TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY
[Spoilers]
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1991 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: A big sci-fi (as opposed to "science fiction") film with amazing special effects has Arnold Schwarzenegger again playing a robot caught up in a battle for the future being fought in the present. Stronger on action than intelligence, it still manages to expand the ideas of the first film. Rating: +1 (-4 to +4).
(There are films plotted in such a way that it is very difficult to say anything without giving away twists in the plot. This review has been worded carefully to avoid spoilers that have appeared in *every* other review I have seen. A spoiler section will follow the review to discuss matters that could not be addressed in the main body of the review.)
On August 29, 1997, so the story goes, the world is plunged into nuclear war, though of about six billion people, only about half are actually killed. The remaining three billion people are locked into a life-and-death struggle of humans against machines. The machines achieve sentience and set out to kill all humans to make the world safe for machine-kind. But the one human who most stands in their way is John Connor. So the machines send a killer robot, a "terminator," into the past to the year 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, who is destined to be the mother of John. The humans manage to send back a human to protect Sarah Connor. The struggle of these two time travelers and the conception of John Connor is the plot of the 1984 film THE TERMINATOR. The first robot, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, failed in his mission so the machines, who could send only one robot back before, suddenly found a way to send a second robot. The humans, too, who could send only one human before, find the means of sending back their own representative for their own second shot. This time each sends to somewhere around the year 1995, one with a mission to kill the now ten-year-old John Connor, the other with a mission to protect John Connor. Their conflict is the story of TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY.
Sarah Connor's reaction to the events of the first film bordered on the psychotic. She made it her mission to learn everything she could about guerilla warfare and survival tactics to pass on to her son. She slept with mercenaries and made friends with military personnel to help achieve her goal. She was eventually placed in a mental institution and John was given to foster parents. He seems to have aged fast and behaves like a much older boy. He even apparently has a license for a dirt-bike that he rides like a teenager and has broken the security on local cash machines. One might assume that the sequel is more of a juvenile film if the main character is so young, but director James Cameron uses that device only to widen the band of audience appeal to include younger people. Arnold Schwarzenegger is as tough as he was in the first outing but this time has more of an opportunity to put personality into his character.
The new script adds some new concepts and forgets about some of the old. And both actions are welcome. We discover this time around that the nuclear war was not with the Soviets. This might have been considered a necessary change since month by month the possibility of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviets seems more and more remote. But without the Soviets as foes, the question would be whom would we be fighting with. The film provides an answer, as Cameron often does, by borrowing a concept from another major science fiction film. (See the spoiler section if you dare.) Not entirely gone but soft-pedaled is the ridiculous idea that only living matter can go through the time portal. So the time portal strips away clothing and weapons but for some reason leaves intact other dead matter like hair and fingernails. However, at one point in the film, the machines of the future send back a piece of metal and it makes it through just fine without being living tissue. The concept that some physical process in the time portal recognizes what is living and what is not is dubious at best. This of course does raise an inconsistency in the plot, but then Cameron considers and develops the ideas of the film only enough so they do not get in the way of all the action scenes. Along those lines it still has not occurred to the humans of the future (is "still" the right word for events in the future?) that their efforts might be better spent in sending back agents actually to avert the war, rather than just to lessen its impact.
The action scenes and special effects--what most of the audience has come to see--are delivered, even if not always in the most intelligent manner. I consider Cameron's last film, THE ABYSS, a much more intelligent and interesting action film. It had better characters and a much more engrossing story. In one sequence of TERMINATOR 2, one of the good guys is sprayed with machine gun fire that should have been instantly fatal, but he lives considerably longer to exact his revenge. It is a little redundant, incidentally, to say that it is a good guy sprayed with machine gun fire. From a certain point in the plot on, the good guys undertake to do what has to be done without killing any more of the bad guys, much like in the Japanese action film SANJURO. The special effects are extremely well done and undoubtedly account for a big piece of the film's price tag of somewhere around a tenth of a billion dollars. That cost was apparently partially defrayed by rubbing the audience's collective nose in the name of a well- known soft drink.
While much of the special effects budget went into creating some really impressive robot effects, there was enough left over to spend some very impressive effects on a dream sequence. In the film THE MOUSE THAT ROARED, in the midst of showing some screwball characters playing tag with a nuclear super-weapon, we see a huge nuclear detonation. The narrator reassures us that it did not really happen in the plot and the scene was just to remind us what could happen any moment. Similarly, we see some of the most frightening and realistic scenes ever created of a city destroyed by a nuclear bomb. And we see them in a dream sequence to tell us, this is what Sarah Connor is trying to avoid. In those scenes and many others the audience can only marvel at the incredible technology used to create this fervently anti-technology film.
TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY is a large film with large virtues and large faults. Like Mt. Rushmore, it is huge and a must-see, but one wonders if it really was such a good idea in the first place. I would rate this Mt. Rushmore of a movie +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
***SPOILER SECTION****SPOILER SECTION****SPOILER SECTION***
One of the nice touches of the script is its use of the audience's expectations from the previous film to surprise the audience this time around. Once again you have a mean-looking Arnold Schwarzenegger and a smaller and more human-looking guy--thin, short, and his ears stick out-- arriving from the future. The natural assumption the audience has is that the Schwarzenegger robot will be a killing machine aimed at John Connor, and the other visitor will be playing defense. It would have caught the audience nicely off-guard when each does precisely the opposite thing. Unfortunately, you are looking at the first and only review I have seen that does not spoil this twist for the audience.
Every review also gives away the nature of the bad terminator, a truly awesome idea for a killing machine which it strikes me was borrowed from a 1960s DC comic book called "Metal Men." Visually the effect, a close relative of the "water-tentacle" used in THE ABYSS, is very impressive. However, the story simply did not carry through with the power of this killer. In at least three of the scenes, he should have been able to take out John Connor by turning himself into a strong clamp and a very long sword. He should have been able to kill any human within twenty or thirty feet of him fairly easily. There may have been some rule that said only a certain percentage of his weight could go into the sword, but if that were the case they should have said so. And this thing is many orders of magnitude advanced over the old-style terminator. Where did the new technology come from? It seems unlikely for 2029 that any such technology will be possible.
It is nice that Sarah Connor starts to use her head, but why does nobody in the future think in terms of stopping the nuclear war? And destroying the computers is a good thought for someone like Sarah, but it probably would not work. It is a standard security precaution to store important software backups off-site just in case two robots from the future decide to use your lab as a battleground. Or in case a defense computer becomes sentient and starts dictating terms. I think Cameron probably borrowed that idea from COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT.
One last question: When the liquid nitrogen truck took the liquid robot into the foundry, am I the only one who knew the next two forces that would be used against him? No, I thought not.
Mark R. Leeper
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leeper@mtgzy.att.com
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