Schwarzenegger Season: Terminator 2: Judgement Day (Dir James Cameron, 1h 57m, 1991)

With Arnold, all roads eventually lead to The Terminator (1984); try and sidestep it all you like, but with all the inevitability of a T-800/T-1000/T-X, etc. coming back in time to kill John Connor and his relatives, so discussions of Schwarzenegger inevitably lead to that of his most iconic role, and the film that created it. Here, Arnold plays an unstoppable killing machine sent back in time to murder the mother of the man who will lead humanity to victory over the forces it represents, opposed by a man who returned from that distant future to stop it. It becomes, in short, a cinematic shorthand for the actor who plays the machine, the T-800. In later years, he’ll become The Governator of California, and for millions, he’ll always be associated by the quip, "I'll be back" (the line would inevitably reoccur in every other movie Arnold would make for the next half decade. .

It becomes pivotal in Arnold's career, as he trades nigh-unstoppable, nigh-wordless, antagonist for nigh-unstoppable, quick-quipping protagonists. It's arguably, the film that, for all the quality Conan has, made Arnold the unstoppable macho icon he was for the Eighties. Birthed from the mind of James Cameron, The Terminator (1984) was, undeniably, a film trading on its antagonist's fame above all; above the T-800's sunglass-wearing, scowling head on the poster looms, in huge red type, SCHWARZENEGGER. It would make Cameron famous. It would make Arnold a nigh-colossus in cinema. It is, undeniably, a very good film.

Terminator 2, on the other hand, is flawless. We've talked on end on what a sequel can be, at its very best, either upping the ante from the previous film, or taking things in a very different direction in tone or mood, or merrily upending the previous film's status-quo in favour of new ideas. Terminator 2: Judgement Day, somehow, impossibly does all three in perhaps the greatest example of the action genre that the entire 90s, if not the great sweep of cinema in all its majesty have to offer; with the T-800 (Schwarzenegger) turning protector of the young John Connor (Edward Furlong) (and his mother, Sarah (Linda Hamilton)), against Robert Patrick's magnificently chilling T-1000 as they battle to stop the nuclear apocalypse of Judgement Day.

Around its smartly told, if occasionally minor dated narrative heft, T2 is a practically perfect mechanism of a film, at points effortlessly carrying its audience along, pushing the boundaries, in visual and technical masterclasses, of special effects to such a degree that the rest of the genre was still catching up at the end of the decade. It is, together with Cameron's other masterpiece, Aliens, the practical blueprint on how to make an action sequel. It is, of course, the peak of Arnold Schwarzenegger's action career. It is the greatest film he ever made. The rest of the 1990s would see a downturn in the quality of his films that we'll talk about more in our fourth and final review of the season.

Let's go back, though. Between Predator and T2, Arnold had, undeniably, a fairly good few years, first teaming up with Jim Belushi in the underrated Red Heat, where he plays a Russian detective looking for smugglers of (all together now) "Cocainum!" before flexing his comedic muscle with Danny Devito in Twins. Next, the equally underrated Total Recall beckoned, in which Arnold plays a man whose fantastical adventure to Mars begins to play out in real life, and Arnold must (all together now) "Get your ass to Mars" to uncover the truth. Arnold would round out 1990 with a reunion with Ivan Reitman (previously director of Twins), in Kindergarten Cop.

James Cameron, meanwhile, was busy making some of the best movies of the 1980s, as director, writer and producer. First up, in the very same year as The Terminator, he'd penned the script, (but clearly not the title) for Rambo First Blood Part II, before launching into production of the bigger, badder and more action-orientated Aliens, where Sigourney Weaver and a squad of marines do battle, not with a single Xenomorph, but an entire hive of them, in a fast-paced, often gloriously over-the-top slice of action cinema. Next up, The Abyss, in which an oil rig makes first contact with an alien creature would see Cameron push the technical abilities of both camera and special effects, and the sanity of his actors to breaking point.

The idea of a Terminator sequel, meanwhile, had not been a new thing-almost since the film rolled into cinemas in the summer of 1984, Cameron had been working on a sequel-after all, the first film had made nearly $80 million on a budget of just $6.5 million, making a follow-up a complete no-brainer. However, standing in the way between James and Arnold, and another outing for the hulking cyborg, was the monolithic (and bewilderingly diverse, having started as an investment company for actors to cut their taxes, and partly bankrolling the Rumble in the Jungle) Hemdale Film Corporation, the producers of Platoon and The Last Emperor. Their working relationship with Cameron had been frosty-with its co-founder, Daly, almost coming to blows over the ending of the film, but with Cameron's hands tied by the very deal made to make the film, and with Cameron, Schwarzenegger, Cameron's ex-wife, Gale Anne Hurd, and special effects maestro, Stan Winston, suing Hemdale, a sequel felt a remote possibility.

This Gordian knot of rights, though, was about to be well and truly cut by the Austrian; over lunch one day, during the production for Total Recall, Arnold discusses the rights for the film, and the fact that the by-now embattled Hemdale needed the cash, to convince producer, Mario Kassar, and his company, Carolco Pictures, to buy the rights for the film. They proceed to take the gamble, buying both halves (from Hemdale and Hurd), for $17 million, and proceed to build a rag-tag production team, in search of one goal-to make the most expensive independent film of all time-something critics of the move said would bankrupt the company. Along for the ride, thus, are Studio Canal, Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment, and Hurd's Pacific Western Productions, and an estimated $60 million (the film would eventually make back almost its entire budget before a single camera rolled, from a tangled web of tax-breaks, television and VHS rights, outside investment and product placement).

What Terminator 2 is, in short, is the complete anti-thesis of the original. We begin, though, with the familiar; in the far flung future of 2029, where Skynet's machine war against humanity is seemingly in its final phases-here, Cameron practically flings open the door from the small-scale opening of Terminator, in which a single tank hunts down Connor and his men, from a thirty-second sequence to a nearly three minute one in which huge-scale war rolls across the screen, with models and full-scale puppets of the fleshless metallic terminators do battle with Connor's forces, culminating in an impressively colossal reinterpretation of the classic opening scene, in which a skeletal terminator (again, a puppet) looms out of the nuclear fire. The metallic clanging score of Brad Fiedel looms over it.

And then the first subversion. Arnold's role in Terminator 2 is perhaps the smartest possible change to the franchise, and in a stroke, not only reflects the change in tone, from horror to straight action, but how Schwarzenegger himself had changed as an actor, from muscled tough antagonist, to ultra-cool action star. (Arnold, for the record, aside from The Terminator, has played a villain only once since the original outing for the T-800, as Mr Freeze in the enjoyably campy Batman and Robin). His re-introduction as the titular machine may follow the same beats as the original, but from the moment that Arnie walks into the bar and demands that "I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle" and promptly has half the bar attempt to beat the snot out of him, to no avail, there's the immediate sense that we're no longer dealing with the same guy. As George Thorogood and The Destroyers strike up the (by-now hackneyed) "Bad to the Bone", Arnold steps down the stairs, and the transformation, once he snatches a pair of sunglasses off the bar's owner, is complete. The Terminator is now an action hero.

What follows over the next two hours is the stuff of legend. It's easy, in this age of action movies being almost baroquely complex, how brutally efficient T2 is as cinema. What Terminator 2: Judgement Day is...is perhaps the single best action movie of the 90s, a mechanism that's masterfully wound up over its first half-an-hour, as John, Sarah, and the two Terminators move steadily into each others orbits, only to crash into action with the corridor sequence, in which the two machines do battle for the first time, and fully reveal what's going on-Arnold deftly produces a shotgun from a box of roses, the T-1000 advances down the corridor, and we, and John, are about to go on the breakneck chase of our lives; T2 is breathtakingly lean, a film that (even in the director's cut that adds nearly forty minutes on), barely has an inch of fat on it-chase gives way to rescue, gives way to chase gives way to the trio hiding out in the Mexican desert. 

It's..breathless film-making. Until its taut denouement, there's not a single scene wasted in the entire picture, and every action scene is so methodical, so perfectly placed and paced, whether it be by Cameron's hand and his cinematic perfectionism, or by the performance of his entire crew, that the film feels effortless, a nigh-incomparable piece of perfect film-making in which not a moment is wasted, in which our heroes are developed as much through action as through dialogue, and where its key themes of heroes, technology, and heart are perfectly balanced through sublime setpieces-by the time we reach that final battle, the film has stormed its way back from Mexico to a heist, with Miles Dyson in tow, to liberate Cyberdine of their Terminator parts and stop them creating Skynet, before a breakneck chase into the steelmill that forms the setting for the ending leaves our heroes bloodied and bruised, needing all their wits to defeat their adversary.

T2's master-stroke, though, is in its villain. Initial ideas for T2 had two identical Terminators fighting each other, one gaining his "heart" through protecting John and his mother, and opposing his mirror image, but co-writer William Wisher (responsible for writing the first-half of the film, nixes the idea (it inevitably turned up, of course, in Terminator Genisys, the nadir of the series), as well as a super-Terminator (this idea making it into the sequel-via-ride, T2-3D: Battle Across Time), and the duo eventually settle on an unused idea from The Terminator, of the villain being partly liquid, and able to change appearance. Enter, thus, Robert Patrick, as the T-1000, perhaps the greatest symbiosis of actor and special effect until Bill Nighy's turn as Davey Jones.

The T-1000, for its part, is one of the greatest villains of cinema for precisely diametrically opposed reasons for why Arnold is terrifying in The Terminator. Arnold stands out-Patrick, in the garb and guise of a police officer for much of the film, at points blends into the background, and, quite obviously, in a California still reeling from the Rodney King beating, further adds a sense of the police being alien, untrustworthy, and the T-1000 able to escape suspicion by masquerading as a figure in a position of power. People have, over the last thirty years added many readings to the T-1000, from it representing the decline of American industry in the face of an ever-more advanced Japan (again, something that comes into play in Terminator Genisys, with Korean actor Lee Byung-hun playing a reimagined T-1000), to people becoming more heartless, detached from society and mechanical in modern America, to even the machine flouting gender-norms as it shifts from person to person.

It is also, simply put, one of the most perfectly chilling performances in cinema, the affable mask of the beat-cop slipping over time into a relentless, single purpose, to kill a boy because of the threat that he will one day pose to its creators. Patrick becomes masklike-being taught to be, in short, a machine, able to pull guns from holsters without looking, run without getting tired, able to go entire sequences without blinking. His tireless hunt for John is merciless, efficient, and against the antiquated Terminator That this performance is essentially shared between several actors (and of course, the still superb special effects of ILM allowing the T-1000 to morph between forms), make it a superb foil to the antiquated, but increasingly human, T-800, and its defeat at the end of the film is a bruising and gruelling affair.

Between these two characters, and their battle to protect John and Sarah, or exterminate them to complete the machines' victory, come John and Sarah themselves; Sarah, for her part, now becomes deuteroagonist behind Arnold, and a continuation of the tough action heroine Cameron had essentially pioneered in Aliens with Sigourney Weaver-instituionalised post the first film after trying to blow up Skynet's creators when John was young, and attempting to mould her son into the leader he is destined to become. For much of the first half of the film, between nightmarish premonitions of the doomsday to come-which are only seen in full as the film enters its masterful third act, together with jaw-dropping effects work-and visions of her dead lover-she is simply captive, waiting, seemingly inevitably for Judgement Day, and once she is eventually freed by her son and the T-800, she seems inevitably wrapped up with her revenge, becoming, not unlike the T-1000 itself, a killing machine, bent on preventing, rather than causing Judgement Day.

At the centre, though, of the biggest changes to the film, is John Connor; John is, practically speaking, night and day from Sarah-a resourceful smart, and snarky young man, who's introduced tinkering with bikes and hacking ATMS, only to be catapaulted into the war between the T-800 and T-1000 to protect or destroy him. Furlong for his part is a league away from the poor child acting of the late 1980s and early 90s, and, for his part, when playing John Connor the child, rather than Connor the war-leader in waiting, he's charming enough, the Gen-Xer with heart writ large into an enjoyable foil to his tough, almost neurotic mother and the growing humanity of their protector.

If The Terminator is a film about human's love for each other defeating terrifying mechanical forces from the future, T2 is a film about learning to be human, even in the case of the Terminator; we see the T-800 become positively human (something that Terminator Dark Fate would smartly update), and eventually finally become the father-figure than John desperately needs. For all that Sarah tries to do to make John the perfect war-leader, it is with the Terminator itself that John learns his humanity, his attachment to other humans (and, in the Director's Cut, the film jumps forward to show John as a Senator, on the battlefield of politics, rather than warfare). It's a fitting end, the film coming full circle with the Terminator sacrificing himself for peace, rather than being destroyed for it, as in the previous film, and it is loss we feel, rather than relief.

But if T2 is the peak of 1990s action cinema, it also feels, undeniably like a changing of the guard, the end of a veritable era of how cinema depicted its heroes. Films like The Fugitive (1993), Speed (1994) and Die Hard with a Vengeance would make fallible everymen their heroes, whilst Hong Kong's hyper-stylised form of the genre via John Woo, especially once he made his way to America, together with gadget-heavy films like Mission Impossible (1997), would leave the alpha-male action hero bereft of purpose in the disenfranchised years of the 1990s-they had no place here, and, frankly. they've never truly made a comeback since. Even Arnold and Sly, the very face of that style of hero, would have to change. Neither would have a good decade, as the Willises and Reeves and Cage and Van Dammes would take over the very medium they helped build, that of the blockbuster action movie.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day though, is more than simply a farewell to brawny, shotgun-toting arms. It is the yardstick, alongside Raiders of the Lost Ark and the original Matrix by which action movies are measured. It is an expansion, an improvement on every single aspect of the original, often by magnitudes which feel almost embarrassing to compare. It is a film that is, in almost every aspect in front and behind camera, perfect. It introduces cutting edge special effects, it sets Jim Cameron on a trajectory that makes him perhaps the single most innovate director of the last twenty years of the 20th Century. Above all, though, it set Arnold as, simply put, the most important, the biggest, and the most famous actor in cinema.

The moment would be fleeting; the rest of the decade would see his ambitions begin to stray outside of the world of cinema, as his film appearances opened to lesser and lesser returns. He would, throughout the decade, inevitably, be back-his ability to pick roles that matched his strengths tempered by his frustrations at type casting as he stepped into more comedic or dramatic roles, before a return to action at the end of the 90s. He'd be back, but never quite the same again. But, that future, in sunny Los Angeles, was yet unwritten as, worldwide, Arnolds glared out across cinema lobbies and from colossal billboards and from the front of cereal, fast food, t-shirts, and a million different merchandising opportunities. For one summer, Arnold Schwarzenegger was, simply put, the man who carried action cinema on his broad shoulders. Hasta la vista, baby.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

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