle characters believe that the timeline is malleable and subject to interference, but the events we see are a long string of bootstrap paradoxes that indicate that they're in a stable time loop where what happened in the film is what made the timeline turn out that way in the first place. What happened in the movies is what happened in the backstory.

John would never have been born if Kyle hadn't gone back to stop the first Terminator. Sarah would not have become the survivalist who took John off the grid and taught him everything he'd need to lead the resistance if she hadn't had to survive being chased by the Terminator. That picture Kyle treasured was taken in the last few minutes of the first movie as she was first getting off the grid in direct response to the events of that movie...while she was making recordings for John about how important it was that he understand that Kyle was his father and needed to be sent back to protect her when the time came.

And then if it were not for the events of T2, John would have been back on the grid and contemptuous of his mother's 'paranoia' and the lessons she taught him. He wouldn't have had that moment that crystalized the value of human life in his mind. He wouldn't have had the experience that would make him realize that the T-800 could be repurposed to be the perfect counter to the T-1000 and help guide his past-self at a critical juncture in his life. And the icing on top of all of this is that by destroying the chip and original terminator pieces during the raid on Cyberdyne, past humanity got robbed of the 'cheat sheet' (in the form of the terminator parts and especially the chip) but still had people who knew about it and would try to replicate it from their limited memory. Ie, instead of reverse engineering SkyNet and improving on the model they had, they're functionally reduced to simply being inspired to make it.

If this last bit is difficult to grasp, imagine if someone dropped a totalled Chevy Tahoe in front of Henry Ford. Left to his own devices? If he tries to reverse engineer the Tahoe, he'll come out of it with a car with design elements that are literally decades ahead of what they should be, which then gets carried down to all future technology based on it...including the Tahoe. But if someone gets rid of the Tahoe and burns all of the notes, prototypes, and blueprints that Ford adapted from studying it? All of a sudden he's working purely off of memory, cannot reproduce it nearly as closely, and must instead draw more heavily on his more familiar paradigms to try to recreate what he saw. So we end up with the Model-T instead of a closer replication of the Tahoe. Apply the same principle to Cyberdyne's robotics and AI development. They can't cross-reference the terminator parts anymore and are instead reduced to trying to recreate something that they know is theoretically possible but no longer have the 'blueprints' for. All of a sudden, SkyNet is no longer on track to being responsible for the creation of SkyNet 1.1, but instead just responsible for its own creation in another bootstrap paradox.

It's actually pretty impressive that they made such a tight narrative with something as notoriously difficult to write (well, effectively write) as time-travel.

I’ll never dispute that the movies are smart, but since I’m a lead headed dummy most of their smarts and subtleties tend to fly over my noggin.

 

[Asita]

I’ll never dispute that the movies are smart, but since I’m a lead headed dummy most of their smarts and subtleties tend to fly over my noggin.

Oh don't sell yourself short like that. If anything I'm overly aggressive on this point, as the 'free will' criticism of T3 is just very frustrating to me due to how it tends to go when elaborated on. To make a long story short, I can't begin to tell you the number of times I've seen that argument be made explicitly as a matter of "Screw Fate! Yay Free Will!" principle. In these cases, the speakers were rather overt about their entire position was based in personal contempt for the concept of fate (usually based on a very shallow understanding of determinism), and as a bit of a storytelling nerd, repeatedly seeing the actual narrative callously disregarded purely because they've got a bug in their bonnet about one of the premises maaaay have given me a bit of a chip on my shoulder about the topic.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Eh, don't see what the fuss is about T2. The franchise doesn't really pick up until the third, IMHO.

...

Just kidding.

My DVD of T2 has "the best action movie ever made on it". I don't know if I agree with that, but it's definitely a contender for that title.

At the same time though, they're smarter than their audience tends to give them credit for and consequentially tend to be misunderstood.

Is that what they were going for, or is that just how they turned out, though? There's always room for interpretations, whether intended or not.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

T2 sits as my primary example of "surprisingly improved sequel". It pulled off its plot twist well (whoa, Arnie's the good guy this time!) and Robert Patrick does a great job of appearing as a credible threat to him.

The thing that I love the most, about T2, on repeated viewings, is John's personality switch, once he learns the truth.

A lot of people rag on Edward Furlong, but I think he did a pretty good job of portraying the result of being raised by someone like Sarah Connor.

 

[Casual Shinji]

It pulled off its plot twist well (whoa, Arnie's the good guy this time!)

Well yeah, for anyone who got to see it before the marketing spoiled it, which means basically no one. But even ignoring that, from the start the movie itself very clearly frames Arnold in a less threating way than it does Robert Patrick, so by the time you get to the reveal it really isn't that surprising at all.

 

[happyninja42]

A lot of people rag on Edward Furlong, but I think he did a pretty good job of portraying the result of being raised by someone like Sarah Connor.

Yes, yes he did. That conflicted "She's my mom, but she's crazy, so I'm angry about that, but also conflicted about my emotions of love for her, and what she did to me, others due to her condition." He did very well with that.

 

[Gordon_4]

Yes, yes he did. That conflicted "She's my mom, but she's crazy, so I'm angry about that, but also conflicted about my emotions of love for her, and what she did to me, others due to her condition." He did very well with that.

Well, better he put the significant effort into John Connor in Terminator 2 than to say, Hawk in Detroit Rock City

 

[Kwak]

Aging sucks.

 

[BrawlMan]

Aging sucks.
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Arnold, Linda, and Robert actual came out okay. Especially Robert. Edward on the other hand has clearly not been taking care of himself that well. I am sad to see him like that.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Arnold, Linda, and Robert actual came out okay. Especially Robert. Edward on the other hand has clearly not been taking care of himself that well. I am sad to see him like that.

I think Robert got work done, though, it's not him aging well naturally.

 

[BrawlMan]

I think Robert got work done, though, it's not him aging well naturally.

Even if that's the case, he still need to take care of himself in the car was. Even when I was a teenager, he already look like he was aging gracefully. Thank you for that heads up.

 

[Gordon_4]

Aging sucks.
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I dunno, Robert Patrick is looking good for his age. Arnold doesn't look awful either. And honestly, Linda Hamilton looks basically like I’d imagine she’d look. Poor Edward though, oof

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Poor Edward though, oof

Child actor + defining role + Hollywood = probably oof