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Early CGI: How James Cameron & Crew Made Those Wild Liquid Metal Effects in Terminator 2
Even decades later, Robert Patrick’s molten metal killer still looks terrifyingly real.
By now, it’s widely known as one of science fiction’s groundbreaking movie milestones. But even today, the sleek and shiny liquid metal effects that signify the ominous approach of Skynet’s next-gen killing machine in 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day (stream it here on Peacock!) remain mighty impressive.
Backed by the steel-eyed gaze of actor Robert Patrick’s morphing, shape-shifting new-and-improved T-1000 Terminator (even as Arnold Schwarzenegger remained stuck in an old-school T-800 unit), the slinky metal model that chased down a young John Connor (Edward Furlong) had a fearsome air of unstoppable invincibility. You could shoot it, stab it, and even bomb it into tiny little pieces — but every single time (almost), Patrick’s metal murder-'bot would simply collect itself and ooze back into fighting shape.
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Most remarkable of all, perhaps, was director James Cameron’s insistence on showing audiences the T-1000 in full metal-shaping magic mode without resorting to any old-school cheats. In scene after scene, the camera holds steady as viewers watch Patrick’s mangled metal monster reassemble itself right onscreen, with no before-and-after cutaways that merely hint at what’s actually taking place.
Nope, the full operational power of the T-1000 remains on full display all throughout Terminator 2, a special effects feat that still looks mighty impressive more than 30 years on from the film’s blockbuster 1991 release. Cameron famously spared no expense in achieving a full smorgasbord of both practical and computer-generated effects for the film, and though CGI was still in its relative infancy at the time (remember: Steven Spielberg was still two years away from creating digital dinosaurs for the first Jurassic Park), a crack team of cutting-edge CGI specialists came together to evolve a digitally-rendered idea Cameron had previously tried in 1989’s The Abyss… and, wouldn’t you know it, it worked.
“The quality of it even then wasn’t as good as it was in T2,” Gene Warren Jr., the special effects supervisor for the first Terminator film, noted in a retrospective interview with Vulture back in 2015 (while ILM's Dennis Muren served as VFX Supervisor and created the CGI for both Terminator 2 and The Abyss). “The digital work was composited into the real backgrounds optically. If they tried to put out the film digitally, it would have made you throw up. They hadn’t yet made the resolution good enough. Cameron picked that water monster [in The Abyss] and decided to have ILM do it because it was gonna be translucent.”
As is often the case when admiring some cool piece of bleeding-edge effects tech, George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) studio skunkworks provided the tech and high-end know-how to iterate on a promising, but not-yet fully realized, idea.
“[Cameron] took it a step further with T2 and the liquid-metal man, and chose mercury as what it was gonna look like; because the only thing for which the digital would be real-looking enough was mercury, because mercury doesn’t look real in real life,” added Warren Jr. “It balls up, it reflects everything — it looks like a digital-created thing.”
Later films like 2015’s Terminator Genisys would further iterate on the same basic liquid-metal concept that made Patrick’s first T-1000 Terminator seem so lethally impossible to stop. But even with the benefit of decades’ worth of further CGI refinements, it all more or less looks and feels like the sleek and slinky molten-silver cyborg that started it all.
Ready to take a blast back to the dystopian past along with Ah-nold, Patrick, and (of course!) Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor? Terminator 2: Judgment Day is streaming on Peacock here.
