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| Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) | |||||||||||||||||||
| Background
The sequel reunited director James Cameron and the two major stars, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton, but the story reversed things from the original film. The screenplay was co-written by Cameron and William Wisher, and Cameron was responsible for both production and direction. The R-rated film grossed $205.8 million (domestic), and was the highest grossing film of 1991. It acquired four Academy Awards (Best Makeup, Best Sound, Best Visual Effects, and Best Sound Effects Editing) from its six nominations. It was the only 'Terminator' film to be nominated for Academy Awards - and to win Oscar(s). It was also the first film in history to cost $100 million to produce (its actual production budget was $102 million). It was commonly noted that some of the special effects used the following year in the humorous black comedy Death Becomes Her (1992) were very similar - i.e., the shotgun hole blasted in Goldie Hawn's midriff. [Note: The comedy also won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.] The sequel was made possible by Cameron's hugely successful blockbuster Aliens (1986) and The Abyss (1989). Unlike The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day would gross half its budget in its opening weekend, despite a running time of over two and a half hours, and end up making back twice its budget in the United States alone. Its three major sequels included (see below):
The science-fiction blockbuster was known for its computer-generated special effects (created by George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic) and dazzling, non-stop action sequences. In the first film, the Terminator was stop-motion animated as an armature model unlike the second Terminator, that was a product of CGI (computer-generated imagery).
Plot Synopsis Under the credits, the film opens with a scene of Los Angeles on a hot, sunny, summer day. [Note: It is soon learned that it is August 29, 1997 - pre-Holocaust.] Cars are moving along on the freeway. Children are playing on swings in a sun-lit playground - a destructive, apocalyptic, unholy white light suddenly envelopes the scene and vaporizes everything - hotter than many suns combined. As a title card fades in: Los Angeles 2029 A.D., the camera pans from left to right over desolate images of future death and destruction - blackened cars, skeletal drivers, a dark sky. The intense heat has dissolved and half-melted everything, including the bars of the jungle-gym where the children were playing. In the smoking ruins, skulls lie on the ground amidst the ash-drifts - the camera lingers on the charred remains of toys, swings, and slides, and then pauses on one tiny skull, as a voice over [of Sarah Connor] speaks:
A metal foot from a high-tech figure crushes the skull from above with a bone-shattering sound. The camera pans up to reveal a silvery, skeletal, humanoid machine holding a massive battle rifle. It scans the black horizon of the war-torn terrain, revealing its red, glowing eyes. War is raging behind the chrome skeleton in the post-nuclear inferno - there are flashes of light from searchlights. Bombs explode and laser-like beam-weapons shoot across the sky. A battle is in progress between human guerrilla troops fighting against stalking robots (terminators), tanks, flying HK's and death-hungry machines. The voice-over continues, describing the supercomputer of the future - Skynet:
Terminators have been dispatched to the past from the future:
As the above voice-over introduces the main context for the film and the major characters, the camera pans in on the figure of John Connor, the rebel, freedom-forces leader, who scans the combat with night-vision binoculars. He leads the remaining human Resistance forces after the nuclear disaster left the world under the domination of evil, killer cyborgs in a life-and-death struggle. His face is rugged with heavy scars. The remainder of the credits play above reddish-yellow, billowing flames and the burning furnace of the war - the playground horses, swings, seesaw, and other apparatus are on fire. A Terminator endo-skeleton emerges from the fire - the camera ominously closes in on the eyes of the evil, shiny figure. Electrical arcs of blue-white light snap and spark behind two parked tractor-trailers in an all-night truck stop. A global time-machine delivers the figure of a naked man, a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger). He is a replica of the Terminator model T-800 from the original film - with a muscle-bound frame and a perfect physique. [Whether he is sent to protect or kill John Connor is left open to question.] He scans his surroundings without any emotion, and his computerized brain registers the results of a digitized, electronic scan of the Harley-Davidson motorcycles sitting outside a bikers' hangout called The Corral. In an amusing scene, he calmly strolls stark-naked into the country-western cafe. As waitresses and patrons turn their wide-open eyes toward him, his alphanumeric readouts calculate body outlines to estimate and analyze which one of the customers is deemed suitable for leather clothing and boots. One of the tough-looking, cigar-smoking bikers is a "MATCH." The Terminator walks up and demands his attire - and bike:
The biker laughs with his pool-playing buddies and responds: "You forgot to say please." Then, he takes a long, red-hot draw on his cigar and stubs it out on the Terminator's chest. The Terminator, naturally, feels no pain. In the ensuing action sequence, the Terminator breaks the man's upper arm, throws the man's pool partner out the nearest window, and then heaves the cigar-smoking biker into the kitchen. He lands on the hamburger grill - his hands sizzle like bacon. That's enough to be convincing - the Terminator takes the man's .45 automatic gun and bike keys - and his clothes (off-screen). In the next scene, a direct cut, the Terminator is already outside - from a boots-eye view. To the tune of "Bad to the Bone," the camera pans up showing him fully dressed in the bruised biker's leather clothes. As he swings his leg over the biker's wheels, another biker appears at the diner's door with a shotgun, threatening that he can't take the man's bike. The cyborg turns and coldly stops, sets the bike's kickstand, and walks over to the guy. He quickly yanks the 10-gauge shotgun from the man, closes in, and then snatches the man's sunglasses from his shirt pocket. He puts them on and then takes off on the Harley. In another area of run-down Los Angeles where papers swirl in the night air, a Los Angeles policeman investigates a blue-white glare and more crackling electrical arcs in the air. While surveying a vaporized, circular section of chain-link fence, he is attacked from behind by another menacing, naked man - the second Terminator time traveler sent from the future. The lean cyborg changes into the man's uniform and sits in the squad car. With access to the onboard computer terminal in the car, the Terminator (Robert Patrick) types in an on-screen inquiry for: "Connor, John" - the dramatic reason for his mission. Although John is only ten years old [it is 1995], his police record is extensive:
Information concerning his natural mother and father is unknown. His legal guardians (foster parents) are Todd and Janelle Voight - the cyborg memorizes their address in Reseda, California, a suburb of Los Angeles.
In a smooth transitional cut to the next scene, it is the next day. John Connor (Edward Furlong) is working on reassembling the carburetor of his Honda 125 dirtbike - amidst the noise of his boombox music and bike, he ignores his foster mother Janelle (Jenette Goldstein) yelling at him to clean up his room. When Todd (Xander Berkeley) orders his foster-son to get inside and obey his mother, John responds defiantly toward his parental authority figures: "She's not my mother, Todd!" - and zooms off on his bike. John is being raised in a foster home because his mother has been institutionalized in an asylum. In another transitional scene to the next character - John's mother - a sign on a fence reads:
In one of the institutional, bare brick cubicles of the high-security wing, one of the female inmates is grunting and sweating while doing pull-ups on the upturned frame of her bed - the tendons and muscles of her arms bulge as she dips and pulls up rhythmically, like a machine. In the corridor outside, a group of young hospital interns are led by Dr. Peter Silberman (Earl Boen), who introduces the next patient. Because of her mad ravings about terminator robots and her delusional fantasies and recurring dreams about Judgment Day, she has been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic:
At the door to the patient's room, Silberman greets her through the intercom: "Morning Sarah." She (Linda Hamilton) turns and her wild, angry eyes peer out through a tangle of hair, as she responds: "Good morning, Dr. Silberman. How's the knee?" He turns to the interns and is forced to confess that she has made repeated attempts to escape: "She stabbed me in the kneecap with my pen a few weeks ago. Repeated escape attempts." The police squad car (with its emblem "to protect and to serve" emblazoned on the car door) pulls up in front of the Voight home. At the door, the Terminator questions John's foster parents and finds that John is away. He borrows a snapshot of John, and then registers what they tell him: "There was a guy here this morning looking for him, too...Yeah, a big guy on a bike." [Both Terminators are hunting for John - up until this point, it is unclear which one is the bad-guy killer cyborg from the future.] John's character is demonstrated in the next scene at a bank's ATM machine. In a voice-over, he flippantly reveals that he is robbing the automatic teller machine: "Please insert your stolen card now." The stolen ATM card is rigged with a ribbon wire-band that is attached to the back of his lap-top computer, where he can crack the PIN number. He tells his friend Tim (Danny Cooksey) how he learned to defraud the bank: "From my mom. My real mom, I mean." After withdrawing three hundred dollars, his friend notices a picture in a plastic sleeve in his knapsack - it is a Polaroid of John's mother. Sounding macho, John tells Tim about his screwed-up mother, but reveals hurt in his eyes:
In the Pescadero Hospital, in one of the brightly-lit interview rooms, a video screen plays a tape of a previous session with her at least six months earlier - Sarah and the doctor watch dispassionately as she hysterically describes her recurring nightmare about the cataclysmic end of the world on Judgment Day, August 29, 1997:
After the tape is freeze-framed on her angry hysterics, Sarah stonily comments to the doctor: "I feel much better now. Clearer." As she is questioned further, the camera withdraws back behind a one-way mirror in an adjacent room. From there, Sarah is being videotaped and notes are being taken as she explains her improvement over six months and her desire to see her son John:
The scene transitions to the "company," Cyberdyne Systems, the corporate headquarters of a mega-electronics corporation - Sarah was taped saying that there is no "evidence" of remaining artifacts left from the Terminator that was crushed in a hydraulic press. One long tracking shot follows Mr. Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), a black computer scientist, into a bluish-lighted, high-security area. He then enters a high-tech, stainless-steel vault to check out the artifacts from the first Terminator. In front of the cabinet, he expresses blind fascination at the first artifact, computer chips from the Terminator which are sealed in a glass-container. Then he moves over to the second artifact - it is an entirely intact metallic fist and forearm - a mechanical arm which stands upright in the vacuum-sealed cabinet. [Obviously, Sarah has been telling the truth about the wreckage of the Terminator, but no one believes her.] Back in the interview room at the hospital, Sarah is denied her request to see John by her doctor: "I know how smart you are, and I think you're just telling me what I want to hear. I don't think you really believe what you're telling me today. I think if I put you in minimum security, you'd just try to escape again....I don't see any choice but to recommend to the review board that you stay here for another six months." Not taking the news well that she can't see her son and is ordered into isolation for another six months, Sarah leaps across the table and grabs Silberman's throat, viciously attacking him. She is quickly restrained by attendants and sedated. To the camera on the other side of the one-way mirror, Silberman quips: "Model citizen." The Terminator has been riding around Los Angeles on his motorcycle trying to positively ID John. In contrast, the second, more advanced Terminator has been using sophisticated methods to track John: the use of the police computer system, questioning of the foster parents and two girls on the sidewalk, etc. From an overpass, the Terminator spots John coming up from a drainage canal, and pursues him to a large shopping mall called The Galleria (in Sherman Oaks, CA) where he parks his larger bike next to John's smaller Honda. From this point on, the film is composed of five exciting, action sequences:
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Terminator
2: Judgment Day (1991) is the well-executed, action-packed
sequel to the earlier film of the same name. Arnold Schwarzenegger's
Terminator (cyborg) character of the first film,