Science Fiction #8 - Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)

Terminator 2, in case you don't know, is the James Cameron sequel to The Terminator, about the future and time travel and indestructible robots and stuff. I've never seen it, but I'm sure it's lovely. Terminator 2 is also about time travel and indestructible robots, this time even more indestructible, and has more explosions than ever before. In the future, you see, there's a super computer network called Skynet that's out to destroy the human race, because that's what supercomputers do. There are also nigh indestructible robots who look like people. One of these robots is Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Obviously.

He's evil in the first movie, but not in the second one, which is good, because I really can't imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger as evil. This is probably because I've never seen The Terminator, but there's just nothing threatening about Arnold Schwarzenegger. He's kind of awesome and ridiculous at the same time. There really isn't anything better than watching Arnold Schwarzenegger stoically riding a motorcycle with a gun, which is good, because that happens a lot in this movie.

A lot.

I suppose I generally liked this movie. I already like it a lot more than I did after I first watched it. It's definitely growing on me. The Young John Connor in it is annoying, and not really a good actor, and Sarah Connor is crazy, which gets tedious, but Arnold Schwarzenegger was pretty awesome, and the action was pretty cool. I suppose I'm at a disadvantage because I've never seen The Terminator. I don't have the background knowledge from the first movie, so I don't know why it's to the machines' advantage t destroy all the humans, or why, of all things, this robot has an Austrian accent. We hear him mimic people's voices in the movie, so why is his default voice Austrian? Beyond simply "Why not," I mean.

The effects in this are really quite awesome. There's this whole big thing with liquid metal and melting and morphing and all that jazz, and it requires these crazy CGI effects that no one had ever used before. It was way ahead of anything anyone had ever done at the time, and it looked amazing then, and still looks good today. Well, not good, actually. More along the lines of....bad. But not really bad! Just sort of bad, some of the time. It doesn't ruin your suspended since of disbelief, and it looks awesome, so it does its job still. The whole end is really cool. The end is the best part, some of the best action scenes I've ever seen. There's that terrible crazy morphing melting molting robot thing, and two Sarah Connors, which was not, by the way, accomplished through computer techniques but by using Linda Hamilton's twin sister, Leslie Hamilton, and The Terminator's thumbs up at the end, which was pretty awesome, I must say.

In conclusion: Terminator 2: Nice movie. Kind of boring if you're not into action (Note: I am not into action), but has really good action scenes and more explosions than you can throw a dead cat at. Or something like that. Nice little commentary about how we should never invent artificial intelligence ever (EVER), good story, follows its own continuity, serious/often humorous science fiction movie, unfortunately made in the 90s, which cannot be helped. Amazing special effects which undoubtedly earned it its spot on the list. I'd watch it again.

As I side note, did you know that "Schwarzenegger" is in the Blogger spell check dictionary? I bet you didn't.