Terminator 2: Judgment Day

In part one, Arnie promised that he’d be back. And he kept his word like a real gentleman. But the stumbling block here is the sticky epilog which I have never come to terms with (and have no plans of doing so in the future) and this also applies to the special effects which are unusually frequent for Cameron. P.S.: This is one of the few movies that HD is detrimental to. The picture is so crystal clear that in most stunt scenes you can easily recognize Arnold’s stand-in, who really doesn’t look much like him. (08/01/2010)

In the first film, the heroes fought for their lives, and the good rule of the second film is that twice as much must be placed on the bet. Cameron fulfilled his commitment, and so the marvelous trio of warriors are fighting not only for existence, but now above all for the future. The script cleverly developed Kyle's words about fate, and Judgment Day is such a dramatic struggle for the right to change what was determined the first time. While machines act as exotic oddities in the first film (in accordance with the times), the second film does not deny the onset of the silicon age. Computers are a common part of human existence, and Cameron rightly points to the threat of diluting human intelligence with a virtual one. But since T2 is massively leaning on the power of silicon as the first film in history, the message goes the other way: even a machine can think like a human. Arnold has a top performance as the humanized Terminator. If there hadn't been such a strong disregard for the genre among academics, it would have been at least nominated for an Oscar that year. One tends to believe in the machine with the learning module. To this day, I'm not convinced that the Governor doesn't have a metal chassis under his skin. If James Cameron based T1 on excellent action, T2 is brilliant professorship. No one (and I stand by that) has been able to elevate the "fallen" genre to the level of art without alienating himself by low means. The lightness with which Cameron juggles emotions and pumps adrenaline, the genius of the action scenes (again, still unbeatable) and the overall apocalyptic touch are among the film's crowning displays of power. That's not the opinion of an intellectual, but of a man who grew up on T2 and, after years and hundreds of films, watched it again, found Cameron's pet to be at least as powerful. Like the time I woke up in the morning and dreamed on the way to elementary school that the door would open and Arnie would join me with a slightly crooked smile. (08/01/2004)

The second installment of The Terminator was the pinnacle of Cameron's career at the time, mainly because he managed to completely refine the script into the perfect crowd-pleaser. In his previous three films (Piranha II doesn't count), you can feel that he had to force a lot of things and therefore they felt more auteur, idiosyncratic, and innovative. In Judgement Day he already knew exactly what to add, what to trim, what to emphasize, what to cut. It's technically competent, but what can we say, it lacks heart. Suddenly we've got comic figures, a badass villain, would-be on-the-spot musings about humanity, and an jacked-up Linda Hamilton whose character is pretty much written as a militant feminist for no other reason than Cameron had been getting big props thus far for how he'd been working with female protagonists and their abilities to make it in a man's world. After all, he himself said in the 80s that he himself doesn't understand how the film industry can ignore the 50% of moviegoers who are still 80% deciding which film to see. (28/11/2017)

What can I say other than praise. Right from the first viewing, I encountered an extended version, and those 154 minutes are absolutely unique at first sight. I've never liked Arnold as much as here, and Cameron's explosive ego I accept without question. Exciting action, amazing tricks, one of the best villains I've ever seen, and the Terminator reloading a shotgun with one hand. (24/05/2006)

This is total overkill in several filmmaking disciplines that hasn't been knocked into the dust by time or silicon by better-refined followers. It's all been said about it already, but the unwritten Cameronian dictum that action scenes must serve the story and not the other way around ages like a fine wine with every unnecessary megabyte of data generated, and it's a wonder that there haven't been many action blockbusters that work on a similar principle in the twenty-six years since. Personally, I'll always prefer the uneven trench warfare of planetoid LV-426, but I still very much understand why this fully holds up in the genre battle even after blowing away all the nostalgic overlay in this millennium. This will survive judgment day because it's... (see the beginning of my comment). (01/10/2017)