![]() ![]() Sarah later talks about him as a father figure, but he’s more like a dog. #Terminator 2 judgment day movieThe heart of the story is this buddy movie between a kid and a musclebound robot that does whatever he says. His life is very different from his mom’s, so this cat and mouse section is very different, not to mention the great new twist that both visitors from the future are Terminators and one was reprogrammed to protect him. naked (improved optical effects there), stealing clothes and weapons and searching for a Connor – this time Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton, KING KONG LIVES)’s ten year old (no fucking way – to me he’s 13 for sure) son John (introducing Edward Furlong), the future leader of the human resistance, boss and son of Kyle Reese, who said he “taught us to smash those motherfuckers into junk.” You got your Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator and your other guy being zapped into present day L.A. Yes, it follows some beats from the original. So we take it for granted now, but the opening featuring a bunch of Stan Winston’s creations marching into battle is announcing okay, we are continuing from there, but bigger and badder. The landscape no longer seems crammed onto a small soundstage, there are more skulls, more soldiers, more Hunter-Killers, and it’s easy to forget but the look of the T-800 endoskeleton was a surprise reveal in THE TERMINATOR – he gets blown up and you’d think he’d be dead but he emerges as a still functioning (if limping) metal skeleton. The look is very similar (still taking place at night and feeling like a horrible nightmare) but with improved effects and larger scale. Kind of like how the beginning of EVIL DEAD 2 was sort of a remake of the first film done with more filmmaking experience and resources (in this case approximately 15 times the budget of the first film). It opens with a redo of the future war sequences from the first film. ![]() So that’s one major reason why this is a great sequel, but far from the only one. It was such a once-in-a-lifetime intersection of cool idea and game-changing technology that it has completely ham-stringed every subsequent Terminator sequel (which have indeed been done with Cameron “at one remove”), because no variation on a Terminator ever seems as new and incredible as the T-1000 did. This felt like something we’d never seen before, never thought about before. The liquid metal turning into Robert Patrick, and then Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video 4 months later, made the world fascinated with “morphing.” We had seen increasingly impressive practical and optical effects throughout the heyday of ILM in the ‘80s, but they all seemed like they were progressions of tried and true techniques. It’s hard to express to people who weren’t there how new it was to see something like the T-1000. That’s maybe the most unlikely part of TERMINATOR’s leap from part 1 to part 2: that it went from low budget underdog to groundbreaking reinvention of cinema. We’ve got a story worked out, but it hasn’t gone beyond the talk stage.”įortunately he was wrong – due to rights disputes between Hemdale and Carolco it took 7 years, during which time he not only made ALIENS but also THE ABYSS, and innovations in computer generated imagery pioneered on the latter made the “mimetic poly-alloy” Terminator possible. In that case what will happen is that we will oversee it at one remove, and select a director. I have a suspicion they won’t want to wait that long because they’ll want to follow closer on the heels of the film’s success. In 1985, James Cameron told Cinefantastique “we’ve got a story worked out” for a TERMINATOR sequel, and that there were “two ways it could go… It will either wait 18 months until we’re done with ALIEN II and then we may do it. This is the fifth part 2 (including 2 1/2s) of the summer – after FX2, MANNEQUIN: ON THE MOVE, NAKED GUN 2 1/2 and SCANNERS II: THE NEW ORDER – so let’s start by examining its approach to sequelization. So this is meant as a supplemental review about its place in 1991, but I think I’ve come up with some pretty meaty stuff to discuss (in addition to silly stuff about toys and video games and crap if you’re more interested in that). #Terminator 2 judgment day seriesBut when I decided to do a summer of ’91 series I knew it was the summer of T2 and it had to be included. TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY is one I wrote about in 2007 (with a pretty good comparison to E.T.) and more definitively in 2017 on the occasion of its 3D re-release. If I had more time I would’ve like to revisit them for completism, but you know how it is. There are a few interesting summer of ’91 movies – STONE COLD, THE ROCKETEER, HARLEY DAVIDSON & THE MARLBORO MAN – that I skipped in this series because I’d already reviewed them in a form I felt satisfied with. ![]()
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