Terminator 2 bungles two narrative devices in its opening half hour, and it leaves me ever-so-slightly sour on the film for the rest of its runtime.
The first is the delivery of the twist that Arnold is a hero this time around. The movie sort of wants this to be a surprise, but not that much. If it did, it would have made Robert Patrick much less suspicious and made Arnold a bit more ominous. (I’ll even ignore that marketing that so clearly telegraphs this dynamic.) And so the moment when Arnold protects John Connor in a mall instead of killing him, as we would have expected after Part 1, is a bit of a shrug rather than the “oh shit!” it really could have been.
The second is so minor I’m not even sure how James Cameron intended it: There’s a faint suggestion that some or all of what we saw in the first movie might be due to a mental delusion by Sarah Connor, now committed to an asylum. Her dubious sanity is enough of a presence to be clearly intentional, but it’s never fully explored, like the idea was left in from an edit of a previous version of the script. I wish it had been there, though. Cameron could have crafted a more psychological, ambiguous film that teased out the blurry edges of reality, but the movie never leaves even a little bit of doubt that Connor is fully lucid and reliable, that every fact we’ve seen in either movie is objectively true. We should trust everything we have and will see, the lunacy of it be damned.
What we’re left with is a messy start to a film that really should have been trimmed in runtime: Terminator 2 is a half hour longer than its precursor. Most of that is more set pieces, which are universally great, but it still results in a film I find increasingly exhausting each time I watch it. Four-quadrant tentpoles shouldn’t flirt with 2.5 hours. (Cough, MCU.)
But there are plenty more things that Terminator 2 gets unquestionably right than it gets wrong. The first is James Cameron’s unmatched craftmanship at creating awe-inspiring spectacle. This is a real, proper blockbuster action flick with cutting-edge and effective CGI (the uncanny liquid-metal effect is never not cool and creepy) and massive scope, especially in its road chase scenes. It’s that Cameron touch: Terminator 2 just feels bigger and more noteworthy than your average popcorn flick.
Terminator 2 also serves as an outstanding showcase for its two leads. Linda Hamilton, who didn’t have much to do in the first Terminator as you might expect, delivers a knockout punch as a paranoid mom on the edge of breakdown. Perhaps the film’s best scene is when Sarah Connor hunts down and nearly kills a scientist responsible for Skynet, becoming the very violent specter she’s trying to prevent. Hamilton plays the moment with visceral impact.
Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, is not quite as Herculean of an imposing presence as in The Terminator, but he has a much wider range to play as the friendly robot. His comic skills and magnetic likeability are leveraged in a special way, totally ignored in the original. He gets some really inviting moments to build unique chemistry with the cast surrounding him. He perfectly plays a machine who learns to love, never sacrificing the sense that he’s a robot, but also showing real warmth.
Unfortunately, Edward Furlong as tween John Connor undoes much of the goodwill Arnold generates. He comes across as a colossal brat and a charm vacuum, with a very specific shrill panicked half-scream that never gets less grating as he uses it a hundred times.
The whole movie has a slightly leisurely air to it, for better and for worse. It’s certainly an inviting film — easy to see why it raised Cameron’s profile to the biggest director in Hollywood not named “Spielberg” — but rarely menacing in the way that the original is. It’s a more tonally sprawling odyssey, and it’s always polished and exciting, but it does less to stimulate your brain. Any sense of a nightmare parable is long vanished.
So, in comparison to the original, it ends up nearly a wash. Nearly, but not quite: Terminator 2 is bigger, friendlier entertainment than The Terminator, but ultimately a worse film.
- Review Series: 2009 Top 100
Is It Good?
Exceptionally Good (7/8)
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