Review of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) by Pacificoduck . — 31 Mar 2015

When you don't see a movie for a long period of time it's easy to assume that nostalgia was making you think highly of it, and that it would not hold up if you revisit the film decades later. T2 offered none of the expected disappointment, in fact I might have liked it even better now. As a passionate fan of all forms of time-travel in film, I am naturally inclined to like these movies, but the story goes well beyond time travel. It delves into deep human emotions and asks us to question what we are willing to sacrifice in order to save the future. They even have complex relationships, including a child who feels abandoned by his mother and in desperate need of a stable role model. Forget the fact that the role model he seems to choose is a cyborg, it works really well as some character growth among all the chaos of the battles being waged. The cast is all spectacular, including Arnold in one of his best roles. In this installment he is allowed to blend his action movie and comedic styles, and the occasionally wooden tone he uses works to his advantage because he is not playing a human. I also like that Linda Hamilton gets to play such a wide range of emotions. She is legitimately going a little crazy, she is physically and emotionally tough, but she is also extremely protective and loving to her son in other scenes.

What Cameron did in Terminator 2 is absolutely brilliant, in fact I wish more sequels were this smart. It perfectly plays on the audience's expectations from the first film. In every way it sets up like the original Terminator to the point where you fully expect Arnold will be killing John Connor. And then, almost 20 minutes into the film, the first confrontation occurs and the script is flipped completely. Suddenly you realize things are not at all as you suspected. It is so perfectly executed that, if I were to make any complaint about this film, it would be the trailer. It's not that it fails to make the movie exciting but it does spoil the excellent twist, that the nice honest guy in the cop uniform is even more dangerous than the killing machine we saw last time. Every moment in this movie worked for me. They managed to get me emotionally attached to a machine, and to make me terrified of Robert Patrick. The effects worked extremely well, especially considering this was made in 1991, and the set pieces are bombastic but shot in such a way that I never lose track of what is going on. When I watch an amazing film like this I can't help but feel discouraged that James Cameron seems so determined to devote his career to those stupid Avatar movies when he can do so much better.