He said he'd be
back, and true to his word, Arnie did indeed return seven years on from the
seminal killer cyborg adventure that proved to be a breakthrough movie for both
the actor, and the film's director, James Cameron.
When The
Terminator first appeared, making the most of its meagre budget, it managed to
reinvigorate the science fiction genre, made an icon out of Hollywood's
favourite body builder and secured the career of the director who would one day
make the most successful movie of all time in Titanic. For the second outing,
both Arnie and Cameron knew that everything had to be bigger. And better.
Having recently shown that he knew a thing or two about making sequels that
outstrip their classic originals with Aliens, Cameron was more than up for the
task of outdoing himself.
At first,
though, the premise behind the sequel seemed like a huge mistake. This time
out, Arnie's kickass 'borg was to be the good guy. Surely not! Was this some
mistake? Or simply the decision of an actor now too big to risk playing a
villain, even if it was the very villain that had turned him into one of the
biggest stars in Hollywood? Instead of copping out however, Cameron delivered
the stunning T-1000, a molten metal killing machine that, in its use of the
emergent morphing technology — developed in part for Cameron's previous effort,
The Abyss — radically raised the bar in terms of computer generated special
effects in movies.
When we left
Sarah Connor in 1984, she was a woman reborn, a veritable Madonna, out to
protect the Messiah she knew she carried inside. When we join her in T2, she
has spent those intervening years haunted by the certain knowledge of mankind's
imminent doom, and is now
incarcerated in
a mental institution; her ten year-old son John, is in care. The intervening
years also appeared to have done a fair amount for Linda Hamilton, whose first
shot in the movie is a close up of her seriously pumped biceps. The actress
spent several weeks before the movie working out and training in gunplay with a
former Israeli commando. It paid off. Sarah Connor was effectively transformed
into the perfect warrior queen, moving over the course of the movie from buff
women-in-prison sensuality to full out Guns And Ammo chic.
And Hamilton
wasn't the only one whose appearance Cameron was intent on making iconic. He
takes an almost fetishistic delight in having a newly arrived naked
Schwarzenegger walk into a tough biker bar and fight his way into the best
leathers and onto the coolest hog in the place. When the Terminator walks in
naked the music playing is all Dwight Yoakam hillbilly; when he walks out, all
leather, shotgun and shades, it's Born To Be Bad blaring out on the soundtrack.
Cameron takes great delight initially in quashing the audience's expectations,
not only keeping Schwarzenegger's actions deliberately ambiguous — is he good
guy or bad guy? — but taking an early opportunity to allow the relatively
diminutive Robert Patrick to trash him in their first fight. (He even manages
to slip in a few sly gags — such as the T-1000 eyeing up a silver headed
mannequin in a department store window, and John's significant talents with
video games presaging his later abilities as leader of the human rebels of the
future.)
Metal dominates
Cameron's film — from the opening shot of a freeway jam packed with
automobiles, to Stan Winston's remarkable prowling Exo-skeletons to the
presence of Guns N' Roses on the soundtrack. Indeed, for much of the movie the
predominant sound is the screeching of metal on metal as Cameron sets out to
redefine that old action movie staple, the car chase. Here articulated lorries
take on dirt bikes, helicopters tailgate vans, and everything is explosively
levelled by Arnie's increasingly large arsenal.
Twins also
unexpectedly feature in T2 — the appearance of Don and Dan Stanton (best known
for Good Morning Vietnam) allows the T-1000 to take on the appearance of the
hospital guard, while Linda's Hamilton's twin sister, Leslie Hamilton Geanen,
does the same for Sarah Connor later (Hamilton actually played the T-1000
version of herself in this shot, while her sister played the real Sarah.)
Originally
Cameron ended on a happy note — Sarah 30 years later, sitting in a park much
like the one she imagines being blown away at the beginning of the film — watching
her grandchild play, her son John now a Senator. Wisely this was dropped in
favour of a more ambiguous shot of a dark lonely road heading into a future now
unknown.
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