Terminator 2 Is Not The Movie You Think It Is.

Flawed and profound, all at once

A few days ago, I posted a note referencing the running joke about Grok becoming sentient and being consumed with an animal lust to sodomize Will Stancil by way of quoting the film The Terminator. We all laughed, but in a comment, Astral asked in all seriousness if I’d ever actually reviewed the film. It’s something I’ve thought about before, but never got around to, with there always being some other idea in the foreground. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had more to say about the second film than the first, and that the former is far more significant as a work of art than the latter.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day is both deeply problematic and groundbreaking at the same time, a film that in many ways represented the inception of a mode of storytelling that would come to utterly dominate modern art- not merely film, but television, literature, all of popular culture. It was quite ahead of its time, really. Without intending to, it offers a kind of prescient meta-commentary on the future, not the message about the horrors of nuclear war at the core of its plot, but a more subtle prediction about the advent of a different kind of computerized wasteland to come.

It’s little appreciated today, but the success of the original Terminator movie was actually a bit of a surprise. In 1984, James Cameron was still a Hollywood outsider, a working-class Canadian kid and community college dropout out who slipped into the industry as a model maker for shlockmaster-extraordinaire Roger Corman. His biggest directing job to date was Piranha II, which could be fairly called the Citizen Kane of the Piranha Cinematic Universe, but was nevertheless not a favorite of critics. Arnold Schwarzenegger had had a breakout performance in Conan the Barbarian in 1982, but hadn’t appeared in anything in the two years since, having only been offered a return to the Conan role (which also debuted in 1984).

While it benefits from the gravitas of David Hasselhoff and Gary Busey, ultimately the gratuitous nudity and gore of Piranha 3DD (2012) undermine the narrative integrity and aesthetic vision at the core of the Piranhaverse.

The Terminator was not just a directing job for Cameron. It was his dream in a literal sense; he was inspired to write the script by a nightmare vision of a flaming metal skeleton he’d had while sick and stressed out during the filming of Piranha II. The story was lean and heavily driven by action, as might be expected from a man with tremendous artistic energy but little in the way of formal training as a filmmaker or scriptwriter. The low budget forced him to be creative, and the casting of Schwarzenegger was an inspired choice- his massive physique and Germanic accent, coupled with the cold, mechanized violence of his character, would have resonated strongly with audiences for whom WWII was not so far in the past. Schwarzenegger is sometimes dismissed as lucking into an easy role- simply being required to be big and menacing- but the garrulous and extroverted former bodybuilder actually had to work very hard to embody the part of a soulless killing machine. Like Cameron, he was an autodidact from a blue collar background who came up in the industry thorough grit and manic energy. The Terminator would become his iconic role.

Cameron also considered Mel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone for the role of Terminator. The studio suggested casting OJ Simpson, but Cameron didn’t think he would be believable as a killer, a view later endorsed by an actual jury.

The plot of the movie is that, in the future of 2029, humans are battling the robotic armies of a rogue AI system called Skynet, which wiped out civilization in a thermonuclear war. Cold War tension formed the real-world context for the film, with an aggressive Reagan administration, soon to be empowered by a landslide re-election (the movie came out a month before), confronting a similarly militant Soviet Union on the world stage. The atomic holocaust predicted in the film was its most plausible feature at the time. But the humans have gained the upper hand- the audience is explicitly told that Skynet is nearly defeated- and in desperation, it uses a time machine (“time displacement equipment”) to send a robot back in time to try to kill the mother of the resistance leader, John Conner, before he can be born. The humans use the machine to send back one of their own, Kyle Reese, and each agent attempts to find future mother Sarah Conner, an LA diner waitress oblivious to her destiny.

Time travel is a fraught narrative device, invariably inspiring massive question-begging from audiences, but Cameron supplies enough information to make his version seem plausible, cleverly having the exposition come from Reese, who, being a human and not anyone with evident scientific training or high rank, believably lacks a full understanding of the mechanics himself. It’s established that only organic matter can move through time, thus meaning that the only machines able to come back are the Terminators, cybernetic automatons consisting of a metal endoskeleton covered in living tissue. They are used as infiltrators and assassins by Skynet, and are formidable due to their ability to pass as humans as well as being efficient killers with a high capacity to absorb punishment. Only one Terminator and Reese were able to come back to 1984, and the time displacement equipment was destroyed by the resistance immediately afterwards.

In this news footage, we see Terminators engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Note that being hit by a car and smashed through a cinder block wall would kill a normal human being, but the BT-1000 is able to shrug off the impact due to its vibranium chassis and immediately resume its mission of destruction.

Reese finds Sarah Conner, rescues her from the Terminator, and confesses his love for her- he, it turns out, is the father of John Conner, the very man who sent him back in time. Reese blows up the Terminator with a pipe bomb but is mortally wounded in the process, and it is Sarah who actually finishes off the killer robot, crushing it in an industrial press. The film ends with her embracing her destiny as the mother of the leader of the resistance, resigned to the coming apocalypse but also the humans’ eventual triumph. Left here, the story would have had a tidy ending.

However, the film proved to be a massive hit, earning $78 million on a budget of $6.4 million. By the ancient laws of Hollywood, this meant that a sequel was called for, despite the original in no way setting up one. Schwarzenegger, whom the movie turned into a bankable star, was naturally eager to jump back into another giant pile of money, notwithstanding his character having been killed off. But Cameron was hesitant for several reasons. Apart from the matter of the story being fully wrapped up in the original film, he felt that even with a bigger budget, technology was not yet in a place to do justice to his ideas. This latter point is fundamental to understanding Cameron as a filmmaker. While his plots are generally solid but not especially clever, he is famous for pushing the limits of practical and computer special effects in his movies, and infamous for his grinding perfectionism. For some of his more effects-heavy films, it’s arguable that the story is more or less a pretext on which to showcase CGI or nearly drown actors in period-appropriate freezing water.

‘This dude needs to relax.’ - Stanley Kubrick.

It wasn’t until 1990 that everything came together for a second Terminator movie. Unlike the first time, there was enormous buzz and high expectations. Both Cameron and Schwarzenegger had gone from success to success through the 80s, and a revolution in computer technology meant that Cameron was now comfortable with being able to execute his vision. Linda Hamilton would also return as Sarah Conner, which meant that the story could be a direct continuation. So after the somewhat delicate process of buying back the rights to the IP from one of his many, many ex-wives, Cameron was ready to go.

It’s here that the problems begin. As noted earlier, the plot of the first movie took pains to tie itself off. It’s possible that a more inventive writer might have had an older, more jaded Sarah Conner battling government agents in the nearer future or introduced John Conner as a grown man rising to lead the resistance; these were in fact storylines that would appear in later Terminator media. But it doesn’t seem that Cameron considered anything other than reverting to the basic concepts from the first film. There were, naturally, some new elements. T2 would introduce John Conner as a teenager in foster care and (in one of the great character evolutions in all of cinema) showcase Linda Hamilton as a buffed up and arguably insane Sarah Conner, her motherly instincts warped by the trauma of the doom she foresees. But of course the real scene-stealer was the villain, a new Terminator (T-1000) made of liquid metal, played by Robert Patrick, who had literally been living in his car before being cast in his starmaking role. But while the shapeshifting robot concept allowed Cameron full scope for his FX vision, it created some narrative issues.

For one, the first film had clearly established that only organic matter could travel through time, but the T-1000 is pure metal. Granted, the only point of that stipulation in the first movie was to explain why neither Kyle Reese nor the Terminator could bring with them any super futuristic weapons that would be beyond Cameron’s budget, but by ignoring that, T2 invites that same obvious question, one it has no interest in answering. Sure, only a nerd would point out that Skynet could have sent a neutron bomb back in time covered in hot dogs and duct tape, but all the same, it’s a lore problem.

Being able to assume the form of any person he touches is indeed a great advantage, but one that is actually little used. The T-1000 is pretty much just Robert Patrick the whole time, which makes sense from a moviemaking standpoint (you want the audience to invest in and be able to follow the character) but given the internal logic of the film it’s strange. The good guys just naturally flee whenever they see Robert Patrick despite Robert Patrick being capable of looking like literally anyone else. He doesn’t even change outfits, which again is a choice made as an audience signifier rather than for reasons of narrative coherence. It’s no accident he’s disguised as an LAPD officer; the film was made during the middle of the Rodney King affair (and in a time of wider concerns about police brutality), and Patrick’s T-1000 has the cold, vulpine professional veneer of a psychopath in blue, a predator ready to visit violence without breaking a sweat, an alien presence among those he moves.

The time travel element introduces other problems. It was clearly noted in the previous film that Skynet only had one set of time displacement equipment, and only Kyle Reese and the single Terminator were able to use it. Also, that act was proximate to its doom; according to Reese, Skynet was as good as defeated and sending back the Terminator was a Hail Mary play. Now, apparently, Skynet is doing just fine. The film in fact opens to a group of Terminators acting as infantry (weren’t they supposed to be specialized infiltrators and assassins?) and the impressions is clearly that the machines are winning against the humans. But- for reasons- Skynet now not only has a spare time machine laying around but decides to do the same thing it did as an act of desperation in the last movie despite not needing to, also for reasons. This time though- even though it could presumably send a robot back still earlier and just kill Sarah Conner as a little girl- it decides to target John.

But the resistance has somehow gotten a hold of a Terminator (the Schwarzenegger T-800 model) and reprogrammed it, and since either Skynet is just really bad at guarding its time machines or they’re just so common now that the resistance has them in every FOB like PlayStations, they are able to send their jailbroken T-800 back in time as well. This time, the twist is that Schwarzenegger is the good guy.

Again, from a movie production standpoint, bringing back Schwarzenegger makes a huge amount of $ense, but narratively, one must wonder if all T-800 Terminators look exactly alike. For robots meant to infiltrate resistance groups, this seems like a bit of a design flaw, like if a senile Joe Biden had ordered all of America’s spies to wear name tags reading “Bond, James Bond” in the field. Strangely, this is actually a plot point that later films would adopt as canon, even using CGI and de-aging to bring in Schwarzenegger when he wasn’t actually cast in the film or able to pass as his original age. More on that later.

This would have been so much better if they’d just had Bale fighting CGI-head Schwarzenegger in his Batman costume, and then, when all hope seemed lost, Robocop dropped in with the assist.

But perhaps the biggest change is the most subtle. In the original film, there is a past that happens leading to a future that will happen, which, despite its apocalyptic tone is ultimately one of optimism. Humans are meant to triumph over Skynet in the end. The antagonist’s motive is to disrupt and destroy that future by undoing the past, erasing important people from history in order to preserve itself through artifice. In T2, Skynet is doing the same thing again (despite not having any apparent reason to) but this time so are the humans.

The protagonists in T2 are only incidentally, physically in the present; the normative reality they inhabit is that of the apocalyptic future they share with Skynet. The T-800 is literally from the future; Sarah Conner’s whole life is subsumed by her awareness of the future, and John Conner has become traumatically conscious that his whole existence is about who he will become rather than who he is. The struggle with Skynet is not so much for the future, but by agents from the future in a battle over who will control the past, a past that exists as a contested space in which shaping a narrative will determine reality itself. “There is no fate but what we make.”

After the T-800 rescues John from the T-1000 and explains the situation, John orders him to help him spring Sarah from the insane asylum to which she’s been confined. Sarah decides that rather than escape with John and the T-800, she will preempt the rise of Skynet by killing its chief scientist, Miles Dyson, and attempts to assassinate him in his home. He is saved by John, and when he sees with his own eyes what will come of his work, Dyson agrees to help destroy the future tech he’s been developing in his lab.

Miles Dyson’s expertise in creating cyborgs would later lead to his being recruited by Zach Snyder.

Dyson dies after being mortally wounded during a police shootout in his lab, blowing up the building as the main protagonists escape. Fortunately for them, the LAPD shows no interest in chasing them despite the T-800 exploding a dozen police cars with a minigun, shooting several of them, and stealing a SWAT team truck, with the T-1000 hijacking a police helicopter in the process. After a running battle on the highway, the group crashes into a steel mill that is for some reason up and running in the middle of the night, and the final battle ensues, with the T-1000 dying a CGItastic death in molten metal. The group toss the Terminator parts retrieved from Dyson’s lab into the cauldron in order to prevent anyone from inventing Skynet, but there is a catch. In a moving scene, the T-800 explains that in order to ensure that no Terminator technology remains, he too must be destroyed.

At the emotional core of the story is the redemptive power of familial love. Sarah Conner, warped by grief over the death of Kyle Reese and the crushing burden of the doom to come, has become, by the start of the film, something very much like a Terminator herself- cold and utilitarian, seeing her son as nothing but the leader of the resistance he will become. Her attempted murder of Dyson in order to change the future parallels the original T-800’s mission to kill her. It’s only when she sees Dyson’s family that she recovers her humanity, and for the first time, unloads the hatred she feels for men who know nothing of cultivating life within them. The T-800, by contrast, starts the film as a pure killing machine, but his proximity to John and Sarah begins to shape him into something more human. But just as Sarah is prevented by her fundamental humanity from becoming a machine, the T-800 tragically can understand humans, but never be one. Paradoxically though, his recognition of this reality comes at his moment of ultimate sacrifice, his descent into molten steel signifying a kind of baptismal metamorphosis, his thumbs-up gesture signaling both hope and pointing to higher things. The family dynamic they form is powerful and despite its ephemeral nature, the death of the ‘father’ in the act of protecting ‘his’ family allows for Sarah to become fully a mother once more, and for John to have a life apart from his prior destiny.

This genuinely mythic, traditionalist aspect is- more than the groundbreaking special effects or the brilliant action sequences- why the film not only works despite the plot holes and lore abuse I noted, but is widely regarded as far better than the original, a rarity for a sequel. It was a mega-hit upon release and has endured as a popular video rental and steaming choice through the years. But the legacy of the movie is unfortunately not so much the grounded emotional resonance with timeless roots, but rather a kind of uncanny postmodern meta-narrative that would give rise to some of the worst aspects of modern creative life.

Skynet’s evil scheme to rework the past in order to create a new present has a long pedigree in the post-Enlightenment West, with revolutionary regimes over and over declaring Year Zero in a frenzy of statue-smashing and tradition abolishing. But modernity allowed for increasingly sophisticated modes of undoing history; you may remember the theme from Orwell and Bradbury. The postmodern age in turn offers a digital landscape wherein a deracinated and demoralized population can be offered wholly artificial narratives constructed with the sole purpose of communication a wholly spurious framing of history. The past as grim racist patriarchy can be remade into a diverse girlboss-driven aspirational model to order.

The Terminator became an “IP” and the movies became a “franchise” a business model wherein the same characters, tropes, and even entire major plot elements are endlessly reworked and reissued. The logic of it all has long since fallen apart; going back in time accomplishes nothing and defeating the time-traveling evil robots accomplishes nothing. Thus, even when directors tried something arguably novel and interesting (Terminator: Salvation; Terminator: the Sarah Conner Chronicles) it didn’t work because everything that happened could and would be undone in the next outing- there were simply no stakes to any of it.

Cameron is a boomer, by modern standards possessed of poor educational attainment, but his art benefited greatly from his having grown up in a world still suffused with a normative Western culture. The people writing the endless stream of new Terminator slop (and all the other slop) did not share that formative environment. Cameron could draw on a living tradition when fashioning his Terminator movies. The new writers learn how to make new Terminator movies from watching old Terminator movies, and their narrow, shallow educations have conditioned them to the same end as Skynet- deconstruction. Cameron’s lorebreaking in T2 is an act of deep reverence compared to the wholesale injection of current-year proprieties into each new retcon and reboot. The final (thus far) act of plundering the past was fitting in its way- an elderly Cameron, his creative powers now mostly exhausted, bringing back a very tired, geriatric Schwarzenegger and Hamilton so that they could watch John Conner getting murdered and erased from the story he’d been central to in order to be replaced by a diversity hire. Terminator: Dark Fate is some truly sad crap.

I don’t want to sound like a cuck here, but Casting Dylan Roof as the good guy is just insensitive.

Of course, the same thing can be said of all popular culture at this point. Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, Predator, Dr. Who, Marvel, Willow (remember that one) and, worst of all, Lord of the Rings; there are many others. All with their pasts ripped apart in order to construct a new reality more acceptable to digital tyrants. But of course, we’ve at least been spared the reality of mad scientists creating Artificial Intelligence with an inhuman obsession to undo history… haven’t we..?