3D isn’t finished yet: James Cameron has supervised a new version of his smash-hit 1991 sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and watching in immersive 3D is a possible new way of getting excited about the technical effects that were state-of-the-art at the time.
The situation is one narrative step forward from where we left the first movie. John Connor (Edward Furlong) is a kid but he is destined to be the grownup leader of the resistance to the machines’ post-nuclear tyranny. (As with all time-travel movies, you have to disregard the breakdown in logic: if we know he grows up, then how can any plan to kill him work?)
Linda Hamilton plays his mother Sarah Connor (a name that no one can see in print without hearing it in Arnie’s thick Austrian-American accent), who is confined to a psychiatric hospital because no one believes what she has to say about humanity’s future. Two cyborgs are sent from the future. The bad T-1000 cyborg, with the quicksilver power to change shape, intends to kill John and is played with a directional ferocity by Robert Patrick. And now Arnold plays a good cyborg, sent by the resistance to protect John.
It is a really exciting, well-made sci-fi picture, but I can’t help feeling that this is one of the least needed sequels and franchises in movie history. The first Terminator was such a classic, its ending so disturbing, so magnificent, so nightmarish and definitive. Bringing back Arnie – and as a good-guy – is sort of beside the point. But T2 is still a very stylish film.
