Terminator 2: Judgement Day

Terminator 2: Judgement Day is arguably the best sequel ever made. It’s definitely the best sequel to The Terminator that’s ever been done to date.

The big thing that makes Terminator 2 work as a sequel is that it directly continues the plot of the original movie. Granted, the movie takes place thirteen years after the original, but this is a quite logical development in the plot from there. After all, if you were unable to preemptively kill John Connor before he was born, killing him as a child is the next best thing.

Of course, there are other things that make this film work as a sequel. The action sequences have a larger scale in this movie, and they reflect the huge difference in budget between the original Terminator and Judgement Day. This is absolutely the kind of thing you want to see in a movie like this.

I think the script for Terminator 2 felt much more like a James Cameron script than the original did. Perhaps this is because he had a different cowriter for this movie than he did the original (William Wisher is credited as cowriting this movie, while Gale Anne Hurd is credited as cowriter of the original), or perhaps it’s because after the relative successes of The Terminator, Aliens, and The Abyss, the studios were willing to give Cameron a little more control over his movies. I’m leaning towards a bit of both.

But it’s undeniable that there was a certain weakness to the characters here. Edward Furlong’s performance as John Connor is about as good as you could expect from a child actor in the early ’90s, but the character was written with a certain inherent whinyness that seemed to make his voice changing more obvious than it needed to be.

Having said this, Furlong did do a passable job here, which is about all one can honestly hope for from a child actor in a movie from this era. After all, this movie was made well before the era of everyone expecting great performances from kids because of Stranger Things and the 2017 iteration of It.

I think Furlong’s the kind of actor who can give a pretty good performance if he’s got the right director, as evidenced by American History X. Perhaps in one of the upcoming Terminator movies they could cast him as an adult John Connor now that he’s old enough.

While I think some of the characters are weakly written, I have to admit that this isn’t the kind of movie that needs brilliantly written characters. There’s not much you really need to do to write a compelling character arc for a T-1000; they just have to be there and be present for the action sequences.

And let’s be fair–in some ways, the T-1000 from Judgement Day is far more chilling than the T-800 from the original Terminator. While the original T-800 was intent on killing every Sarah Connor he could find, he didn’t speak much and could only hold the one form. The T-1000, on the other hand, could take other forms if it needed to, and was generally searching a much more intelligent manner because he was more willing to talk to people.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character, the T-800, did get a lot more character development in Terminator 2 than the T-800 from the original movie got. While the original T-800 was merely a killing machine totally intent on killing everyone in sight, this T-800 was able to learn things about human behaviour and, to some extent, was also able to form connections with people.

So that’s really the trade-off in this movie in terms of the characters. While one of the main human characters, namely John Connor, in Judgement Day is less compelling (and, quite frankly, a little bit annoying) than the human characters in the original Terminator, the two Terminators sent back in time in this movie are interesting in ways that the original T-800 never really was.

As I mentioned in my post about the original movie, I think it was the best Terminator movie. This isn’t to say that this movie is bad, because I’m inclined to believe anyone who thinks Judgement Day is a bad movie has most likely never actually seen a bad movie; but rather that this movie isn’t quite as good.

This is for one simple reason: I think Terminator 2: Judgement Day strays away from the message of the original movie. While no fate but what you make are arc words in this movie and explain a lot of the motivations for what Sarah Connor does here, I don’t think this is necessarily true for this movie like it was in the original.

I know this may sound like nonsense, given that the protagonists of this movie were successfully able to prevent Judgement Day from happening. But here’s the rub: even if you were inclined to think that all the Terminator sequels after this don’t really count, and I can definitely see why one would argue this, I don’t think what happens in Judgement Day would really prevent Judgement Day from happening at all.

Think about this for a moment from the perspective of the United States Department of Defense. You’ve just sunk quite a substantial amount of money into funding a private company’s research into reverse engineering advanced technology (that may or may not be from the future) which could potentially have massive repercussions not only how future wars are fought, but also how ordinary people live their lives. After all, some of the advances that become possible because of this research will eventually find their way onto the civilian market.

One day, at what must be a pivotal moment in the research, the lead researcher destroys all his documentation that he had at home. Not only this, he’s gone and gotten himself killed. Oh, and quite a large chunk of the facilities that he was using to study the advanced technology has been destroyed.

Now, if I were the United States Department of Defense, I’d want a great deal of answers. I’d want to know how and why this was possible, and I’d want to know what was so important that someone went ahead and destroyed so much of it.

Whatever the answers I found, or the lack thereof, I’d come to one important conclusion: it’s hugely important that this work continue. Surely I’d have some idea of how the research was coming along, and I’d have copies of some of the documentation–after all, the Department of Defense would be pouring huge amounts of money into this project.

So I don’t think that this would really stop Judgement Day from happening at all. What it would do would be to delay it by a number of years; perhaps even a couple of decades. But eventually, it would happen again.

Really the only way for the Connors and their allies to completely stop Judgement Day would be to find some very high-placed friends within the Department of Defense or within the government who’d be able to fear monger about the danger of machines having too much control. This is really the only true way to prevent the war against the machines from happening at all at this point.

So while Judgement Day might want to pretend that it’s about people’s ability to control destiny, I don’t think this is true. I think Judgement Day is a movie about destiny being more of a loose thing, akin to what you saw in The Butterfly Effect–while you can change the particulars of how a thing will happen, you won’t always be able to prevent it completely.

Despite drifting away from the core message of the original movie, I think that Terminator 2: Judgement Day is still a pretty good movie. It does some stuff with the Terminators that I think was pretty interesting, and the action sequences in this movie definitely benefit from the film’s relatively large budget.