Our travels through time come to an end with not only one of the best time-traveling movies of all-time, but one of, if not THE BEST sci-fi action movie ever made.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day is a masterpiece of popcorn films. It should have won every Oscar ever made upon its release. Unfortunately, the Oscars are for pretentious bullshit, not kick-ass action movies with time-traveling robots. And although the storyline of the first Terminator is the only one of the franchise that makes sense, Terminator 2 takes everything that was awesome about the first movie and does it ten times awesomer.
First of all, taking the villain from the first movie and then making him the hero of the second...BRILLIANT! You've got this strange dynamic where now Sarah Connor has to trust the very machine that chased her around for an hour-and-a-half trying to kill her. That's awesome.
Then you make the machine that seemed so unstoppable in the first film a total underdog by creating an even more badass (and much creepier) machine in the T-1000. A liquid-metal robot that can replicate anyone, form blades and knives with its arms, and get shot, like, a bazillion times, even frozen and shattered, and just shake it off like nothing happened? Um, YES PLEASE! They couldn't even come up with a more bad-ass machine for the third film (The T-X, pa-leeze, bitch!) because the T-1000 maxed out on every possible bad-ass o' meter.
The special effects were not only good for the time, but they totally hold up even now more than two decades later. James Cameron was still using special effects to enhance movies at this time instead of just whoring them out as the entire reason for the movie's existence (Avatar, I'm looking at you!). Nothing looks cheesy, but it also doesn't look like a giant cartoon either.
The thing that really makes this film stand out is that not only are the action set pieces amazing (The chase with the dirt bike and the semi, the escape at the mental institution, the raid on Cyberdyne, EVERYTHING at the steel mill), but it has a depth that is totally unmatched in any other action film. The relationship between John and the Terminator is one of a father/son, and the metamorphosis of a machine that kills without remorse to a machine that realizes the value of human life is one of the great character arcs in all of cinema. When Arnold is being lowered into that molten lava, you're fighting back tears! For a goddamn machine! That's great story-telling.
Contrary to popular belief, it was James Cameron who made these movies great, not Arnold. You saw what happened in T-3 when Arnold is present and Cameron isn't (total trainwreck). The worst part is that the third movie totally cancels out EVERYTHING that happened in the second film...which is a shame because it's the third film that someone should travel back in time to prevent.
I only have one complaint about T-2, and it's something that bothers me every single time I watch it. After the T-800 terminates the T-1000 in the lava and we've all just witnessed one of the great action movies of our time, Arnold (in a totally ad-libbed scene) approaches John and Sarah and delivers one of the WORST lines in cinematic history. He says, "I need a vacation." WHAT?! Why would a machine even know what a vacation is?! Why would he even need one?! He can't get tired, he doesn't know what relaxation is! A vacation?! Cameron, how could you let that one slide! BAH!
But other than that, it's awesome...
Why It's Awesome:
Two time-traveling robots, a totally bad-ass Linda Hamilton in a wife-beater, and a kid in a movie who isn't a whiny bitch. What a movie!
Best Line That Hasn't Become a Total Cliché:
T-800: I know now why you cry...but it is something I can never do.
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