Terminator 2: Judgement Day

Q. Does ‘Terminator 2: Judgement Day’ represent:

(a) the last high point the franchise achieved?

(b) the moment the rot set in?

(c) both of the above?

Hands up if you answered (c).

Now, I’ve not watched ‘Rise of the Machines’ or ‘Terminator Salvation’ yet, so there may be some big surprises in store … but I kind of doubt it. These are works of cinema that have, after all, the respective talents of Jonathan Mostow and McG at their helm. ‘Judgement Day’ at least has James Cameron calling the shots and therefore preserves a continuity of vision. It also has Linda Hamilton taking the vulnerable but resilient Sarah Connor of the first movie and turning her into a hard-core bee-yatch, the spillage of whose pint is assuredly not recommended.

In the absence of Michael Biehn’s haunted personification of Kyle Reese (he appears briefly in a flashback/dream sequence), it is left to Linda Hamilton to give the movie a degree of substance and an emotional cachet beyond Cameron’s increasingly repetitive formula of high-speed-chase/gunplay/blow-shit-up. Muscular, terse, almost brutally pragmatic in her relationship with her son John (Edward Furlong), Hamilton gives us Sarah Connor Version 2.0. And a scarier prospect she’d present than even the old killing machine itself, the T-101 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) … except that the T-101 is now good guy and there’s a new Terminator, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick) on the block.

And here we come to the problem with ‘Judgement Day’. Well, one of the problems. Let’s start at the beginning. You know how I said having Cameron back in the director’s chair preserved a continuity of vision? That was kind of a backhanded compliment. What Cameron does is basically remake ‘The Terminator’ but on a bigger budget, running a nearly an hour longer and with John Connor as an actual character and not just the (literally) embryonic concept he is in the first film. Things kick off with a vision of Armageddon, a kiddies’ playground exploding under the nuclear blast, and a voiceover announces that, hey, you know how Skynet sent a Terminator back through time to try to kill John Connor before he was even born, well damned if the sneaky li’l sunnovabitch didn’t pull exactly the same shit thirteen years later.

Yup, what we have here is essentially ‘John Connnor: The Teenage Years’. ‘John Connor: The You’re Not My Real Mom and I Hate You Years’. ‘John Connor: The I’m-Working-Some-Personal-Shit-Out-By-Flipping-My-Adoptive-Parents-Off-And-Tearing-Around-On-a-Motorbike Years’. Or, as the film would have been titled in the Agitation-approved cut ‘John Connor: The FFS-Won’t-Somebody-Slap-the-Little-Prick-Upside-the-Head Years’.

So, yeah: we’ve got a squeaky-voiced future leader of the resistance trying to cut it as a juvenile delinquent only his shirts are too clean and his haircut too prissy. We’ve got his estranged mother locked up in a sanatorium. We’ve got the T-1000, all liquid alloy and fond of impersonating highway patrol officers (I swear to God I am not making this up). And we’ve got our old mate Arnie in scuffed leather jacket and shades ensemble, all gutturally monosyllabic but with (bad move) more dialogue. And this time he’s the good guy.

I may have already mentioned that this brings us to the single biggest problem with ‘Judgement Day’. How best to describe the paradox? Like watching ‘Halloween II’ only this time Michael Myers is the sensitive soul who’s doing his best to help Laurie through the aftermath and if that means getting in a final act smackdown with some totally new and random character who’s doing all the shit that Michael was doing in the first movie, right down to the hockey mask business, then so be it. Because Michael’s the good guy this time. He is. Honest.

If ‘Judgement Day’ itself represents a sop to the audiences who flocked to ‘The Terminator’ and ‘Aliens’ in droves but stayed away from ‘The Abyss’ in roughly the same numbers, then the re-imagining of Arnie’s protagonist is a sop to the mainstream popularity the actor come to enjoy and which would remain unquestioned by moviegoers until ‘Last Action Hero’. It’s almost as if a memo went round before a word of the script had been written or a frame of footage shot: Arnie’s the good guy this time; work with it.

All right, I’m 700 words into this polemic and I’d really like to post it on the blog before sundown, so I’ll skim over some of the other issues – chief among them, the decision to follow slavishly the formula of the first instalment (which was, after all, a chase movie) only to incorporate a Cyberdyne-heavy subplot two thirds of the way in which effectively keeps the T-1000 off the screen for a good 40 minutes (that’s right, it’s a chase film in which the guy doing the chasing suddenly disappears only to suddenly reappear for the finale without any indication of how he even got there) – and simply observe that ‘Judgement Day’ can best be summed up by its extended-to-the-point-of-interminable finale: it’s visually spectacular, blazingly action-packed and supremely well-executed, but – jeez – it doesn’t half go on!

The Terminator

I’m not into hagiography and it rankles when people try to deny their roots, but I’d love to discount ‘Piranha II: The Spawning’ and hail ‘The Terminator’ as one of the great debuts in modern mainstream cinema. It would almost be effortless to make the case: ‘Piranha II’ as a throwaway piece of hackwork (not even graced by the sly wit of a John Sayles script a la its predecessor) that Cameron seized upon purely because it gave him the chance to direct something.

Still, ‘Piranha II’ remains his directorial debut; and as Joe Dante used the first ‘Piranha’ as a stepping stone to ‘The Howling’ (the first authentically Joe Dante film), so Cameron used his fishy opus as a springboard to ‘The Terminator’. I mention this simply to illustrate what an achievement ‘The Terminator’ was, and how out-of-nowhere its success. (It’s worth bearing in mind, as well, that Arnie wasn’t a major star at the time; he’d got the ‘Conan’ films under his belt, but ‘Raw Deal’, ‘Predator’ and ‘The Running Man’ were still two or three years off.)

‘The Terminator’ can also be ranked as a hell of an achievement in terms of the amount of bang Cameron got for his budget. It cost $6.5million. Two years later Cameron’s next film, ‘Aliens’, clocked in at three times that much. Another three years and ‘The Abyss’ came with a price tag of $70million. In 1991, seven years after part one cleaned up at the box office, Cameron delivered ‘Terminator 2: Judgement Day’ at a cost to the studio of over $100million. They made it back and then some, which is why Cameron secured a $110million budget for ‘True Lies’ in 1994, $200million for ‘Titanic’ (1997) and $237million for last year’s ‘Avatar’. And with ‘Titanic’ taking over a billion and ‘Avatar’ twice that, there’s every possibility that his budgets will continue to be as bloated as his film’s running times.

Again, just for comparison, let me quickly rattle through them. ‘The Terminator’: 108 minutes. ‘Aliens’: 137 minutes. ‘The Abyss’: 146 minutes. ‘Terminator 2: Judgement Day’: 139 minutes. ‘True Lies’: 141 minutes. ‘Titanic’: 194 minutes. ‘Avatar’: 162 minutes. Which adds up to an average running time of two hours twenty six minutes. And as much as I love some of Cameron’s films and despair at others, there is nothing in his filmography that would not benefit from a more stringent approach in the editing suite.

Except for ‘The Terminator’.

‘The Terminator’ is a powerhouse action/sci-fi thriller, a textbook example of the chase movie, and a model of narrative economy. Everything about it hums with purpose, from the gritty urban look of the cinematography to the relentless cadences of Brad Fiedel’s score. In a comment he left on my introduction to Terminator week yesterday, Bryce of ‘Things That Don’t Suck’ remarked that “Cameron was able to take what was basically a Corman budget and turn it into something that blows my mind each time I watch it. That movie’s pure editing.” Amen, brother. Every cut, every choice of camera angle, every line of dialogue, every set-piece (and ‘The Terminator’ is littered with set-pieces, more so than many movies with ten times its budget) pushes the narrative forward, raises the stakes, heightens the danger, and plunges protagonists Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) and Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) headlong towards their inevitable showdown with cybernetic killing machine the T-101 (Arnold Schwarzenegger).

It’s Arnie who gets the iconography and the signature line “I’ll be back” (three words out of the grand total of the 130 or so he gets in the entire hour and three quarters), but for me it’s Michael Biehn who solidifies the movie. His performance captures the underlying melancholy in Reese’s grim determination: Reese is a soldier, on a suicide mission, and he knows it from the outset. Inevitability haunts him, but he never gives up. In his own way, he’s as relentless as the T-101; as unswervable from his mission.

Linda Hamilton credibly effects Sarah Connor’s narrative arc from harassed waitress to bona fide action heroine, although the world would have to wait until ‘Terminator 2: Judgement Day’ for the full adrenaline-pumped awesomeness of her transformation into hard-bitten, hard-as-nails survivalist. Elsewhere, ‘The Terminator’ serves as a casting call for ‘Aliens’ with Biehn and Bill Paxton making their first appearances in a James Cameron film and Lance Henriksen his second (after ‘Pirahna II’).

Ultimately, ‘The Terminator’ is as beautifully simple in its construct as it is darkly evocative in its vision of a dystopian future literally under siege from technology. Matters pertaining to Cyberdine and Skynet are kept to a minimum. It was with the arguably overblown sequel that the mythos of the series came to the fore. Here, the emphasis is kept rigidly on Kyle Reese, Sarah Connor and there remorseless, emotionless and implacable enemy. Cameron never forgets that the film is about the chase. And even when the conflict is over, a perfectly pitched coda carries the sting of a future still under threat.

"Come with me if you want to blog": Terminator week on The Agitation of the Mind

Colleague (incredulously): You’ve not seen ‘Terminator Salvation’?

Me: No. Missed it when it was at the cinema. Didn’t know if it was worth shelling for on DVD.

Colleague: But you’ve not seen ‘Terminator Salvation’!

At this point in the conversation, yours truly reflects on whether colleague’s aghast response isn’t perhaps a little excessive. After all, it’s not like I’m admitting to having never seen ‘Citizen Kane’, ‘Jules et Jim’, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ or ‘The Godfather’*.

Yours truly’s response is carefully considered.

Me: You know what? I’ve never seen ‘Rise of the Machines’, either.

Colleague (spluttering): But you’ve only seen half of the ‘Terminator’ saga.

(Yeah, he called it that. An honest to God saga.) Which is why I now have a plastic bag containing the entire, ahem, saga on DVD sitting on my desk. I rather think that in renewing my acquaintance with ‘The Terminator’ and ‘Terminator 2: Judgement Day’, my conviction that I’ve seen the good half of the saga will be strengthened. Let’s face it, we’re talking two films by James Cameron, followed by un film de Jonathon Mostow followed by something directed by a man with one name that’s not even a proper fucking name to boot (I mean, McG; yeah, right, like there’s Scottish clan called the McGs; I think fucking not) who directed the ‘Charlie’s Angels’ movies.

But hey ho, for the sake of fairness, completism and the fact that it’ll give me something to blog about other than Operation 101010 picks, I’ll blast through all four of them this week and post reviews, one a night, from tomorrow.




*For the record, I have seen these particular movies. Confidentially, I find ‘Citizen Kane’ a tad overrated.

The Happening

Whoa! A week long hiatus on The Agitation of the Mind. This can only mean one of three things:

1) I've won big on the lottery and been spending the last few days haemorrhaging money on fast cars and even faster women (clue to unlikelihood: Paula wouldn't let me);

2) The commissioning editor of Sight & Sound, stumbling upon this blog, has liked what he's seen and retained my services as staff writer on his august publication (clue to unlikelihood: well ... check the next issue);

3) I really - REALLY - don't want to write about 'The Happening'.

Hands up everyone who guessed 3.

Hands up everyone who really doesn't want to read about 'The Happening'.

Hands up everyone who knocked off reading this article two sentences ago and has gone down the pub/cinema/rental shop.

'Kay.












Nah, can't leave it.

'The Happening' is a film that doesn't have a twist ending, isn't a fairy tale, and is free of the turgid trickery of 'The Village'. Yet it's the single worst thing M Night Shyamalan has ever made. Why?

1) There's no suspense. The (intended) enigma of the first half - is what's happening a terrorist attack, or something else? - is undermined by the fact that the film-makers were talking it up as an ecological horror movie six months before it opened. Also, the resolution comes down to one of the characters saying little more than "Hey, what if it's the trees doing it?" Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

2) It's not remotely scary. The litany of suicides becomes soul destroyingly repetitive after the first ten minutes. Thereafter, Shyamalan tries to conjure terror by frequently cutting away to shots of grass blowing in the wind, or the wind rustling through trees. The virus/infection/thingymajig is carried on the wind, you see. Thing is, wind is invisible. This is a movie. As in short for 'moving picture'. Do you see the problem here?

3) It's reminiscent of Hitchcock's 'The Birds', but without the birds. Which is kind of like doing 'Alien' but without an alien. Or 'Debbie Does Dallas' sans Debbie. Also, 'The Birds' is only a partially successful movie: the first half is lousy, the second terrific. Shymalan achieves an inverse homage here: the first of 'The Happening' is average, the second half appalling. Subject of which ...

4) The film doesn't just fall apart in the second half, it kind of stops, looks around, realises it's lost and kind of wanders around dazed until the closing credits roll.

5) The whole and-then-the-threat-just-passed finale is tres 'Signs', as is the small-group-of-survivors-holed-up-in-a-rural-locale scenario. And doesn't that sound like a certain George A Romero film?

6) Not content to fob us off with the and-then-the-threat-just-passed-and-they-all-lived-happily-ever-after-and-the-lady-got-pregnant-and-they-were-a-happy-loving-family ending, Shyamalan decides he wants to have his cake and eat it, and delivers a "shock" ending in which ... ooops, the happening happens again. Well, fuck me sideways.

Okay, I've just spent twenty minutes of my life that I'll never have again typing this - which, added to the running time of the film, clocks in at about two hours, and I'm still pissed off at James ("I'm the king of the world, woof, woof, woof") Cameron and Michael ("666") Bay for the three fuckin' hours apiece they owe me for 'Titanic' and 'Pearl Harbor', the only two movies that have had me cheering on, respectively, a large chunk of ice and a squadron of Japanese kamizakis.

Please, Mr Shyamalan, make a good movie next time. You deserve better than this kind of write-up.