14 ms·

'Terminator' 1 and 2 Save Their Reveals for the Right Time

154 points by georgecmu 4y ago

MontyCarloHall 4y ago
… except for the fact that the T2 trailer gave away the big reveal within the first 30 seconds. Cameron must have been apoplectic.
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  Also The T-1000 murders people prior to the reveal, while Arnold doesn't.
  - adenozine 4y ago
    Wait, Arnold shot the guy in the gun shop? I haven't seen the movie in ten years, but I think that's prior to the shootout at the police station?
    - everdrive 4y ago
      In Terminator 1, yes. He loads up on guns at the shop and Muir sees the owners there. That is the firepower he uses to take out the police station.
      - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
        I loved that scene. Uzis, full auto assault rifles, laser sight pistols, phased plasma 40kilowatt rifles (not in stock apparently), "good for home defense" line. Such a good scene, and captures a window into the terror and deadly force we add to our own society, just a corner gunshop visit away.
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      I'm talking about in T2, Arnold doesn't kill anyone in the entire movie. In T1 he kills several people while Kyle Reese doesn't kill anyone, even when he has the opportunity.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - MontyCarloHall 4y ago
    True, though prior to the reveal, Arnold does stab one of the bikers and proceed to throw him onto a hot kitchen griddle.
    - hackeraccount 4y ago
      He'll live.
    - devonkim 4y ago
      He was attacked with a knife and was even stabbed, and I believe the response was non-fatal in all cases. We don't understand yet why the Terminator isn't killing everyone like in the first Terminator movie at this point until later on, but at the same time most people don't realize the Terminator isn't killing indiscriminately either due to how effortlessly its enemies are subdued. Sorta maybe like how Batman beating up people makes some forget that he doesn't shoot / kill enemies.
      - TeMPOraL 4y ago
        > Sorta maybe like how Batman beating up people makes some forget that he doesn't shoot / kill enemies. Kinda reminds me of my top-3 favorite TV shows ever, Person of Interest. The protagonist there had a habit of knee-capping the criminals instead of shooting to kill, which seems like the more humane alternative, but the more I think about it, the less I'm sure.
  - ridgered4 4y ago
    This may have been changed from the original cut but I recall it being intentionally unclear that the T-1000 killed the first cop. They made it look like he just passed out from a gut punch, which of course makes little sense.
  - antod 4y ago
    Even if Arnie had killed anyone prior to the reveal, it would've still been consistent. He didn't have any orders not to do that until later, and the way he took them onboard it seemed clear that the orders were a change to his tactics. Although, seeing who sent him back, it's probably strange they weren't his original orders anyway. I always found the Terminator movies full of that kind of circular weirdness. Anyway for the T2 twist, I always just assumed that when T1 was shot, Arnie was kinda unknown, but by T2 he was a pretty big Hollywood action star and couldn't be the bad guy anymore. So they had to wrangle him being the good guy into a sequel if they wanted him back.
- sillyquiet 4y ago
  See also the trailers for "Predator". Movie is still fantastic, but plays out so much better if you don't know the nature of the predator.
  - the_af 4y ago
    I watched Predator when I was very young, on VHS, without having watched any trailers, and I still remember how amazed I felt. What was this monster? How was Arnie going to win, the creature was unbeatable and was everywhere! A couple of other movies -- again, no trailers -- which made me feel this way were "Aliens" (they are everywhere!) and "Die Hard" (how is this cop going to beat all these bad guys?). I don't really feel that way anymore with scifi or action movies, and of course much of it has to do with growing up. But I wonder if teenagers feel that way about the current crop of scifi/action movies, do they feel the thrill, do they feel "the good guys can't possibly win", or is this forever lost in modern cinema, what with all the rushed pacing, spoilers and trailers?
    - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
      Superhero films kindof kill the tension. Superheros always win, and the suspension of disbelief is heavily established for the superpowers. The tension of a possible failure by the heroes is lost.
      - TeMPOraL 4y ago
        Helps if one isn't too familiar with the source material. With my Marvel experience prior to MCU limited to a bunch of animated shows I watched as a kid, I left the cinema furious after watching Captain America: Civil War - I was pissed at them showcasing and then destroying S.H.I.E.L.D., the one thing I actually found most interesting in the whole setting. It was a moment of genuine, deep surprise, as I had no idea how they planned to recover from losing - what I believed to be - a critical piece of the setting. Couple more MCU movies and now I know better how this genre works :).
  - Karellen 4y ago
    Also you should skip the opening shot (added at the request of the studio) of a spaceship heading down to Earth. Because apparently audiences are considered too dumb to put 2 + 2 together. FFS
- yread 4y ago
  One more reason never to watch any trailers
  - jjbinx007 4y ago
    I now NEVER watch any trailers at all. I watched Terminator Genisys and while it wasn't a brilliant movie I did gasp a little at the reveal part way through the movie. I asked my brother what his reaction was and he said he already knew going in as the trailer had revealed it. I don't get the point of trailers any more. Most of them just show you the whole movie in 2 minutes. Saying that, probably the best trailer of recent times was for one of the Godzilla films, which actually gave away very little and just gave you enough of a vibe to make you want to watch it.
    - toast0 4y ago
      Yeah, the Genisys trailer was pretty bad. The twist was pretty predictable, but I rember watching the trailer and thinking oh, [the reveal], and then they showed the reveal and I was like ... well, I guess I don't need to watch that. Although, I didn't remember that that was inline with the franchise trailer history. I think the most deceptive trailer ever was for The Fountain. You see the trailer and think oh, here's some cool stuff, but it's kind of disjointed, but it's a trailer; but then you watch the movie and it's just as disjointed.
      - TeMPOraL 4y ago
        I took my then-girlfriend to cinema for Prometheus, convinced by the "TED 2023" trailer that it's going to be a nice transhumanist sci-fi. I didn't lose the girfriend that day, but I did lose my sci-fi cred - the name of the speaker in that trailer, Peter Weyland, should have rung a bell. (For those who, like me then, don't know the reference - that's Weyland as in Weyland-Yutani, the evil megacorp that sent the ill-fated crew of the Nostromo to their deaths in the movie Alien. Yes, Prometheus turned out to be an Alien prequel.)
  - t-writescode 4y ago
    About 15 years ago, my family watched a movie without seeing the trailers. Then, we happened to see the trailers, and the trailer revealed *the* major plot twist in the movie (it was a thriller). We all loudly agreed that we were grateful we didn't see the trailer. As a result, for any movie that I really care about watching, I now actively avoid almost all trailers. YouTube and TikTok make avoiding spoilers quite difficult, though. Thankfully, some movies have started to recognize the importance of hiding details, and don't reveal everything in the trailers anymore. Specific examples include Marvel changing the contents of the scenes to hide important details, like which Infinity Stones Thanos had at a given point.
- david422 4y ago
  Uggh, yea, trailers in general include a scene from every part of the movie. Why???
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Presumably it's because it works to get more people to the movie a lot of the time. Especially for action films, there's a lot of temptation to put the "best" action sequences in the trailer.
- robg 4y ago
  I thought the same, but he actually supported it as a way to drive the marketing. I believed our potential audience would be more attracted to seeing how the most badass killing machine could become a hero than they would be to just another kill-fest in the same vein as the first film. Sequels have to strike a delicate balance between honoring the most loved elements from the first film but also promising to really shake things up and turn them upside down. Our marketing campaign was exactly that promise, and it worked. https://www.slashfilm.com/1118938/why-james-cameron-spoiled-terminator-2s-twist-in-the-trailer/ https://www.slashfilm.com/1118938/why-james-cameron-spoiled-...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- iso1631 4y ago
  If I remember the same thing happened with Terminator Genisys Watched a TV show last night which left the "Special Guest Star" to the start of the end credits, so you weren't spoiled at the start with his name. The streaming platform stuck his picture on the picture for the episode rendering that protection moot.
- Marazan 4y ago
  I would love, love to have seen T2 unspoiled. The crafting of the first act is masterful if you don't know the twist. Such as shame that was impossible.
- a3w 4y ago
  Most trailers give away 90 % of the plot. Therefore, I do not watch trailers.
chamanbuga 4y ago
As of late I keep hearing/reading/seeing that the original author of Terminator and the Matrix is Sophia Stewart. It seems even the FBI ruled in her favor, yet both wikipedia pages have not mentioned her at all. Is this a case of really good fake news, as of late, or Wikipedia simply hasn't caught up?
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/oct/05/instagram-posts/no-woman-didnt-win-25-billion-matrix-lawsuit-over-/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/oct/05/instagram-...
- jrm4 4y ago
  Yeah, her deal strongly sounds like "coincidental invention" type stuff. Especially for me with The Matrix. As a Matrix fanatic I could point you to dozens of works for which you could make this sort of argument.
  - bnralt 4y ago
    There were even two other "people stuck inside simulated reality" SciFi films released within two months of The Matrix (Existenz and The Thirteenth Floor).
- slowmovintarget 4y ago
  I don't know which FBI you're speaking of, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn't rule (adjudicate) on anything. The courts threw her case out. No, she didn't invent those.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  Terminator is already listed as having copywright issues with another author though.
  - slater- 4y ago
    what do you mean by this?
dylan604 4y ago
" The release also sadly lacks the full spectrum of special features that were available on the 2001 release, including script drafts and an hour-long documentary. " This is something that I noticed as a pattern for DVD releases in general. When DVDs were first arriving, titles were slower to be released. There's plenty of reasoning behind this. However, "they" also did not know what level of effort would be required to get people to buy into DVDs. So the first DVDs were in effect overly produced with so much extra content. The first DVD that I bought was Contact, and the entire second disc is nothing but BTS and making of type content. Skip to the time when Blu-ray/HD-DVD were being introduced, and you had <$5 DVDs in bins at WalMart with 2 or 3 movies on it that had nothing but the movies with essentially no effort whatsoever being applied. "When I revisited the film on Amazon a year or two ago, I realized I was watching a remastered HD version, which featured a more contemporary color grade, generally referred to as “teal-and-orange.” The bluish look of the theatrical release, which was reproduced in previous video versions, gave way to an overly greenish look that was common on HD transfers of 80s pictures." With DVD still being SD, a lot of the films had digital masters like a DigiBeta or D1 tape format which made for excellent DVD sources. This meant the DVDs looked like how people had seen them (only much cleaner compared to VHS). For HD discs, the studios had to go back to the film sources to rescan them at HD resolution. Since they were going back to the negatives, the sources would need to go back through a color session. Most film types can't leave things alone and must always tweak, but even if they didn't it's a completely new color session and usually not the same colorist. Maybe for A-list titles did they get anything other than factory floor treatment. They had entire back libraries of films to get transferred. You also had the decisions of keeping OAR, reframing for 16x9 full frame, or even pan&scan 4x3. It was a tremendous amount of work, and the longer it took meant fewer sales. Let's not forget that some of the people that originally worked on titles could very much be "no longer available" to work with on the projects.
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  A similarly awful change was made to the color grading for several streaming releases of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It feels like whoever did the color had just watched Breaking Bad and decided to imitate the "make any scenes in Mexico have an orange color grading" style but for the entire movie: https://imgur.io/a/Ub5MO5R https://imgur.io/a/Ub5MO5R
scandox 4y ago
I think the horror element in T1 that is particularly striking is the invasion and destruction of the police station. I recall the power of that as a kid: the dismissal of the concept of a safe place. I think it shows the idea-power that horror can have.
- type0 4y ago
  It's one of the best Sci-fi Thrillers of all times, the pacing is stellar.
- hef19898 4y ago
  T1 shows just how terrifying it would be hunted by a killer robot, or by ani killer that simply cannot stopped by any means short of a battle tank. Something the other films, including T2, failed to show. It did work in T2, because the whole story was different. Oh, and the Sarah Connor Chronicles did a good job of it as well, shame that got cancelled.
  - semireg 4y ago
    It seems like any decent plot succumbs to soap opera writing. e.g. Raised by Wolves season 2. I thought the SCC was a lot of fun for about 6 hours. Then it waned… Sometimes I’ll see a different “written by” on sci-fi credits and think “ahh, that’s the reason!”
  - EGreg 4y ago
    Slaughterbots video shows that nothing we have can stop them. Here are some videos: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=40JFxhhJEYk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=40JFxhhJEYk Real: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ndFKUKHfuM0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ndFKUKHfuM0
    - methodover 4y ago
      Well. That first video was terrifying. I'm too scared to click on the others.
tiborsaas 4y ago
It was quite sad to see this interview with James Cameron that he probably wouldn't make Terminator as we've seen it 30 years ago. https://variety.com/2022/film/news/james-cameron-avatar-2-deleted-scenes-gun-violence-1235473069/ https://variety.com/2022/film/news/james-cameron-avatar-2-de...
- scandox 4y ago
  I don't think it's sad. We all change and some of us also grow up. Older people and parents find violence in general harder to take as entertainment. It's part of your brain changing over time. I would say that isn't an argument for less violence in movies. I'm not making a moral argument about violence in film - it's just an aesthetic thing.
  - tiborsaas 4y ago
    The sad part is that there's a sense of regret. It's fine to mature and focus on different things and change with the climate.
- dbspin 4y ago
  Wouldn't and indeed likely couldn't. Cameron's talent in the early years was writing very fast paced films with stock characters - but adding a richness and depth to those in theory cliche characters (especially the women) that transcended the pulpiness of the material. Viewers got the best of both worlds - action comics meets cyberpunk punchy SF scripts, and (frequently working class and female) witty, humanised characters. This juggling act has been missing (irrespective of their financial success) from his films since Titanic. Something that frequently gets lost in the consideration of the work of artists is that is doesn't always improve. Lots of artists / craftspeople make less vigorous, audacious work when the pressures of early career establishment are removed. Spielberg and Lucas are both great examples of the same thing - with the same mix of humanised, droll, often working class protagonists much more richly drawn and well portrayed than was common for the time. Without these characters and this balance of pacy storytelling, the blockbuster has become mushy fan service. See any recent marvel, 'fast franchise' film, or indeed Avatar.
simne 4y ago
I wonder, if creators will save pure T1, or will do like with Star Wars, where first episodes re-rendered with modern graphics.
- HighChaparral 4y ago
  Cameron has had plenty of opportunities and never has. There was something of a controversy when the DVD was re-released with a new Dolby Digital surround track and the original mono was left off. A lot of people felt very strongly about how those guns sounded.
bilsbie 4y ago
It’s strange I’ve never considered them horror movies whatsoever. Just pure sci-fi.
- birdymcbird 4y ago
  me young when I saw T1 and what memorable to me exactly the horror element of movie. > “Terminator allows viewers to have a legitimate sense of discovery while watching the movie, to learn crucial plot details largely as Sarah learns them, which makes for very efficient storytelling.” feel today interesting story points would get shown in trailer.
  - mattnewton 4y ago
    One of the things I wished they did even more is keep it ambiguous whether the terminator is really a machine just a bit longer into the film. Everyone else thinks Sarah is hysterical, including herself ant first, and Kyle sounds just nuts after the tech noir bar scene- let the audience wonder a little more too! Did the guy just have a bullet proof vest on? Could Kyle actually be crazy? I think a lot of the psychological horror here is traded for some very cool tech shots of the future, time travel and arnold vision early - probably a worthy trade. But it would be awesome to see a cut that holds its cards even closer to the chest and let’s more of that tension build.
- runevault 4y ago
  Out of curiosity do you feel the same way about Alien? Because both movies obviously use sci-fi elements (space and an alien vs robots and time travel) but the plot arcs for both are 100% horror. Frankly outside slasher flicks a LOT of horror has either SF or fantasy elements because things we don't understand are the scariest.
  - bilsbie 4y ago
    It’s the strangest thing. I don’t. I don’t like horror and I could never get into alien. I think the plot/story in terminator is just so compelling and horror doesn’t seem to be used just for scares but furthers the story.
everyone 4y ago
I usually can take or leave director's cuts. They're usually good but dont fundamentally change the movie or anything. But the director's cut of T2 does. That one scene where they explain that Arnie is in read only mode, take out his brain chip and reset him. Apart from being an important scene in itself: John making his first leadership decision and deciding, against Sarah's wishes, to not destroy the T100; It is also soooo relevant to so many things that occur later in the movie. It's crazy to me that they cut that scene.
- havblue 4y ago
  The theatrical cut was already pretty long without it. John demonstrating more leadership would likely help the viewer think of him as more than a whiney kid, but he was still the third most important protagonist. I also think of aliens where a lot of early footage is cut after Ripley is rescued. You're left wondering how exactly Burke betrayed the colony and what happened with Ripley's life when she was drifting for so long. Again, the theatrical was already too long.
- grubbs 4y ago
  I always enjoyed the longer cut of Aliens. Where they show some of the life on the space station before the Aliens actually show up. I always found that whole backstory very interesting - but you only get very small glimpses of it in the theatrical release.
  - CottonMcKnight 4y ago
    Then there's The Abyss. Where the Director's Cut is pretty much a completely different movie.
  - Karellen 4y ago
    Interesting take. I always thought that the "colony life" parts of the special edition were completely unnecessary. The rest of the movie works really well as being told almost entirely from Ripley's viewpoint, so seeing the colony only when she does (as in the theatrical cut), torn apart and lifeless, I personally think works better. I still prefer the director's cut because of the backstory about Ripley's daughter, and the deeper relationship she forms with Newt as a result. It gives so much more depth to why she goes back for her at the end. Also to the stand-off in the egg chamber with one mother against another, and the shared understanding there. The sentry guns are pretty cool, too.
orev 4y ago
I think a big part of the delayed reveal of the skeleton only version in T1 is pretty simple: once you reveal that, Arnie is no longer in the movie, and the special effects required to fully animate it didn’t exist back then (other than stick figures or rotoscoping which would have looked awful). As is, the scenes with just the skeleton look like a stiff puppet show instead of some intimidating killer robot.
- jonhohle 4y ago
  As an audience member, you’re expected to maintain some suspension of disbelief. At a musical no one would say, “no one would actual sing what they could just say!”, or reading a book “those letters could have been scrawled by any kindergartener!” At that point of the movie the thing the protagonists thought they killed is resurrected in an even more frightening form and dread is elevated. Obviously the viewer is not at risk, so how that is implemented has little bearing on the impact of the scene. On the other hand, if you are interested in the technical details of how this creature appears next to actors, knowing Cameron’s history in the model department on low budget movies and Ray Harryhausen’s similar technique used in Jason and the argonauts would allow you to appreciate how it was made. I don’t buy that the late reveal was due to effects limitations. It’s really to take an audience that may have allowed themselves to relax to be immediate brought back to an even higher anxiety level than the proceeding chase.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    I think GP's point is less about breaking or sustaining suspension of disbelief, or technical limitations themselves, and more about costs. Once the Terminator loses its human skin, the (then) relatively cheap actor is replaced by a prop that's (then) stupidly expensive to animate. Deciding to do it earlier would likely force the movie to look entirely different at least from that point on. Such considerations were a major driver of how sci-fi in general was done up until early 2000s. With TV shows, a lot of the tropes and patterns of sci-fi, particularly around how the aliens look and behave, boil down to the fact that about the only way to make non-grotesque aliens without breaking bank was to glue prosthetics to the actors and apply tons of makeup. The writing was thus constrained by what the makeup department could handle.
pjc50 4y ago
This is a spinoff of the Terminator sidetrack discussion of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34310047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34310047, isn't it?
thomashabets2 4y ago
Terminator 1 is absolutely amazing. Terminator 2 is great, but it's no T1. I recently wrote a longish post about it: https://blog.habets.se/2022/11/Terminator-1-is-the-best-Terminator-movie.html https://blog.habets.se/2022/11/Terminator-1-is-the-best-Term... But long story short is that 1) T1 terminator is uncanny valley, and T2 is not. 2) T1 is a perfect time loop, and T2 is not.
- deleted 4y ago
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- mitthrowaway2 4y ago
  The gaps in T2's time loop are pretty alarming in retrospect. Killer robots suddenly materialize in the present, time traveling from a future that never comes about. It's quite a spooky thought. In my opinion the film only gets away with it by riding the coattails of how cleanly T1 executed the time travel concept.
- abdullahkhalids 4y ago
  There are philosophical differences between T1 and T2 which I think are much more substantive than critiques of fan service. T1 is, "if we go ahead with improved computing technology with no thought, ultimately machines will take over and kill us. But with our humanity (Kyle) we can defeat them." T2 is, "The leader of the resistance, who successfully leads humans towards victory, is someone whose mother was human, but whose strongest father-figure was a machine. It is only if we understand machines, and teach them humanity (like John does the Terminator) can we attain victory." I think if you reflect on this a while, you will see that T2 has a lot more philosophical nuance in what it says about the relation of humans and technology, than T1.
  - thomashabets2 4y ago
    Yeah that message is not exactly subtle in T2. Though again at the cost of "that's not what happened". John Connor doesn't grow up to become the Great Skynet Negotiator. I'm not saying every single aspect of T2 is worse than T1. But the little philosophy that T2 adds is vastly overshadowed by what it contradicts from T1, and partly itself.
andrewfromx 4y ago
and we have to mention https://filmschoolrejects.com/terminator-2-helicopter-stunt/ https://filmschoolrejects.com/terminator-2-helicopter-stunt/ 'With a lot at stake and not a lot of room for error (quite literally), as Tamburro, himself put it: “If I made a mistake, I would be killed.” The stunt was so obviously dangerous that the scheduled camera crew tasked with shooting the close-ups refused to take part in it. Proving that he’s not one to ask of others what he isn’t willing to do himself, Cameron said “okay fine, I’ll shoot it” and shot the stunt with the help of a very courageous insert car driver.' Oh and he did it twice.
suction 4y ago
[dead]
type0 4y ago
Here's what would happen if Stalone played Terminator [deepfake] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71c80ab_TgQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71c80ab_TgQ
scelerat 4y ago
I think this is a great breakdown and analysis, though "‘Terminator’ Really Is a Horror Movie" is something a lot of people at or near the time of its release, including my eleven year old self watching it for the first time, understood intuitively. In my mind (and perhaps even in my local video store) it was always grouped with Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street
legohead 4y ago
I never even noticed T2 trying to hide the fact the T1000 was the bad guy. I suppose it was thanks to the lovely spoiling trailer [1] of the day. Plus I remember it being all over the news about the amazing graphics and how they did the famous "mercury scene". [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRRlbK5w8AE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRRlbK5w8AE
intsunny 4y ago
Terminator 2 is my fav film for weeding out pretend-wanna-be-film snobs. I've had this conversation more times than I'd like: Me: Terminator 2 was a great movie Fake film snob: Terminator 2?! A shoot-em-up movie?! What?! Me: Yah, it isn't what James Cameron is most known for, but still good Fake film snob: Wait .... James Cameron??? Me: Yup, he even got five Oscars for it. Obviously not best picture or best actor/ess, but still Fake film snob: five Oscars?! Edit: formatting
- hairofadog 4y ago
  I guess count me as a fake film snob? I love a good "shoot-em-up", and I loved the first Terminator, but the second one felt hokey to me. I just couldn't get past James Cameron's idea of how a kid behaves or talks.
  - SergeAx 4y ago
    John Connor behaves and talks like a figure any kid in the movie theater want to associate themselves with.
- stonogo 4y ago
  I've never met anyone who considered James Cameron to be other than a blockbuster factory. Aliens, the Abyss, True Lies, writing the second Rambo film... who the hell would be surprised that James Cameron was involved with a Terminator movie? Aside form that, Terminator 2 not only isn't Cameron's best effort, it's not even the franchise's best effort. It was the beginning of "to hell with making sense, look at these explosions," which got worse with each passing film, and better in the Sarah Conner Chronicles.
- RichardCA 4y ago
  There is a documentary called "Los Angeles Plays Itself". Thom Andersen is as erudite about movies as anyone could possibly be, but he still saw value in movies like "L.A. Crackdown" and "Death Wish 4". Terminator and Terminator 2 are both given shout-outs for their depiction of L.A. and the LAPD in particular. https://youtu.be/Ifii8LvR-ss https://youtu.be/Ifii8LvR-ss
tacticaldev 4y ago
"Sex, in other words, literally makes them too ignorant to live." -- anyone with Kids can tell you this is true...
guilhas 4y ago
I like how it looked like a regular mainstream action movie, but incorporated things like time travel. Accessible for the whole family to think or have fun at same time
SergeAx 4y ago
I remember the feeling of sheer awe while watching both movies. "Wait, what, he is a metallic skeleton underneath?!! No goddamn way!!!". I really miss that feeling in today's movies, even "Avatar 2" by the same James Cameron. He replaced it with some gizmo gimmicks, like exoskeletons or crab sumbarines, which are impressive, but not awesome.
coldtea 4y ago
>So, when Robert Patrick’s T-1000 arrives on the scene, the structural repetitions position him as the T2 analog of Kyle Reese. As in, we are led to believe that he is another human rebel fighter sent to protect Sarah and/or John Connor. Actually, that's the biggest flaw "reveals"-wise for T2 in my opinion. Robert Patrick plays his character as too robotic and even icky even before the reveal. He looks off, so people start wondering if he really is a "Kyle Reese" type or some enemy, perhaps robotic... He should have been played the "cop" with more neutral maunerisms until the reveal, so that the reveal has bigger impact.

154 points by georgecmu 4y ago

… except for the fact that the T2 trailer gave away the big reveal within the first 30 seconds. Cameron must have been apoplectic.

HideousKojima 4y ago
Also The T-1000 murders people prior to the reveal, while Arnold doesn't.
- adenozine 4y ago
  Wait, Arnold shot the guy in the gun shop? I haven't seen the movie in ten years, but I think that's prior to the shootout at the police station?
  - everdrive 4y ago
    In Terminator 1, yes. He loads up on guns at the shop and Muir sees the owners there. That is the firepower he uses to take out the police station.
    - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
      I loved that scene. Uzis, full auto assault rifles, laser sight pistols, phased plasma 40kilowatt rifles (not in stock apparently), "good for home defense" line. Such a good scene, and captures a window into the terror and deadly force we add to our own society, just a corner gunshop visit away.
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    I'm talking about in T2, Arnold doesn't kill anyone in the entire movie. In T1 he kills several people while Kyle Reese doesn't kill anyone, even when he has the opportunity.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  True, though prior to the reveal, Arnold does stab one of the bikers and proceed to throw him onto a hot kitchen griddle.
  - hackeraccount 4y ago
    He'll live.
  - devonkim 4y ago
    He was attacked with a knife and was even stabbed, and I believe the response was non-fatal in all cases. We don't understand yet why the Terminator isn't killing everyone like in the first Terminator movie at this point until later on, but at the same time most people don't realize the Terminator isn't killing indiscriminately either due to how effortlessly its enemies are subdued. Sorta maybe like how Batman beating up people makes some forget that he doesn't shoot / kill enemies.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      > Sorta maybe like how Batman beating up people makes some forget that he doesn't shoot / kill enemies. Kinda reminds me of my top-3 favorite TV shows ever, Person of Interest. The protagonist there had a habit of knee-capping the criminals instead of shooting to kill, which seems like the more humane alternative, but the more I think about it, the less I'm sure.
- ridgered4 4y ago
  This may have been changed from the original cut but I recall it being intentionally unclear that the T-1000 killed the first cop. They made it look like he just passed out from a gut punch, which of course makes little sense.
- antod 4y ago
  Even if Arnie had killed anyone prior to the reveal, it would've still been consistent. He didn't have any orders not to do that until later, and the way he took them onboard it seemed clear that the orders were a change to his tactics. Although, seeing who sent him back, it's probably strange they weren't his original orders anyway. I always found the Terminator movies full of that kind of circular weirdness. Anyway for the T2 twist, I always just assumed that when T1 was shot, Arnie was kinda unknown, but by T2 he was a pretty big Hollywood action star and couldn't be the bad guy anymore. So they had to wrangle him being the good guy into a sequel if they wanted him back.
sillyquiet 4y ago
See also the trailers for "Predator". Movie is still fantastic, but plays out so much better if you don't know the nature of the predator.
- the_af 4y ago
  I watched Predator when I was very young, on VHS, without having watched any trailers, and I still remember how amazed I felt. What was this monster? How was Arnie going to win, the creature was unbeatable and was everywhere! A couple of other movies -- again, no trailers -- which made me feel this way were "Aliens" (they are everywhere!) and "Die Hard" (how is this cop going to beat all these bad guys?). I don't really feel that way anymore with scifi or action movies, and of course much of it has to do with growing up. But I wonder if teenagers feel that way about the current crop of scifi/action movies, do they feel the thrill, do they feel "the good guys can't possibly win", or is this forever lost in modern cinema, what with all the rushed pacing, spoilers and trailers?
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    Superhero films kindof kill the tension. Superheros always win, and the suspension of disbelief is heavily established for the superpowers. The tension of a possible failure by the heroes is lost.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      Helps if one isn't too familiar with the source material. With my Marvel experience prior to MCU limited to a bunch of animated shows I watched as a kid, I left the cinema furious after watching Captain America: Civil War - I was pissed at them showcasing and then destroying S.H.I.E.L.D., the one thing I actually found most interesting in the whole setting. It was a moment of genuine, deep surprise, as I had no idea how they planned to recover from losing - what I believed to be - a critical piece of the setting. Couple more MCU movies and now I know better how this genre works :).
- Karellen 4y ago
  Also you should skip the opening shot (added at the request of the studio) of a spaceship heading down to Earth. Because apparently audiences are considered too dumb to put 2 + 2 together. FFS
yread 4y ago
One more reason never to watch any trailers
- jjbinx007 4y ago
  I now NEVER watch any trailers at all. I watched Terminator Genisys and while it wasn't a brilliant movie I did gasp a little at the reveal part way through the movie. I asked my brother what his reaction was and he said he already knew going in as the trailer had revealed it. I don't get the point of trailers any more. Most of them just show you the whole movie in 2 minutes. Saying that, probably the best trailer of recent times was for one of the Godzilla films, which actually gave away very little and just gave you enough of a vibe to make you want to watch it.
  - toast0 4y ago
    Yeah, the Genisys trailer was pretty bad. The twist was pretty predictable, but I rember watching the trailer and thinking oh, [the reveal], and then they showed the reveal and I was like ... well, I guess I don't need to watch that. Although, I didn't remember that that was inline with the franchise trailer history. I think the most deceptive trailer ever was for The Fountain. You see the trailer and think oh, here's some cool stuff, but it's kind of disjointed, but it's a trailer; but then you watch the movie and it's just as disjointed.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      I took my then-girlfriend to cinema for Prometheus, convinced by the "TED 2023" trailer that it's going to be a nice transhumanist sci-fi. I didn't lose the girfriend that day, but I did lose my sci-fi cred - the name of the speaker in that trailer, Peter Weyland, should have rung a bell. (For those who, like me then, don't know the reference - that's Weyland as in Weyland-Yutani, the evil megacorp that sent the ill-fated crew of the Nostromo to their deaths in the movie Alien. Yes, Prometheus turned out to be an Alien prequel.)
- t-writescode 4y ago
  About 15 years ago, my family watched a movie without seeing the trailers. Then, we happened to see the trailers, and the trailer revealed *the* major plot twist in the movie (it was a thriller). We all loudly agreed that we were grateful we didn't see the trailer. As a result, for any movie that I really care about watching, I now actively avoid almost all trailers. YouTube and TikTok make avoiding spoilers quite difficult, though. Thankfully, some movies have started to recognize the importance of hiding details, and don't reveal everything in the trailers anymore. Specific examples include Marvel changing the contents of the scenes to hide important details, like which Infinity Stones Thanos had at a given point.
david422 4y ago
Uggh, yea, trailers in general include a scene from every part of the movie. Why???
- ghaff 4y ago
  Presumably it's because it works to get more people to the movie a lot of the time. Especially for action films, there's a lot of temptation to put the "best" action sequences in the trailer.
robg 4y ago
I thought the same, but he actually supported it as a way to drive the marketing. I believed our potential audience would be more attracted to seeing how the most badass killing machine could become a hero than they would be to just another kill-fest in the same vein as the first film. Sequels have to strike a delicate balance between honoring the most loved elements from the first film but also promising to really shake things up and turn them upside down. Our marketing campaign was exactly that promise, and it worked. https://www.slashfilm.com/1118938/why-james-cameron-spoiled-terminator-2s-twist-in-the-trailer/ https://www.slashfilm.com/1118938/why-james-cameron-spoiled-...
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iso1631 4y ago
If I remember the same thing happened with Terminator Genisys Watched a TV show last night which left the "Special Guest Star" to the start of the end credits, so you weren't spoiled at the start with his name. The streaming platform stuck his picture on the picture for the episode rendering that protection moot.
Marazan 4y ago
I would love, love to have seen T2 unspoiled. The crafting of the first act is masterful if you don't know the twist. Such as shame that was impossible.
a3w 4y ago
Most trailers give away 90 % of the plot. Therefore, I do not watch trailers.

chamanbuga 4y ago

As of late I keep hearing/reading/seeing that the original author of Terminator and the Matrix is Sophia Stewart. It seems even the FBI ruled in her favor, yet both wikipedia pages have not mentioned her at all. Is this a case of really good fake news, as of late, or Wikipedia simply hasn't caught up?

formerly_proven 4y ago
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/oct/05/instagram-posts/no-woman-didnt-win-25-billion-matrix-lawsuit-over-/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/oct/05/instagram-...
jrm4 4y ago
Yeah, her deal strongly sounds like "coincidental invention" type stuff. Especially for me with The Matrix. As a Matrix fanatic I could point you to dozens of works for which you could make this sort of argument.
- bnralt 4y ago
  There were even two other "people stuck inside simulated reality" SciFi films released within two months of The Matrix (Existenz and The Thirteenth Floor).
slowmovintarget 4y ago
I don't know which FBI you're speaking of, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn't rule (adjudicate) on anything. The courts threw her case out. No, she didn't invent those.
agumonkey 4y ago
Terminator is already listed as having copywright issues with another author though.
- slater- 4y ago
  what do you mean by this?

dylan604 4y ago

" The release also sadly lacks the full spectrum of special features that were available on the 2001 release, including script drafts and an hour-long documentary. " This is something that I noticed as a pattern for DVD releases in general. When DVDs were first arriving, titles were slower to be released. There's plenty of reasoning behind this. However, "they" also did not know what level of effort would be required to get people to buy into DVDs. So the first DVDs were in effect overly produced with so much extra content. The first DVD that I bought was Contact, and the entire second disc is nothing but BTS and making of type content. Skip to the time when Blu-ray/HD-DVD were being introduced, and you had <$5 DVDs in bins at WalMart with 2 or 3 movies on it that had nothing but the movies with essentially no effort whatsoever being applied. "When I revisited the film on Amazon a year or two ago, I realized I was watching a remastered HD version, which featured a more contemporary color grade, generally referred to as “teal-and-orange.” The bluish look of the theatrical release, which was reproduced in previous video versions, gave way to an overly greenish look that was common on HD transfers of 80s pictures." With DVD still being SD, a lot of the films had digital masters like a DigiBeta or D1 tape format which made for excellent DVD sources. This meant the DVDs looked like how people had seen them (only much cleaner compared to VHS). For HD discs, the studios had to go back to the film sources to rescan them at HD resolution. Since they were going back to the negatives, the sources would need to go back through a color session. Most film types can't leave things alone and must always tweak, but even if they didn't it's a completely new color session and usually not the same colorist. Maybe for A-list titles did they get anything other than factory floor treatment. They had entire back libraries of films to get transferred. You also had the decisions of keeping OAR, reframing for 16x9 full frame, or even pan&scan 4x3. It was a tremendous amount of work, and the longer it took meant fewer sales. Let's not forget that some of the people that originally worked on titles could very much be "no longer available" to work with on the projects.

HideousKojima 4y ago
A similarly awful change was made to the color grading for several streaming releases of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It feels like whoever did the color had just watched Breaking Bad and decided to imitate the "make any scenes in Mexico have an orange color grading" style but for the entire movie: https://imgur.io/a/Ub5MO5R https://imgur.io/a/Ub5MO5R

scandox 4y ago

I think the horror element in T1 that is particularly striking is the invasion and destruction of the police station. I recall the power of that as a kid: the dismissal of the concept of a safe place. I think it shows the idea-power that horror can have.

type0 4y ago
It's one of the best Sci-fi Thrillers of all times, the pacing is stellar.
hef19898 4y ago
T1 shows just how terrifying it would be hunted by a killer robot, or by ani killer that simply cannot stopped by any means short of a battle tank. Something the other films, including T2, failed to show. It did work in T2, because the whole story was different. Oh, and the Sarah Connor Chronicles did a good job of it as well, shame that got cancelled.
- semireg 4y ago
  It seems like any decent plot succumbs to soap opera writing. e.g. Raised by Wolves season 2. I thought the SCC was a lot of fun for about 6 hours. Then it waned… Sometimes I’ll see a different “written by” on sci-fi credits and think “ahh, that’s the reason!”
- EGreg 4y ago
  Slaughterbots video shows that nothing we have can stop them. Here are some videos: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=40JFxhhJEYk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=40JFxhhJEYk Real: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ndFKUKHfuM0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ndFKUKHfuM0
  - methodover 4y ago
    Well. That first video was terrifying. I'm too scared to click on the others.

tiborsaas 4y ago

It was quite sad to see this interview with James Cameron that he probably wouldn't make Terminator as we've seen it 30 years ago. https://variety.com/2022/film/news/james-cameron-avatar-2-deleted-scenes-gun-violence-1235473069/ https://variety.com/2022/film/news/james-cameron-avatar-2-de...

scandox 4y ago
I don't think it's sad. We all change and some of us also grow up. Older people and parents find violence in general harder to take as entertainment. It's part of your brain changing over time. I would say that isn't an argument for less violence in movies. I'm not making a moral argument about violence in film - it's just an aesthetic thing.
- tiborsaas 4y ago
  The sad part is that there's a sense of regret. It's fine to mature and focus on different things and change with the climate.
dbspin 4y ago
Wouldn't and indeed likely couldn't. Cameron's talent in the early years was writing very fast paced films with stock characters - but adding a richness and depth to those in theory cliche characters (especially the women) that transcended the pulpiness of the material. Viewers got the best of both worlds - action comics meets cyberpunk punchy SF scripts, and (frequently working class and female) witty, humanised characters. This juggling act has been missing (irrespective of their financial success) from his films since Titanic. Something that frequently gets lost in the consideration of the work of artists is that is doesn't always improve. Lots of artists / craftspeople make less vigorous, audacious work when the pressures of early career establishment are removed. Spielberg and Lucas are both great examples of the same thing - with the same mix of humanised, droll, often working class protagonists much more richly drawn and well portrayed than was common for the time. Without these characters and this balance of pacy storytelling, the blockbuster has become mushy fan service. See any recent marvel, 'fast franchise' film, or indeed Avatar.

simne 4y ago

I wonder, if creators will save pure T1, or will do like with Star Wars, where first episodes re-rendered with modern graphics.

HighChaparral 4y ago
Cameron has had plenty of opportunities and never has. There was something of a controversy when the DVD was re-released with a new Dolby Digital surround track and the original mono was left off. A lot of people felt very strongly about how those guns sounded.

bilsbie 4y ago

It’s strange I’ve never considered them horror movies whatsoever. Just pure sci-fi.

birdymcbird 4y ago
me young when I saw T1 and what memorable to me exactly the horror element of movie. > “Terminator allows viewers to have a legitimate sense of discovery while watching the movie, to learn crucial plot details largely as Sarah learns them, which makes for very efficient storytelling.” feel today interesting story points would get shown in trailer.
- mattnewton 4y ago
  One of the things I wished they did even more is keep it ambiguous whether the terminator is really a machine just a bit longer into the film. Everyone else thinks Sarah is hysterical, including herself ant first, and Kyle sounds just nuts after the tech noir bar scene- let the audience wonder a little more too! Did the guy just have a bullet proof vest on? Could Kyle actually be crazy? I think a lot of the psychological horror here is traded for some very cool tech shots of the future, time travel and arnold vision early - probably a worthy trade. But it would be awesome to see a cut that holds its cards even closer to the chest and let’s more of that tension build.
runevault 4y ago
Out of curiosity do you feel the same way about Alien? Because both movies obviously use sci-fi elements (space and an alien vs robots and time travel) but the plot arcs for both are 100% horror. Frankly outside slasher flicks a LOT of horror has either SF or fantasy elements because things we don't understand are the scariest.
- bilsbie 4y ago
  It’s the strangest thing. I don’t. I don’t like horror and I could never get into alien. I think the plot/story in terminator is just so compelling and horror doesn’t seem to be used just for scares but furthers the story.

everyone 4y ago

I usually can take or leave director's cuts. They're usually good but dont fundamentally change the movie or anything. But the director's cut of T2 does. That one scene where they explain that Arnie is in read only mode, take out his brain chip and reset him. Apart from being an important scene in itself: John making his first leadership decision and deciding, against Sarah's wishes, to not destroy the T100; It is also soooo relevant to so many things that occur later in the movie. It's crazy to me that they cut that scene.

havblue 4y ago
The theatrical cut was already pretty long without it. John demonstrating more leadership would likely help the viewer think of him as more than a whiney kid, but he was still the third most important protagonist. I also think of aliens where a lot of early footage is cut after Ripley is rescued. You're left wondering how exactly Burke betrayed the colony and what happened with Ripley's life when she was drifting for so long. Again, the theatrical was already too long.
grubbs 4y ago
I always enjoyed the longer cut of Aliens. Where they show some of the life on the space station before the Aliens actually show up. I always found that whole backstory very interesting - but you only get very small glimpses of it in the theatrical release.
- CottonMcKnight 4y ago
  Then there's The Abyss. Where the Director's Cut is pretty much a completely different movie.
- Karellen 4y ago
  Interesting take. I always thought that the "colony life" parts of the special edition were completely unnecessary. The rest of the movie works really well as being told almost entirely from Ripley's viewpoint, so seeing the colony only when she does (as in the theatrical cut), torn apart and lifeless, I personally think works better. I still prefer the director's cut because of the backstory about Ripley's daughter, and the deeper relationship she forms with Newt as a result. It gives so much more depth to why she goes back for her at the end. Also to the stand-off in the egg chamber with one mother against another, and the shared understanding there. The sentry guns are pretty cool, too.

orev 4y ago

I think a big part of the delayed reveal of the skeleton only version in T1 is pretty simple: once you reveal that, Arnie is no longer in the movie, and the special effects required to fully animate it didn’t exist back then (other than stick figures or rotoscoping which would have looked awful). As is, the scenes with just the skeleton look like a stiff puppet show instead of some intimidating killer robot.

jonhohle 4y ago
As an audience member, you’re expected to maintain some suspension of disbelief. At a musical no one would say, “no one would actual sing what they could just say!”, or reading a book “those letters could have been scrawled by any kindergartener!” At that point of the movie the thing the protagonists thought they killed is resurrected in an even more frightening form and dread is elevated. Obviously the viewer is not at risk, so how that is implemented has little bearing on the impact of the scene. On the other hand, if you are interested in the technical details of how this creature appears next to actors, knowing Cameron’s history in the model department on low budget movies and Ray Harryhausen’s similar technique used in Jason and the argonauts would allow you to appreciate how it was made. I don’t buy that the late reveal was due to effects limitations. It’s really to take an audience that may have allowed themselves to relax to be immediate brought back to an even higher anxiety level than the proceeding chase.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  I think GP's point is less about breaking or sustaining suspension of disbelief, or technical limitations themselves, and more about costs. Once the Terminator loses its human skin, the (then) relatively cheap actor is replaced by a prop that's (then) stupidly expensive to animate. Deciding to do it earlier would likely force the movie to look entirely different at least from that point on. Such considerations were a major driver of how sci-fi in general was done up until early 2000s. With TV shows, a lot of the tropes and patterns of sci-fi, particularly around how the aliens look and behave, boil down to the fact that about the only way to make non-grotesque aliens without breaking bank was to glue prosthetics to the actors and apply tons of makeup. The writing was thus constrained by what the makeup department could handle.

pjc50 4y ago

This is a spinoff of the Terminator sidetrack discussion of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34310047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34310047, isn't it?

thomashabets2 4y ago

Terminator 1 is absolutely amazing. Terminator 2 is great, but it's no T1. I recently wrote a longish post about it: https://blog.habets.se/2022/11/Terminator-1-is-the-best-Terminator-movie.html https://blog.habets.se/2022/11/Terminator-1-is-the-best-Term... But long story short is that 1) T1 terminator is uncanny valley, and T2 is not. 2) T1 is a perfect time loop, and T2 is not.

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mitthrowaway2 4y ago
The gaps in T2's time loop are pretty alarming in retrospect. Killer robots suddenly materialize in the present, time traveling from a future that never comes about. It's quite a spooky thought. In my opinion the film only gets away with it by riding the coattails of how cleanly T1 executed the time travel concept.
abdullahkhalids 4y ago
There are philosophical differences between T1 and T2 which I think are much more substantive than critiques of fan service. T1 is, "if we go ahead with improved computing technology with no thought, ultimately machines will take over and kill us. But with our humanity (Kyle) we can defeat them." T2 is, "The leader of the resistance, who successfully leads humans towards victory, is someone whose mother was human, but whose strongest father-figure was a machine. It is only if we understand machines, and teach them humanity (like John does the Terminator) can we attain victory." I think if you reflect on this a while, you will see that T2 has a lot more philosophical nuance in what it says about the relation of humans and technology, than T1.
- thomashabets2 4y ago
  Yeah that message is not exactly subtle in T2. Though again at the cost of "that's not what happened". John Connor doesn't grow up to become the Great Skynet Negotiator. I'm not saying every single aspect of T2 is worse than T1. But the little philosophy that T2 adds is vastly overshadowed by what it contradicts from T1, and partly itself.

andrewfromx 4y ago

and we have to mention https://filmschoolrejects.com/terminator-2-helicopter-stunt/ https://filmschoolrejects.com/terminator-2-helicopter-stunt/ 'With a lot at stake and not a lot of room for error (quite literally), as Tamburro, himself put it: “If I made a mistake, I would be killed.” The stunt was so obviously dangerous that the scheduled camera crew tasked with shooting the close-ups refused to take part in it. Proving that he’s not one to ask of others what he isn’t willing to do himself, Cameron said “okay fine, I’ll shoot it” and shot the stunt with the help of a very courageous insert car driver.' Oh and he did it twice.

suction 4y ago

[dead]

type0 4y ago

Here's what would happen if Stalone played Terminator [deepfake] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71c80ab_TgQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71c80ab_TgQ

scelerat 4y ago

I think this is a great breakdown and analysis, though "‘Terminator’ Really Is a Horror Movie" is something a lot of people at or near the time of its release, including my eleven year old self watching it for the first time, understood intuitively. In my mind (and perhaps even in my local video store) it was always grouped with Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street

legohead 4y ago

I never even noticed T2 trying to hide the fact the T1000 was the bad guy. I suppose it was thanks to the lovely spoiling trailer [1] of the day. Plus I remember it being all over the news about the amazing graphics and how they did the famous "mercury scene". [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRRlbK5w8AE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRRlbK5w8AE

intsunny 4y ago

Terminator 2 is my fav film for weeding out pretend-wanna-be-film snobs. I've had this conversation more times than I'd like: Me: Terminator 2 was a great movie Fake film snob: Terminator 2?! A shoot-em-up movie?! What?! Me: Yah, it isn't what James Cameron is most known for, but still good Fake film snob: Wait .... James Cameron??? Me: Yup, he even got five Oscars for it. Obviously not best picture or best actor/ess, but still Fake film snob: five Oscars?! Edit: formatting

hairofadog 4y ago
I guess count me as a fake film snob? I love a good "shoot-em-up", and I loved the first Terminator, but the second one felt hokey to me. I just couldn't get past James Cameron's idea of how a kid behaves or talks.
- SergeAx 4y ago
  John Connor behaves and talks like a figure any kid in the movie theater want to associate themselves with.
stonogo 4y ago
I've never met anyone who considered James Cameron to be other than a blockbuster factory. Aliens, the Abyss, True Lies, writing the second Rambo film... who the hell would be surprised that James Cameron was involved with a Terminator movie? Aside form that, Terminator 2 not only isn't Cameron's best effort, it's not even the franchise's best effort. It was the beginning of "to hell with making sense, look at these explosions," which got worse with each passing film, and better in the Sarah Conner Chronicles.
RichardCA 4y ago
There is a documentary called "Los Angeles Plays Itself". Thom Andersen is as erudite about movies as anyone could possibly be, but he still saw value in movies like "L.A. Crackdown" and "Death Wish 4". Terminator and Terminator 2 are both given shout-outs for their depiction of L.A. and the LAPD in particular. https://youtu.be/Ifii8LvR-ss https://youtu.be/Ifii8LvR-ss

tacticaldev 4y ago

"Sex, in other words, literally makes them too ignorant to live." -- anyone with Kids can tell you this is true...

guilhas 4y ago

I like how it looked like a regular mainstream action movie, but incorporated things like time travel. Accessible for the whole family to think or have fun at same time

SergeAx 4y ago

I remember the feeling of sheer awe while watching both movies. "Wait, what, he is a metallic skeleton underneath?!! No goddamn way!!!". I really miss that feeling in today's movies, even "Avatar 2" by the same James Cameron. He replaced it with some gizmo gimmicks, like exoskeletons or crab sumbarines, which are impressive, but not awesome.

coldtea 4y ago

>So, when Robert Patrick’s T-1000 arrives on the scene, the structural repetitions position him as the T2 analog of Kyle Reese. As in, we are led to believe that he is another human rebel fighter sent to protect Sarah and/or John Connor. Actually, that's the biggest flaw "reveals"-wise for T2 in my opinion. Robert Patrick plays his character as too robotic and even icky even before the reveal. He looks off, so people start wondering if he really is a "Kyle Reese" type or some enemy, perhaps robotic... He should have been played the "cop" with more neutral maunerisms until the reveal, so that the reveal has bigger impact.