In the last 25 years anything and everything has become possible in cinema. The budgets got bigger, the SFX more spectacular (and the audience ever more infantilised). By rights Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the first film that cost $100 million to shoot, should now look dated. This release proves otherwise. Everything about the Terminator sequel, arriving seven long years after the original, stands the test of the time.
A bit like Garbo laughing, the concept of Arnold Schwarzenegger playing the good guy was a quantum leap in star branding. As he explains in the extras, he wasn’t that keen on not being a badass but writer-director James Cameron was able to persuade him that, aside from having a buddy relationship with his young charge John Connor, it would be business as usual. And so it is from the moment he walks into a bar and demands a bearded biker hand over his outfit, all the way through to the climactic face-off in a steel mill.
Arnie’s catchphrases all hail from T2, but the film owes much to the other leads. None of the cast would ever have such a career peak. Robert Patrick played the shape-shifting, liquid-chrome T1000 in a cop’s outfit with terrifying intensity. Edward Furlong found a way not to be a cute all-American kid as the future saviour of the world. Above all, Linda Hamilton beefed up her biceps and played psychotic with fantastic aplomb.
The former Mrs Cameron is the one major player who doesn’t participate in the thorough 50-minute making-of documentary. The rest of them, including all the key figures behind the camera, sound tremendously pleased with themselves, with good reason.
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