Back again and cleaned up for a new home video format Terminator 2: Judgment Day looks better than ever, showing off the superior effects talents of its demanding producer-director. James Cameron’s career took a giant step forward with each project — one moment he’s pasting together cut-rate effects for Roger Corman, and the next, he’s directing a patchwork sequel to Piranha. He stunned the industry with his 1984 The Terminator, a movie that looks several times more expensive than it was. His 1986 Aliens did the same trick on a much larger scale, firmly interlocking science fiction and violent action into a surefire genre hybrid. Aliens not only respected Sci-Fi traditions, it initiated the ‘action overkill’ technique of drawing the viewer into thrilling, exhausting multiple climaxes. Critics had complained for ten years that movies were becoming roller-coaster rides, but Cameron’s complex attractions left his audiences thoroughly exhilarated.
The Abyss stumbled somewhat because Cameron’s scripting wasn’t good enough to sell the feel-good message in a confusing mix of Sci-Fi and underwater adventure. But The Abyss opened the door on a fantastic new development that would change movies as completely as had sound and widescreen: digitally created visual effects. Cameron was one of the first filmmakers to pull free of the limitations of what could be staged in front of a camera lens.
Best described as ultra-competent, Cameron stepped to the forefront of the industry with Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a vastly complicated violent entertainment machine that could be made only by a mastermind in full control of every technical detail. Already adept at efficient camera storytelling, Cameron gambled with Industrial Light & Magic’s new capacity for creating unique, photographically impossible digital effects. 1991 audiences watched T2 surpass normal technical standards within its first two or three shots — and then proceed into an unbroken string of visual miracles, including the first really successful characters animated through CGI.
T2 brings back Arnold Schwarzenegger as a cyborg assassin, this time programmed to protect Valley Boy John Connor (Edward Furlong) so he can grow up to save the world from a robot uprising. The villain is T-1000 (Robert Patrick), a new-generation bio-robot made of liquid metal that can reconfigure itself into the image of anything or anybody it can touch. It’s The Blob and Invasion of the Body Snatchers combined. The T-1000 oozes through iron bars, forms its arms into steel daggers and disguises itself as a hundred square feet of linoleum tiles. It spends most of its time in the form of a polite, immaculately uniformed police officer — on a one-track pursuit of its prey.
One admires Cameron’s mastery of the building blocks of commercial action cinema, even as his basic cynicism shows through. Imperiled heroine Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) is now buffed out like a combat action toy. She’s trained herself to be a one-woman army — and yet she’s supposed to retain our sympathy as a traumatized woman desperately trying to save the world’s children from a nuclear holocaust. Cameron presents emotionally moving images of kiddies on a playground, but his real energy goes toward visualizing an atomic horror more graphic (and sadistic) than anything yet seen. T2 is the ultimate apocalyptic survivalist fantasy: Sarah and friends save the world by embracing guns galore and riding a rising tide of don’t-look-back violence. She’s also quite good at striking wiry-muscled survival-girl poses. It’s Survivalist Chic, all the way.
Cameron and his co-screenwriter William Wisher confect a story overloaded with spectacular, ultra-cool mayhem, most of which is perpetrated by the relentless T-1000. The metallic cop skewers an innocent victim with a finger that grows into a Pinocchio-like stiletto; shotgun blasts blow chrome ‘splash craters’ into its body. All of these wounds heal almost instantaneously. When liquid nitrogen freezes T-1000 into hundreds of ice cubes, he appears to be kaput. But a good thaw allows all the pieces to flow back together like liquid mercury, and the T-1000 is back in business. Since there’s no blood, T-2 is censor-proof. But the surreal visions of the human body being shot, smashed, frozen, melted and splattered is disturbingly gory.
Guns, gore and sanitized sadism.
Despite the superior filmmaking, the emphasis on killing technology panders to the crowd looking for exploitative thrills: for all its bemoaning of the fate of humanity, T2 is ‘a little cold around the heart.’ Arnold Schwarzenegger reportedly agreed to repeat his Terminator role only if his character could be made into a Good Guy, a task that Cameron and Wisher accomplish with ease. But the result is guilt-free ‘fun’ violence, and jokes on a killing machine that mock basic human decency. Forbidden from actually killing anyone, The Terminator instead shoots scores of policemen in the knees, a supposedly benign alternative. The sick joke is at the expense of civilized values. I say, go volunteer your services at your local hospital and find out how much fun gunshot wounds really are.
Moral discomfort aside (do people even concern themselves with that any more?) T2 remains a marvel that can exhaust any audience. At about the three-quarter mark I tend to run out of energy, having simply OD’d on non-stop action for the evening. In the next decade or so, the mass audience may rediscover the notion that Less Can Be More, and this kind of thriller will spin off in a different direction.
The cult following for the first two Terminator movies is fascinated by its concept, which blends time travel, apocalypse-avoidance, survivalism and robot-chic into a workable narrative — adapted, as often cited, from earlier movies and TV shows. The storyline resembles some Outer Limits episodes, and is almost identical to an old no-budget Sci-fi turnip called Cyborg 2087. But few people could even sit through all of Cyborg 2087. Frankly, I pay little attention to T2’s time travel aspect, as the freedom engendered by time-travel capability renders normal drama inert. If the future robots failed to kill Sarah Connor in 1984, why the heck did they try again several years later in the timeline, when Sarah knows what’s happening and has had time to prepare? Why not set the Wayback Machine for the week before the first attempt, and snuff her in her sleep? If you don’t believe me, ask Superman: Time Travel means that no mistake is ever final.
Special thanks to Craig Reardon.
