There’s a lot in it, but what jumps into my mind every time is how Sarah Connor’s arc goes, how inextricable from the movie’s politics it is. She didn’t really have a believable character progression in the first film either, (that “ON YOUR FEET SOLDIER” is so goddamn cheesy, as is “YOU’RE TERMINATED FUCKER”) but surely T2 is the chance to show us how she became that brave, principled organiser that Michael Biehn told us she becomes, right?!? See her lead a revolution and shit?!
So when T2 opens Sarah Connor is in an asylum getting abused because she did an adventurism and tried to blow up a data center. Splendid.
But that’s not enough, really, and when John Connor and his pet terminator go spring her, the movie decides it’s time to sacrifice her entire character on the altar of a both-sides-ism. She gets armed up, but instead of training a guerilla fighting force, she just grabs the nearest Colt and goes off to shoot the Cyberdine research man who designs the “CPU” of the first terminators. John Connor and the gang do manage to stop her, because No way mom he’s just a regular guy doing work, he’s just a small bean banality of evil!!! Haven’t you read Hannah Arendt?! He’s just following orders, if you tell him it’s bad he’ll stop!!! And so she doesn’t ventilate this guy in front of his family, (imo the scenes of an aggrieved white woman holding a black man nursing a bullet wound at gunpoint in front of his family is kind of harrowing, the film goes out of its way to depict her as evil) and they all go blow up Cyberdine HQ together, because actually mom was just being silly, and saving history was as easy as “corporation bad”, and shit. It basically deflates any of the cool parts of the original film and subsumes it back into end-of-history liberalism.
Again this isn’t like I think The Terminator (literally 1984) is the goat or whatever, it’s a weirdly apolitical film for having so much great man theory and the central romance is piss-poor, but I’ve always thought Sarah Connor is one of the most done-dirty protagonists in US cinema. James Cameron is my mortal enemy.
EDIT: reflecting upon this thread and the script, I’ve realised that I think I want Sarah Connor to do literally anything much more than James Cameron wanted her to do literally anything. Her job is child rearing, ofc.
EDIT 2: I am only just now discovering that James Cameron is a fuckin’ canadian. Folks, this is a tragedy 
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It’s a cautionary tale about how adventurism and great man theory gets in the way of genuine revolution. Sarah Connor tried to
instead of organising and the movie shows us that she is wrong for it, it isn’t until she works with others instead of trying to be a solo adventurist that she can actually start achieving her goals.Also the bad guy is a cop. Curious how you didn’t feel a need to mention that in your analysis.
FINALLY some GOOD FUCKING FOOD
Okay sure but A) 1984’s The Terminator tells us that Sarah Connor is a great revolutionary but we never see that. B) You can make the argument that Miles Dyson is a cool class traitor, but the movie doesn’t really go into that, it just posits that if you tell the bourgeois man that what he’s doing is bad, he will help Blow Up A Pipeline, right?
There’s an argument to be made that the only good message in T2 is “never trust cops” but I think the intent behind Robert T-1000 is that he’s a figure the viewer is supposed to be able to trust but can’t, mostly because I refuse to give Cameron that much credit. ACAB tweet by James Cameron, where?
He’s so close… he almost has it…
he does strike me as a lib who’s quite close to getting it
That’s literally the vibe I got from Avatar (which I hated). It’s like if a hippy grossly misread Settlers and made a bad scifi movie out of it.
1984’s The Terminator tells us that Sarah Connor is a great revolutionary but we never see that.
I don’t recall that. I recall Kyle Reese saying that Sarah and John went underground before judgement day to prep. You could argue Sarah initially was just following his directions I guess cuz she assumed judgement day was inevitable. Idk what changed and made her try and do a preventative adventurism, maybe she got turned off by having her son get trained by all these military freaks to become prepper messiah and decided to try and stop it from happening.
Yeah it isn’t really explained, which bugs the hell out of me.
From the script:
REESE (continuing) …but there was one man…who taught us to fight. To storm the wire of the camps. To smash those metal mother- fuckers into junk. He turned it around…he brought us back from the brink. (pause) His name is Connor. John Connor… your son, Sarah. Your unborn son.
Endquote. I guess it’s only implied that she taught him to be Che Guevara II…
Idk what changed and made her try and do a preventative adventurism
She dreamed about getting nuked.
Wasn’t that later?
I thought the original plan was just hiding out in the desert in Mexico(?) with those Mexican(?) preppers. She had that dream of getting nuked which prompted her to do the adventurism. The T800 only tagged along to blow up Cyberdyne Systems because John told it to.
There was an earlier adventurism between the movies of her trying to blow up Cyberdyne, which is why she got institutionalized.
yes but have you considered that Linda Hamilton rules in that film
She beats up that orderly pretty good
I think you’re applying a political lens to the movie in an a somewhat unfair way.
she became that brave, principled organiser that Michael Biehn told us she becomes, right?!? See her lead a revolution and shit?!
Conner isn’t a communist, she’s a woman who got told her son was gonna become some messianic figure after an apocalyptic event. It makes sense her impulse after the traumatic even of having that realization by watching a robotic death machine kill her messiah son’s father in front of her wasn’t to join the DSA but become an unstable doomsday prepper.
So when T2 opens Sarah Connor is in an asylum getting abused because she did an adventurism and tried to blow up a data center.
It was a computer factory not a data center fyi. You also leave out the part where she spent years dragging her son around the globe and dating military men and mercenary guys in exchange for training her son in guerrilla warfare. It makes sense a person who did that and then tried to blow up a computer factory because she claims robots are going to conquer the world would be institutionalized. I mean, yeah it turns out she’s totally right but without the context of the first movie would you have believed her?
nearest Colt and goes off to shoot the Cyberdine research man who designs the “CPU” of the first terminators. John Connor and the gang do manage to stop her, because No way mom he’s just a regular guy doing work, he’s just a small bean banality of evil!!! Haven’t you read Hannah Arendt?!
I mean when you know the apocalypse is going to happen due to a specific technology advancement due to a time travel resistance fighter knocking you up with the messiah child isn’t it kinda reasonable to target the inventor of the specific technology?
Also he is a guy doing his job, he wasn’t even working for an evil weapons contractor just a normal computer company, I think there’s a scene where he specifically says he wanted to design the tech for civilian use. Plus she did try and kill him in his home in front of his kids, and the Terminator makes the good point that his research had advanced enough that killing him alone maybe wouldn’t have been enough to advert judgement day. Once he’s told all this he makes the right choice and helps them blow up his lab.
It’s obviously not a communist film, Cameron is a lib asshole, but as an action movie with a kinda interesting apocalyptic coat of paint it’s very well made, the whole concept of two time traveling robots duking it out in the modern day over the life of a single kid makes for some good action.
It makes sense her impulse after the traumatic even of having that realization by watching a robotic death machine kill her messiah son’s father in front of her wasn’t to join the DSA but become an unstable doomsday prepper.
Not untrue for her character I guess, but one wonders how she became the woman that Kyle Reese talks about from the future, and to me it doesn’t feel like we’re watching her develop about it. Also data center, computer factory, tomato tomato.
You also leave out the part where she spent years dragging her son around the globe and dating military men and mercenary guys in exchange for training her son in guerrilla warfare.
I completely forgot about the FUCKING EX-CIA WEAPONS DEALER IN TEXAS OR NEW MEXICO, holy shit lmao. This is not helping the idea that T2 character assassinates Sarah Connor imo.
Also he is a guy doing his job, he wasn’t even working for an evil weapons contractor just a normal computer company,
Sorry but there are lines in T1 about how Skynet resulted from military computers made by Cyberdine, which is kind of in keeping with how basically all of western computing is NATO capture and can trace its roots to DARPA. Even for what Miles says, there is no realistic way he wouldn’t know, imo that’s like Boeing engineers.
But do you see what I mean? The film is a narrative in which all of the stuff I said about it is the probable and reasonable thing to happen. It’s a convenient story in which no systemic change or organising of resistance forces or anything is required. Just tell the engineer he’s doing a bad and he’ll blow up all the research at HQ. Just like in real life, right?
the whole concept of two time traveling robots duking it out in the modern day over the life of a single kid makes for some good action.
Something I’ve seen people miss about my
lolcowingfilm analysis or whatever, is that I’m not coming at movies like “this is ontologically evil and impossible to enjoy”. I’m the fun police, but I still watch and enjoy Robocop despite it being sly copaganda, or The Running Man even though it’s a weird wrestling fan’s movie. I just think it’s important to look at what movies like this are saying with their stories, being products of the Hollywood military industrial complex and shit.I get the impression Sarah WAS trying to prep for the apocalypse by training her son to be some epic guerrilla leader, but it turns out doing that shit can result in your ass getting institutionalized. I doubt I would have handled the situation much better honestly. They probably could have done more to explain WHY she ditched the original plan of going underground to train John to be anti-Robot Che and instead try and adventurism Judgement Day into not happening, but as I speculated it may be because she was hoping to save her son from a life of nothing but blowing shit up. Idk.
It is a good action movie if nothing else, and I’d argue the politics of it is better than a lot of other good action movies which are often just cop and soldier jerk off porn.
Fair enough, and yeah it sure beats the fuck out of The Delta Force or Cobra or something.
I can’t quite tell if this is a joke or not. Either way, im not huge on T2 either, the first one is dope but that’s kinda where I leave it.
If you are being sincere youre not doing a fair critique of the film at all
I am utterly serious. Felt this way since I first watched it, and the ability to recognise its political elements amazingly made it worse.
I’m curious though, how is it unfair?
Canonically they didn’t stop the war because by the time we get to Terminator Zero it’s explicitly acknowledged as a near-eternal time travel war that is essentially turning into a stalemate because SKYNET and humanity keep canceling each other out and trying again
My comrade in chains, in all sincerity, what the fuck is a Terminator Zero and who would be following this sad, beleaguered legacy IP after 1991? Series from which the juice has drained and only diagetic essentialism remains.
There was Terminator: Dark Fate, Terminator: Genysis, Terminator: Skynet Prime, the Terminator: The Young Kyle Reese Adventures TV show, Terminator: The Ride at Paramount Studios (it’s canon), the Lego Terminator movie, and there was also the movie where the viral Christian Bale soundbite came from, but this is the first i’ve ever heard of “Terminator Zero” so I’m going to assume the poster above made it up
now that’s posting
Netflix anime that got canceled and was honestly the most interesting thing anybody had done with the IP in years
So of course it had to be canceled
I like Mike and Jay from RLMs idea that the series should have wrapped up with Sarah and Kyle going back to the Wild West days and trying to start and anti-computers religious movement, and then terminators get sent back in time and have to dress up as Cowboys and beat up guys in Saloons.
Needs more Huey Lewis.
In 2026, the main reason why I care about T2 is the fact that almost every single weapon from Doom 1 is in the movie (the pistol, the shotgun, the chaingun, the rocket launcher, and the plasma rifle). I will one day email John Romero this question, who’s apparently pretty good at answering questions from randos.
James Cameron never made a single good movie gang, rise up.
Terminator 2 is not great but salvageable, not as good as Terminator 1 but still acceptable. making Schwarzenegger a cute relatable murder-robot was an odd choice though, and led to the death of this franchise (but I guess that’s a good thing. franchises are a bourgeois decadence)
but I did see the post the other day where the official party line was that Aliens is good. This is of course ridiculous. Alien is great (because everyone except Ridley Scott did a great job and Scott did an OK job) but Aliens is a downgrade on all fronts and Cameron opened the gates for stuff like the french Aliens vs Crusty Jugglers sequel, the Aliens vs Predators franchise, Prometheus: Aliens Begins, and he also infused juice into the Space Marine trope and made them look cool and relatable.
David Fincher tried to reverse everything that Cameron screwed up (similar to how JJ Abrams tried to reverse everything about the Last Jedi, but good) , making a grounded, minimalist, and gay club themed alien movie, and he was crucified for it. The “fans” demanded more space marines and wacky adventures and more alien life stages. So to punish them even more, the producers gave them Aliens vs. French Mimes as a giant fuck you (the “fans” deserved it though)
anyway, in conclusion, a melting terminator doesn’t make sense. there’s like 1000 years of tech research between “skinwalker” and “melty man” yet they come from roughly the same era. this is never explained (or maybe it is, who cares)
Alien is great
The ultimate weapon of mass destruction I’m hiding is that Alien is also bad & I can prove it mathematically.
How can it be bad? It has Sigourney Weaver AND Harry Dean Stanton in it.
I refuse to discuss it for fear of blowing this stupid thread up further. I can also say that I think it’s still an enjoyable movie and has an appreciable working class character.
Wrong
As if shooting the designer of a technology will somehow prevent someone else from inventing that technology. You wouldn’t prevent the future from happening you’d just change the timeline of events. That goes for the company as well.
Terminator: Genisys
I disagree
As many do, which is chill imo.
I just watched it this weekend and for whatever reason the copy I acquired had this very funny ending where John Connor becomes Gavin Newsom at the end. “Here, on the battlefield of the Senate, his weapons are common sense… and hope!” Laughed out loud.
Because if a machine can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.
who are the real terminators? the murder robots from the future, or the doomers that don’t vote?
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I will never understand the impulse to measure how good a movie is by how good its politics are
Triumph of the Will is a good film actually /s
It’s not universal, it’s a tendecy that comes out if a movie isn’t engaging me on any other level. Also to be real, I kind of enjoy taking the politics scalpel to stuff.
Ok this is obviously bait but have you considered T2 is one of my kids’ favourite movies and their mum won’t let them watch it anymore?
Different opinion?! Must be trolling.
Also
Last time I sincerely said “popular thing bad” redditors were insinuating that I get paid to do it. I think it’s because I gave it a flippant and hyperbolic title, again, oops. T2 might be bad but it’ll never unseat irredeemable shit like Year of the Dragon.
Do you have any thoughts about skyrim
(/uj I’ve enjoyed reading this thread)
