Terminator (1984) & Terminator 2 (1991) - Quick Thoughts
This is a format I'm trying where I get out relatively incomplete thoughts on a topic I may or may not explore more later
Spoilers for 2 30+ year old movies I guess?
In the last few weeks, I've seen Terminator and Terminator 2 in the cinema, two films I haven't seen in the better part of a decade. The last time I saw either was actually also at a cinema, as part of a 6-movie Arnie All-Nighter at the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square. Fun symmetry! Though this duo was were the finale of the 12 hour screening, so I wasn't watching under ideal circumstances back then. That said, these are both films I saw multiple time long before I was supposed to, as a childhood Arnie superfan.
Watching them again recently, with the benefit of an extra 10 years of experience, I had a few thoughts.
- Terminator really holds up. I felt this last time too tbf, and the sleep deprivation may have heightened this. It's a supremely focused film, super intense, and imo entirely un-Hollywood in its presentation. It's weird, the audio design is grating, and it just doesn't let up. A real triumph, I truly wish James Cameron did more work on this scale.
- One of the only Narratively Necessary Sex Scenes in cinematic history, fair play Jim.
- I love how the first half of T2 mirrors the overall arc of T1 - the truck chase with a firey conclusion, the terminator walking out of the flames (bloopy metal this time, ooo), the climactic escape wherein the terminator loses a hand (temporarily? ohhhh), and the escape to the Mexican border - with the kind of questionable-in-the-sequel Sarah Conner voiceovers - before it's ruined and they have to go back and perform an act of domestic terrorism. It's T2 now baby, T1 is over both literally and narratively. Then the film climaxes with a truck chase and the opposite of a fireball.
- The scene where Sarah can't kill Dyson really caught me off guard - it never really clicked for me before that she's stopping because she sees herself as a terminator in that moment, killing a man to get the future she wants. That John comes in and immediately goes to her side, and they're not angry at each other - they're on the same page, they know what they're going to do and trust each other to do it. I feel like this scene is the heart of the whole thing, in a way I never appreciated before - it was always kind of a road-bump in the pacing to me.
- The whole foundry sequence fucking rules, just extremely good cathartic story telling. The audio design is beautifully awful here.
- It's such a tragedy that they made more movies after this. Hell, I'd say that T2 was a massive roll of the dice - the first film leaves the door open somewhat but it was a hard act to follow. They kind of nailed it with T2 but they also nailed the door shut for a sequel imo. T3's hand wavey "nah you just delayed it lol" feels honestly fair given what we know about technologists and the US military, but I still feel let down by the film even if I enjoy it a reasonable amount, and what came after was borderline unwatchable. The story was so sewn up. Speaking of...
- I really liked the kind of misplaced optimism of the ending of T2. The apocolypse has been solved, and that outweighs any bad results, but also John's life is gonna suuuuuuuuck. I honestly can't even recall how they handwave that away in the sequel, gonna assume "false identity" and move on like they probably did.