30 years ago, Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released to rabid hype – and lived up to it. The Terminator came out in 1984 and was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s coming out party as a major commercial action star, and was an original and enthralling action movie in its own right. In the same way that Alien was a horror movie and the sequel Aliens moves into the action genre, T2 makes that same shift, only that it was even bigger and better. At the time, T2 was the most expensive movie ever, and adjusted for inflation, is still the highest grossing R rated movie ever. It is a revolutionary film that still holds up incredibly well today, and remains one of the most important and rewatchable action movies ever made.
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6:50 – Arnold Schwarzenegger appears naked in the thinker pose. Ok now the movie has really started.
8:19 – Schwarzenegger, as the T-800, scans the bikers for someone his size, and tells him: “I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle.” Schwarzenegger does not have a lot of lines in this movie (he was paid $21,429 per word of dialogue) but damn does he make them count. This biker bar scene (capped off by the sunglasses and shotgun) is so much fun, but crucially, first time viewers at this point have no idea whether he’s good or bad, and this still maintains that ambiguity (especially since Robert Patrick kind of resembles Michael Biehn).
14:02 – We get our first shot of Sarah Connor, and she’s doing pullups in her cell at the mental institution. Yet another iconic scene. Linda Hamilton goes through one of the biggest movie-to-movie transformations I’ve ever seen, and importantly, paves the way for Hollywood badass women-centered movies.
28:30 – Following John Connor and the T-1000 at the mall, the T-800 pulls out his shotgun for the first time, which he was carrying in a box of flowers. This is some John Woo style shit. I’m pretty sure Arnold in this movie is what made me think shotguns were cool, especially with the one handed reloads while on the motorcycle. We also see T-1000 get shot for the first time, which was a mind-bending thing for an 8-year-old boy to see.
29:56 – As John Connor is trying to escape on his dirtbike, the T-1000 starts sprinting full speed in his cop uniform, seemingly without breathing at all. Robert Patrick running full speed was one of the most thrilling and menacing movie memories I have as a kid.
34:35 – After the T-1000 snags a truck to follow John onto the LA River, the T-800 joins them from behind, with his sunglasses and shotgun in tow. This is such a great set piece. It’s pretty simple by today’s standards but is still one of the great and memorable car chase scenes. Both Terminator films are such underrated “Los Angeles movies”.
38:56 – The T-1000 morphs into John’s foster mom! Almost at the same time we learn that, it/she also stabs his foster dad in his brain, through the milk carton he was drinking. The milk carton scene! Another holy shit moment seared into my 8-year-old brain that was beginning to comprehend the implications of “liquid metal”. The knife hand, of course, but also the fact that the T-1000 could turn into any other human being. James Cameron takes one of the conceits that makes The Thing so effective and uses it to inject even more fear and paranoia into the movie. We see more of the liquid metal later on of course, but a lot of the special effects really hold up for what was, at the time. Also Xander Berkeley, we hardly knew ye – what a way to go out.
49:01 – The T-1000 goes to the psych hospital to try to find Sarah Connor, and in order to get in, morphs into the security guard. This is the first time we see the T-1000 replicate someone else and how he does it. Crucially, the CGI is convincing enough, even now in 2021. Again, this is another cool use of the liquid metal as the T-1000 blends into the floor to establish “contact”. A fun fact is that Cameron used twins for many of the actors who played characters that the T-1000 imitated, including this security guard and even Linda Hamilton herself.
1:06:31 – John asks T-800 not to “be such a dork all the time” and teaches him slang. “Hasta La Vista, baby” were the first Spanish words I ever uttered growing up. I also said “chill out, dickwad” before I knew what any of those words meant. I kind of make fun of Edward Furlong for how annoying he is in this movie but I was probably just as bad in real life.
1:18:45 – Sarah Connor has her recurring dream of the nuclear blast. This one was kind of scarring as a kid, with the people getting turned into ash, Vesuvius-style. What a great job of setting up the stakes though, and showing us more of the trauma that Sarah has been dealing with.
1:43:34 – After the long scene at Cyberdyne, the T-800 tells John and Sarah: “Stay here, I’ll be back.” It’s always a tricky line when making sequels. You don’t want it to be just full of homages and references to the original – it’s got to stand on its own – but at the same time there needs to be enough of the connective tissue, the little throwaway lines and bits that give the people what they want. T2 balanced these things perfectly.
1:55:08 – John, Sarah, and the T-800, in their second car chase with the T-1000 in a truck, crash into the steel mill and T-1000 slowly freezes up as he struggles to move. Arnold shoots him with his iconic line of “hasta la vista, baby”: and he shatters into a thousand pieces. What a great misdirect – for a split second we think we’re home safe, and this was finally the way to destroy the liquid metal.
1:56:18 – Just a minute later, the little polyalloy pieces start to liquify again, warmed up by the spilling molten steel nearby. This is another holy shit moment – this thing is really unkillable. Even though you know the bad guy can’t win at the end, there’s such a sense of dread and hopelessness at this point.
2:02:41 – The T-1000 repeatedly smashes the T-800’s face with the machinery, giving Arnold his trademark half-face half-machine look with the red eye. The action in the steel mill is actually less high-octane than a lot of the other parts of the film, it turns more into a thriller horror here almost, where Robert Patrick is slow but unrelentingly purposeful, and just unstoppable in every way.
2:12:03 – After a tearful goodbye, Arnold sacrifices himself and lowers himself into the molten steel as well, knowing that all future technology must be destroyed in order to prevent judgment day. Is this the best action movie ending? The best thumbs up in movie history? A lot of people make fun of Arnold’s acting, but understanding one’s limited range is not a bad thing. The T-800 gets increasingly humanized over time, and Arnold does a great job conveying that.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day is such a satisfying and rewatchable movie, it’s hard to believe it’s been 30 years since its release. This probably marks the end of the big violent 80s action movies but what a way to cap things off. The special effects really hold up but what makes this really work is the boldness of the ideas, and the central theme of humanity, and that’s what will always be timeless.
This movie
is surely the rise of Arnold in the industry!