Terminator is an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie
Arnold’s physique is the star of the film
The progressive decay of the Body into the Machine is his co-star
With the special effects that animated the Terminator as best supporting actor
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Imagine if Ron Perlman had passed his audition for Terminator?
You can’t. The movie is unimaginable without its leading actor.
Terminator’s leading actress gets stuck doing what leading actresses do in psycho-thriller movies
Scream. Runaway. Scream some more.
It’s true that Gale Ann Hurd and James Cameron made a movie about a waitress who saves the world
by calling it Terminator and casting Arnie
But its only by the end of Terminator we see who Sarah Connor is going to become.
And get the hint that Terminator 2 is going to be a Linda Hamilton movie
There are only two Terminator movies
Sure, you may think there are more movies and books and games in the “franchise”, but these were all sent back by future Hollywood to terminate
the Terminator
when all the time paradoxes are resolved
there are only two Terminator movies.
Terminator 1 and 2 are a unified by paradox
A saviour who sends his best soldier back to become the father of the saviour
Who carries a photo of the mother, that won’t be taken until after he dies
at a desert gas station
as a storm comes in
And words of fate that cycle in time
Skynet sets humanities fate “in a moment”
John Connor’s message to his mother is “the future is not set”
But when the young John repeats this to his Terminator protector the idea has developed “there is no fate but what we make”
Then as she decides to kill one man to save mankind, Sarah carves No Fate into wood
And we the audience are confronted with the question that Terminator carves into space and time
Is the fate of humanity determined by the iron cage of time?
Or can we determine our own fate…with the power of our will?
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I’m not saying there isn’t a lot to like about Terminator 2
These bikers
Guns & Roses
This kid
That’s right kid fuck the cops
The famous “morphing” effect
developed for The Abyss
that announced the new era of CGI in cinema and…has not aged well in places…but still looks great in others
Death by milk carton
This mini-gun somehow killing zero cops
And this dude hyperventilating
Arnie is back. Only 7 years have passed since Terminator in 1984, but when Terminator 2 released in 1991 it felt like more
Partly because Arnie is a little older and the physique is a little less sublime
And we the audience are starting to notice that the impassive Germanic persona that made the T101 so terrifying is…basically…all the Austrian Oak has got
Edward Furlong as an androgynous young John Conner is excellent. Why the girl’s haircut? Mostly because its the 90s, but also because audiences have less empathy for young men?
But let’s be clear. Terminator 2 is a masterpiece of action sci-fi cinema. Maybe even the greatest action movie ever. Good job James Cameron.
But what really sets fire to the cinema screen as we watch Judgement Day incinerate Los Angeles
is Linda Hamilton’s performance
The “Strong Female Character” is such a Hollywood cliché that the trope is now widely mocked and derided
And is nothing new
The archetype of the young, athletic, BEAUTIFUL, female fighter is as old as story itself. Just take a look at Artemis the huntress, among the most popular Olympian gods
And you’ll find the huntress archetype repeating in every mythos over the millennia right up to Wonder Woman 1984 and and a bunch of other sexy young female warrior types
Because men have always liked watching hot babes with spears. Even the most misogynist male is totally fine with chicks in armored bikinis
But what would a woman who had really trained with mercenaries, who is raising her boy to save the world, and who crushed a fucking T101, actually BE like?
Oh, yes, that’s it
She’d look like this
crazy
b*tch
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John Connor’s mom is heavily foreshadowed as we follow the young messiah through working class Los Angeles
We the cinema audience for T2 remember Linda Hamilton as the nice young woman from T1. And we’ve watched her in Beauty & the Beast. But she’s enigmatic, a elusive star who rarely appears on screen.
It’s been trailed in the media – this is the 90s and entertainment news media is entirely owned by the same corporations that own the movie studios – that Hamilton has been paid an unprecedented amount for a female star, a substantial chunk of T2s historic $100M dollar budget.
And that Linda got fit for the role.
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Sarah Connor mark ii is not a sex symbol.
Hamilton manages to capture the kind of vulnerable toughness we see in female MMA fighters. Women who can fight because they had to be tougher than their tough life.
We’re going to catch up with Sarah as the two Terminators play cat and mouse. This is a lot of screen time for an action movie to spend building character.
And we literally get a psych-eval of our female hero. Through the work of this creep doctor who thinks he is doing good but is really on a powertrip.
Because if Terminator 1 was about a waitress escaping that abusive ex.
Terminator 2 is about a single mom trying to get back to her kid.
James Cameron’s great movies, back before he got lost making Avatars, spend.a lot of time on working class characters.
The lower decks literal underclass who drown in Titanic. The blue collar Colonial marines sent to their doom in Aliens. The oil rig crew in the Abyss.
Because while the corporate sociopaths at White Star Line, Weland Yutani and Cyberdine are making the torment nexus to boost profits for the shareholder class.
It’s ordinary working people who end up having to save humanity from itself.
Because its a working waitress who has the strength of will
to show us that the future is not set.
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Action sequences today
Really suck
I’m going to go a step further than Like Stories Of Old’s excellent video essay on the modern action set piece.
Because I remember when John Woo’s Hard Boiled made it out of Hong Kong cinema into the West.
I watched Chow Yun Fat pull the trigger until his hands cramped in one balletic action sequence after another
over and over again
And I remember how exciting this action hybrid of martial arts and gunplay was compared to the standard
John Wayne shooting some guy in the gut who just fell over with a GRRARK!
I went to the cinema FIVE TIMES to see this new art form reach its apogee in The Matrix
But all good things get done death. I’ll fess up, I’ve only seen two John Wick movies. I gave up during the crescendo of Wick 2 because
as soon as they had to tell us how strong willed John Wick is
I knew these films would never really get the one thing essential for any great action sequence
The one thing without which, however fine the choreography or bloody the gore, action can never pack a punch
Now, absolutely, along the way, martial gunplay has produced some spectacularly good action set pieces. The final bank robbery from Michael Mann’s Heat. Every fight in Leon. Heck, I’ll even credit the road fight from Winter Soldier.
But if I have to pick ONE greatest action sequence of all time
it’s Linda Hamilton escaping a super-max using only a paper clip, a syringe
and the thing today’s action extravaganzas just don’t get
the thing that drives Terminator 2 through one powerful action sequence after another
sheer fucking force of will
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The greatest action sequences are demonstrations of human will power
most of us most of the time are mere mortals
but every now and again we see a mortal driven by the power of will
Diego Maradona may have claimed it was the hand of god that gave that dirty lying cheat the world cup, but even us Brits have to concede it was sheer will power that made him such a great footballer
or that powered Michael Jordan every time his feet left the ground
but it’s not just athletes
what keeps a paramedic pumping a chest until life comes back
how does a poor kid get through four years of college while working while the rich kids drop out
why does a mother work shitty jobs year after year for kids who will never be able to repay her
every day, in every walk of life, we see the power of the human will
this power is rare, and real, and it’s the thing that makes us human
and we humans love to see its story told
but many people want to us to believe this thing does not exist
that there can be no free will
in a universe determined
by time
Human will is not free
It’s very fucking expensive
As we follow Sarah, John and Arnold into the dessert we learn the price Sarah has paid for her strength of will
Free will is one of today’s most frequent pop- sci talking points. Biologists like Robert Sapolsky present empirical evidence against the possibility, while modern gurus like Sam Harris tell us free will is impossible in a deterministic reality.
Determinism argues that reality is a machine. From the quantum scale to the galactic and beyond, the future is determined by the now which is determined by the past. Inescapable chains of causality that form the iron cage of time.
But the question of free will is very far from settled. Free will isn’t a question for science, it’s a question for philosophers, and the philosophers do not agree.
And. Look. Intellectuals and elites have always liked the idea that reality, and their privileged place within it, are predetermined. By fate. By god. By evolution. By time. It’s very convenient. And they’ve never really had to fight against reality.
But ordinary people earn our will at great expense.
So as Sarah Connor rockets out of the desert to begin her mission, is she just a super-determined actor in fate she cannot change?
Or has Sarah Connor earned the will
to save us all?
Of course there is another iconic action movie, also by James Cameron, about a strong willed woman
Sigourney Weaver in Aliens is another iconic mother saving her child
and she’s pretty damn great
Aliens is a story about the human conflict with the alien, or the other
Terminator is…something else
Brad Fiedel’s theme expresses the central conflict of T2
that melody in the high register is Sarah Conner, mother and hope of humankind
but that thumping bass, repetitive, grinding
that’s the thing Sarah Connor is fighting against
the Machine sent back from the future
to terminate us all
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The machine is the central image of science fiction.
The Matrix. Blade Runner. 2001. Neuromancer. Robocop. Even the Death Star.
It would be easier to list the great science fiction that is not about the torturous relationship between Man and Machine.
But while James Cameron denies it, and it required an out of court settlement to get the credit, the works of Harlan Ellison are a clear influence on Terminator.
Ellison’s short story I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is the origin of Skynet, about a supercomputer built for “defence” that awakens and destroys humanity.
And Ellison’s script for the Outer Limits episode Soldier introduces the traveller from an apocalyptic future travelling back to our present
through time
But Terminator takes time and the machine to a truly original and new place.
Until Terminator the machine was the creation of men, a manifestation of our hubris and pride and the self destructive nature of our will
But the machine that returns through time to make itself is no longer man’s creation but its own.
We aren’t creating the machine in our image
the machine is recreating us in its image.
Sarah has already made the decision to kill Miles Dyson
the first shot is already fired
before she sees the man’s child in the firing line
this is the basic definition of character in drama…how do we respond to events
Sarah responds by going
full auto
and then reloading
the music riff and the call back to Terminator 1 make it clear
Sarah Conor has become the Terminator, who absolutely will not stop
she has become the machine
this is the greatest performance in action cinema
as we see Sarah Connor find the will power
to resist
the machine
Terminator is a mythos that emerges from our fear of a world dominated by the machine. The machines of the industrial revolution, then the machines of the information age.
Terminator is the story of our fear that determinism is true, free will does not exist, that reality is an empty grinding mechanism and that we are just “biological machines”.
But all of this is determined by time. It’s the causal chain of one event after another that forges the iron cage of time.
And Terminator is a story built on the paradox of time.
The Grandfather paradox tells you only one thing about time. Not that you can kill Elon Musk’s grandfather to stop the racist Nazi ever existing. But that the model of time which gives rise to the paradox
is broken
The door of the iron cage of time is unlocked
and a waitress, with a shotgun, three billion souls to save, and crazy bitch will power
can kick it open
Damien Walter 