TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY
With Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, Edward Furlong, Earl Boen, and Joe Morton.
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This time it’s a little different. A resurrected version of the Terminator, now working for the human resistance forces of 2029, returns to the past to protect Sarah’s 12-year-old son John (Edward Furlong), now living with foster parents while Sarah is in a mental ward, diagnosed as schizophrenic because of her statements about the future. The Terminator’s new opponent is not a human but another, even more high-tech, killing machine (Robert Patrick). Sent back in time to destroy John Connor it appropriates the clothes of a cop and turns out to have the talent of replicating any human it comes in contact with. This capacity refers back intertextually not to The Terminator but to Cameron’s The Abyss (1989), where a benign extraterrestrial force, a sort of shimmering, amorphous mass of mercury, forms various human and animal shapes.
Why, indeed? If Schwarzenegger and Patrick didn’t kill a lot of people and didn’t look like people themselves, we wouldn’t care a fraction as much about what they did. The functions of the two machines as relentless and remorseless killer-destroyers are chiefly what makes them live and thrive on the screen. The principle even operates in small ways: when John needs a quarter to use a pay phone, Schwarzenegger obligingly smashes the bottom of the phone with his fist so that a jackpot of change splatters out.
