Terminator 2 Is Still a Perfect Fusion of Action and Science Fiction

For much of his career, James Cameron has been fascinated by the conflicts and bonds between the natural world and the technological. It's everywhere in his work, most obviously now in his Avatar epics, but it stretches all the way back to Piranha II. Whenever manmade objects and living beings themselves merge, Cameron is interested.

With this in mind, Cameron's two-film Terminator saga feels like not just a key exploration of this theme, but an essential piece of his concerns as a filmmaker. Here's a sci-fi-action saga not just about humanity clashing with technological monsters, but reckoning with its own role in creating those monsters. It's part of what makes The Terminator fascinating and horrifying in equal measure, and it's something Cameron explored in even greater depth for Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Released in the summer of 1991, Cameron's follow-up to his original Terminator film takes advantage of all the bombast and cinematic clout he'd earned through both that first film in the franchise and through the phenomenal Aliens. Cameron had proven himself by this point as a guy who knew how to play with moviemaking toys and maximize their potential, and he poured all that into his Terminator sequel. Look closer, though, and you'll find that the film doesn't just work because the setpieces are spectacular and the visual effects are convincing. Terminator 2 remains a masterpiece among Cameron's filmography because of those things, yes, but also because of the depth with which he's committed to exploring the relationship between man and machine. In this classic film, now streaming on Peacock, Cameron plays with action movie formulas, explores emotional science fictional concepts, and dials everything up to 11.

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How Terminator 2: Judgement Day Flips the Script

The Terminator is, for all its depth and precision, built on a fairly simple idea: A killer robot goes back in time to kill a woman who poses a threat to robot supremacy. It's more complicated than that, but that's the hook. How do you follow-up something like that? Well, you get more killer robots, of course, and you send them back in time again. That's a recipe for a sequel, and Terminator 2's very basic "Now there are two Terminators" hook gets us in the door, but then Cameron goes a step further and asks a simple question: What if the killer robot we came to fear in the first film is the good guy now?

Again, it's a simple conceptual lure, but it's just the first of many in this film that Cameron wields to his advantage. The basic plot follows this good T-800 Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) as he tries to stop a bad T-1000 Terminator (Robert Patrick) from killing John Connor (Edward Furlong), the future leader of the human resistance. The two killer robots act similarly, pursue their goals with dogged callousness, and generally arrive with the same air of menace. The difference, of course, is that one is dressed in biker gear and toting a lever action shotgun, and the other is dressed like a cop. Guess which one is the good guy?

Throughout the film, Cameron stages police to be the sometimes unwitting villains of the piece, while the heroes, including John's mother Sarah (Linda Hamilton), are presented as outsiders, people on the fringes who don't fit into the polite idea of societal norms. The T-800 is a biker with a brutal edge. John is a teenage criminal zipping around Los Angeles on a dirt bike. Sarah is an institutionalized mad woman who claims she's seen the apocalypse in her dreams. These are people who, conventional wisdom tells us (especially in 1991), aren't set up to win. What they are set up to do, though, is survive, and their tenacity forms the dramatic backbone of the film. That Cameron is able to showcase that tenacity with daring chase scenes and shootouts is often just a bonus. 

The Heart of the Action

Robert Patrick, as the T-1000 Terminator in James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day Photo: CBS via Getty Images

Throughout the film, Cameron stokes the unexpected in ways big and small, moving from having his villain dress as a cop to having the T-800 open fire on an entire squad of cops with a minigun all while killing not a single human soul. It has the effect of keeping you intrigued, yes, but also keeping you on edge, knowing that you can't possibly predict what these characters are going to do, because by the action movie standards of the 1980s and early 1990s, they're not playing by the rules.

This gets particularly important in the film's third act, when Sarah decides she has to kill Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), the inventor of Skynet who unwittingly sets off the entire apocalypse and the rise of the machines. Here again, in an age when personal computing and new technology was taking over the world, Cameron is flipping the script, presenting the idealistic innovator as a villain, however unaware he is of the consequences of his action. Innovation and technological progression comes with a price, and Dyson's presence without knowing that price creates a moral quandary: Would you kill the guy who ends the world, even if he didn't know that's what he was doing?

This quandary, and the way Dyson himself responds to it, makes up the film's climactic minutes, as our team of renegades fights to stop the AI threat known as Skynet from ever truly materializing. Cameron's climax is another sci-fi movie cornerstone — the heroes going to the enemy base to blow it up and save the day — but because he's packed it with so much character tension, we really truly don't know how everything is going to resolve. There's tension between John and Sarah, tension between Sarah and the T-800, tension between Dyson and everyone, and of course a real bond forming between John and the T-800. All of these things present emotional threads that weave together in deft, often surprising ways, creating an end that's a popcorn movie blowout as well as a punch aimed right for you heart.

So while Terminator 2 remains a tremendous display of Cameron's ability to marshal cutting edge visual effects, explosions, and gun battles all in one movie, it also stands as one of his most potent explorations of the merging of man and machine, the ways we plan and the ways we don't. It's been more than three decades, and it's still a towering achievement.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day is now streaming on Peacock.