I Just Saw

Released seven years after the 1984 original, Terminator 2 famously makes a protagonist of the original villain, having Arnie sent back in time not to kill future resistance leader John Connor (Edward Furlong) but to protect him from another killing machine, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), a mass of liquid metal that can assume the shape of whatever it touches. If Connor dies before judgement day, the engineering programme Skynet will on that date become sentient and wipe out humanity in a nuclear blast.

Unfortunately, the person who can warn them of this, John’s mother Sarah (Linda Hamilton), has been locked up in a maximum security psychiatric hospital…

The film is regarded as a classic, as well as the rare case of a sequel besting its predecessor, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s an action extravaganza with great sound design, groundbreaking special effects, and various top-tier set pieces.

It’s also delivered with a level of pulpy horror that’s rare in action movies now; this was still the era of damp and noisy squibs for blood effects, and it’s even possible to view the first two Terminators as slasher movies, in this case with the T-1000 – and his arms that can turn into blades – as a colleague in of Freddy, Michael, Jason, et al.

The headlong pace and viscerality with which James Cameron tells this tale are absolutely what makes it work since if we’re being honest with ourselves, the plot makes less than zero sense. It’s one of those movie plots that completely fall apart after about a minute of picking. This is to some extent endemic to the time travel genre, and arguably a part more than a flaw of it.

But even T2’s details don’t make sense. Here’s one extremely minor point as an example of the whole: in one of the film’s most famous sequences Arnold Schwarzenegger walks into a biker bar completely nude. Judging by the womenfolk’s appreciative glances he’s anatomically correct, but who or what would have designed him with reproductive organs, and why?

A larger point: what happens to Sarah and John once the film ends? They’re stuck with no transport in a flame-and-steel factory to which a trail of carnage leads from a top-security research facility, itself all but destroyed and at which the Connors were seen.

Cameron infamously said when asked how he came up with the plot of the first film that he just stole a couple of Harlan Ellison stories. (An admission that didn’t please Ellison.) In many ways T2 has the flaws that would come to be derided in Cameron’s later work.

Sarah narrates periodically and mostly needlessly; it’s useful in the prologue to recap the previous film, but at one point while watching John bond with Arnie in the desert she monologues about father figures, as if Cameron doesn’t trust us to interpret visual information. Shades of Jake Sully’s po-faced monologuing in Avatar: The Way of Water there.

But little of this matters while you’re watching the film, whose storyline is so linear and vividly brought to life that it generates an authenticity all its own.

Rating: 3.5/4