CAMERON ROUNDTABLE: TRUE LIES

The Cameron Roundtable continues today with our discussion of True Lies. It's an interesting film and ties into this sites ongoing Bondathon series. As always on Cameron Roundtable, we're joined by Max O'Connell of The Film Temple.

Loren Greenblatt: We just finished James Cameron’s James Bond movie. I get the feeling that he was a little worn out after Terminator 2.

Max O’Connell: Well T2 was sort of a wrap-up of all of the themes he explored throughout the 80s, and he handled it better than most of them (better than any, in terms of the nuclear material), so it’s understandable to see him go lightweight in terms of plot. He was also working on the Spider-Man movie that he ended up never making because he didn’t think the technology was up to speed. By the way…he wanted Michael Biehn to play Spider-Man, which I don’t think would have worked at all.

LG: Maybe for an older Peter Parker going for his doctorate…

MO: And at the same time he wrote Strange Days for Kathryn Bigelow, by this point his ex-wife who I think he has a healthy relationship with.

LG: But he basically made a Bond film, and a very good one, to a degree. It’s a remake of a French movie called La Totale!, which neither of us has seen unfortunately. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Harry Tasker, a superspy in the 007 mold, he goes around doing spy stuff, but he’s also married to Helen, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, who knows nothing about his job. Also, he has Tom Arnold playing this really annoying partner…

MO: A comic-relief character who isn’t funny at all.

LG: And it’s not a bad premise for a film. He lies to his wife about his job (she thinks he’s a computer salesman), and then he realizes his wife was lying to him about something.

MO: It’s True Lies…a title that makes absolutely no sense.

LG: Just like most Bond films-perfect!. The opening sequence is fantastic: Arnold does everything James Bond ever did in a movie. There’s a gag ripped directly from Goldfinger, where he comes out of the water (hey, a trope!) in a wetsuit  and walks into a high class party in a tuxedo. There’s a number of other Bond-gags: witty banter, there’s an evil Bond girl he dances with that contrasts his wife, he fights with attack dogs, he escapes on a snowmobile…what kind of party has snowmobile guards by the way?

MO: What kind of parties are you going to?

LG: Well I’m not very popular I guess. But it culminates it a great chase where he skis down a mountain into a getaway car. At this point we already know James Cameron does action scenes better than anyone not named Spielberg. It honestly outdoes most of the Bond films, and part of the reason the film was a hit was the fact that we hadn’t had a Bond film in a long time. The series had stalled.

MO: Timothy Dalton wasn't the most popular Bond at the box office.

LG: Plus there where legal disputes. Anyway, there hadn’t been a Bond film in five years and True Lies filled the gap very nicely, and it spoofs both James Bond films, Arnold’s action persona and 80s action movies in general.

MO: Here’s the thing with Arnold: he is not a normal person. He’s a big man, he’s got that thick Austrian accent, and he needs to find roles that fit with his larger-than-life persona. A lot of his best movies play with the fact that he’s not normal: the first Terminator and Conan the Barbarian turn him into a hulking monster. Commando turns him into this ridiculous super-soldier that’s basically Rambo with a sense of humor and less self-important jingoism. Terminator 2 was released after Arnold was a big goofy action star, so he becomes more likable and funnier. Total Recall plays with the idea that he’s not a normal person by sticking him in the real world, having him stick out like a sore thumb, and then telling us that he’s really a super-spy, which really helps that film.

LG: Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the most meta actors in Hollywood. It’s not just that a lot of his films are similar: he actively tries to work in references to his previous films. When he and Tom Arnold go into the superspy headquarters, we get a much better version of the X-ray vision from Total Recall.

MO: Well, the special effects are better because it’s four years later and this tops Terminator 2 as the most expensive movie ever made, around $102 million.

LG: The man has expensive tastes.

MO: Well, for Cameron’s process, it’s not a matter of “play around till we get what’s right for the film”. What he sees in his head is what is going to show up on the screen, and it doesn’t matter how much time it takes. He’s going to get it. It can make him difficult to work with (see: The Abyss, Titanic), but he makes some of the most striking action sequences ever. Pound for pound, True Lies almost tops Terminator 2 when it comes to eye-popping action sequences.

LG: In terms of visceral action beats, True Lies is a one-stop shop. But it’s a much lighter film, and ultimately, as fun as the action scenes are (and they really are a blast), they’re not as satisfying as something like Terminator 2, which had much stronger, relatable characters.

MO: Right. At the end of this film, Schwarzenegger and Curtis’ daughter is brought back after being taken hostage by the terrorists. We have not seen her for about an hour, maybe longer. She’s hostile towards her father, and that’s her character. Eliza Dushku plays it just fine, but she has no chance to make an impression.

LG: And to be fair, many years later she was excellent in Joss Whedon’s show Dollhouse, but she has very little to do here.

MO: The emotional undercurrent is missing here. Arnold and Jamie Lee Curtis have a surprising amount of chemistry in this film, but it’s pushed to the side. The first third of the film barely shows them together. The second third of the film is a catastrophe. The last third shows them together, and it makes me wish that that section was extended to a feature length film. We get to see her get used to him being a superspy, and she comes into her own as a strong female character. Jamie Lee Curtis is a fantastic actress with great comedic chops, and she showed this in earlier movies like Trading Places and especially A Fish Called Wanda. She’s very funny in a lot of this…

LG: Even in the worst scenes, she finds something to work with.

MO: She’s quite good, but as appealing as they are together, there’s not much emotion in their relationship.

LG: We should mention that Schwarzenegger is the light of this film.

MO: He’s great.

LG: He’s very funny, he’s very relatable. A lot of people knock his acting range, but he’s better than people give him credit.

MO: The man can do comedy. He can do comedy like no one gives him credit. It’s unfortunate that most of his straight comedies (Kindergarten Cop, Junior, Jingle All the Way) are unfathomably awful, because he’s a great comedic presence. This film doesn’t just give him great one-liners (“here’s my invitation”, “you’re fired”). The way it lets him look at the camera, give a sarcastic line to the villains, have great chemistry with the evil Bond girl (played very well by Tia Carrere). Cameron and Schwarzenegger have a gift for comedy.

LG: I love Charlton Heston’s cameo as basically Nick Fury. He’s got the eye-patch and scars, and he’s the head of a superspy organization.

MO: The comedy and action are very strong, but the film has a lot of problems, not the least of which is that it’s less intellectually exploratory than his other films.

LG: The film gets into a battle of the sexes when Arnold realizes his wife is lying to him.

MO: In the second act, he learns his wife is possibly having an affair with Bill Paxton, a sleazy used car salesman posing as a spy.

LG: I do find it interesting that she lies to him with cover stories, just like him. It’s the essential metaphor of the film.

MO: Yeah, which could be interesting, but they don’t do enough with that. The thing is that the entire middle section is painfully misogynistic and mean-spirited. It’s nasty and it’s not funny. It’s not funny at all. I found it depressing. Every time I watch the film, I feel my grade dropping when it hits the middle section.

LG: I don’t actively hate that section as much as you do, but it’s not good at all, and it drags the film down, every time Tom Arnold opens his mouth…

MO: He’s terrible.

LG: He calls all women “bitches”…

MO: I’ll actually rephrase that: he has comic timing, but his presence, his delivery, and his material is painfully unfunny.

LG: He’s very concerned with the sexual awakening of Schwarzenegger’s young teenage daughter in a very creepy way. He has a whole monologue about it. It’s clearly a subject he’s put a lot of thought into.

MO: Also, it’s worth noting that Cameron, at this point, is dating Linda Hamilton, so as far as we know he’s happy. Tom Arnold had just divorced Roseanne, and he puts in an anecdote from real life where “the sick bitch even took the ice cube trays”, which is not just unfunny, but it’s nasty towards women.

LG: Every time he opens his mouth, he says something terrible.

MO: “Women: can’t live with ‘em, can’t kill ‘em”.

LG: We could go through a list here, but who has the time?

MO: And he’s not the only sexist character. Bill Paxton’s character is supposed to be, but it’s in the most tiresome way.

LG: Paxton is the sleaziest lothario ever. He’s a cartoonishly evil car salesman…to an irritating extreme.

MO: He describes Jamie Lee Curtis as having “a pair of titties that make you scream for buttermilk and an ass like a ten-year-old boy”.

We’ll let that sink in for a second....

MO: It’s supposed to be nasty, but it took me out of the movie completely. And it’s not the only awful bit in the second act. I lose sympathy for Schwarzenegger as the film goes on. We have to keep in mind that this was made pre-PATRIOT Act, but the way he follows Curtis around is just awful. This premise would have been rejected by audiences on the spot today.

LG: As evidenced by the flop of a very similar film earlier this year This Means War. Movies like True Lies feel very transitional, it was a very different world, it’s post-Cold War, we’re looking for a new boogeyman, and Arab terrorists look like the big ones. But the film doesn’t treat them very seriously. Now to be fair, as ugly and stereotypical as the film’s depiction of Arabs are at times, the film’s main villain does have a legitimate beef with the West…

MO: Yeah, but it’s just thrown out in about a second.

LG: And quickly forgotten thereafter. He throws in one sentence in the middle of a speech, but he’s a psychotic Arab crazy man, so we're supposed to ignore it.

MO: And he’s not a bad actor…

LG: No, he’s good.

MO: And the film isn’t trying to be offensive, but Cameron clearly didn’t take that into consideration. There is a good Arab character on Arnold’s team, but his part is so small it barely registers. In Cameron’s defense, though, he decided not to do his planned sequel to True Lies after September 11, because, in his words, “terrorism isn’t funny anymore”.

LG: There’s also that weird section where Arnold hijacks the generically named spy-organization he works for to follow his wife. It’s easy to understand his anger, but the actions he takes are extremely immature, and he learns very little from it, it doesn’t add to his character…

MO: And the tone is all wrong. It’s supposed to be funny. Oh, and how about the parts where they practically torture Bill Paxton till he pisses his pants (this happens twice).

LG: Torture is hilarious! Well, there is a torture scene late in the film that is funny.

MO: But that’s in the last third of the film when the movie is good again when the action sequences start again. This includes an over-the-top one I like and you don’t involving an uzi falling down the stairs.

LG: It’s done in the most ridiculous way and it’s completely predictable.

MO: It’s done pretty cleverly.

LG: That gag goes a bit far for me. She drops an uzi, it spins in slow motion and shoots everyone but her even though she’s in the range of fire. I can forgive lapses in logic in film, but my brain couldn’t be turned off for it.

MO: That’s fair. Whereas I can overlook some of the questionable racial politics (very barely). You gotta love the balls it takes, even then, to attach a terrorist to a rocket, say “you’re fired”, and shoot him through a building into another helicopter full of terrorists.

LG: Today that image is a little queasy.

MO: Oh, it’s horrifying today.

LG: Put your brain into 1994 mode and you’ll be okay.

MO: Now, we have to talk about the striptease. Why don’t you talk a little bit about it so I can talk about why I hate it.

LG: There’s a scene right before the movie gets good again, Arnold realizes he’s been a terrible husband, and he wants to give his wife the excitement she’s been craving. She still doesn’t know he’s a spy or that he’s aware of her almost-affair with Paxton. He uses government resources to disguise himself, force her into a secret mission where she has to strip for a man in the shadows (really Arnold). It’s a good scene and she’s sexy in it.  the set-up is queasy, and the end is very ugly and creepy, but Jamie Lee Curtis is very funny in that scene.

MO:…she plays it about as well as anyone could. She has that moment during the striptease where she falls, which she really did but she played it off so well that Cameron kept it in. And she’s a very attractive woman, there’s no doubt about that. It’s not that the striptease itself isn’t sexy. Cameron directs it well: his use of shadows in that scene is fantastic. The context around it? Creepy and misogynistic.

LG: Yes.

MO: This kind of scene handled well can be both erotic and frightening, like a David Lynch film can do.

LG: I don’t think you need Lynch…

MO: Ok, but how about Paul Verhoeven, who would have made it so comically over-the-top and overtly satirical that it’d be hilarious.

LG: Over the top? Cameron pushes it pretty far…

MO: But it’s nasty and mean-spirited, like the rest of that section of the movie, and even when the film gets good again it never fully recovers.

LG: I agree with you on the context. But as a scene unto itself, it works.

MO: Maybe by itself, sure, but as part of a whole it doesn’t. It’s absolutely unjustified.

LG: It’s a very interesting shift for Cameron. His films up to this point all have some of the strongest female characters ever put on screen, and then he does this. We can understand Curtis’ actions, but she’s not a very strong woman for the vast majority of the movie.

MO: And it’s not like a fragile but resilient thing like Sarah Connor in the first Terminator.

LG: No, not at all. When she’s put in these male-dominant situations where she has little control, it’s an interesting shift from the lionesses of his previous work.

MO: You have to give this film credit for where it doesn’t go: it’s not a Michael Bay film. The action scenes are great. It’s not jingoistic, it’s not completely dunderheaded in its politics.

LG: It’s never Michael Bay-misogynistic.

MO: The sexism is pretty pervasive, but the women aren’t just guy-accessories, give Cameron that.

LG: Even though it doesn’t work, I think Cameron was trying to make a movie about a relationship that’s in a weird place and try to have the characters move past it. It’s handled badly, and it’s inadvertently sexist, but he’s trying to do something better than that. It's basically something Mr. & Mrs. Smith did much better.

MO: There is potential. Schwarzenegger and Curtis have a Cary Grant-Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest chemistry, but their relationship never quite gets there. At the end when Curtis becomes a spy and they tango, it’s great (all of the dance scenes in this movie are great), but it’s too little too late.

LG: Arnold did all of his own tangos!

MO: And they did most of their own stunts! That part where Arnold rescues Curtis by picking her up and she hangs from a helicopter? That was real.

LG: When the movie is doing action, it’s great. That scene with Arnold chasing the terrorist on a horse is about as ridiculous as it sounds, but it’s goofy fun and works as a spoof of the kind of films Arnold does when working with people other than Cameron and Verhoeven.

MO: It’s a great scene, and a lot of the film is terrific, but that middle section is really a movie-killer.

LG: When I think about the film, I always only remember the good parts and forget the middle. And then I see the film and I go “oh…”. I didn’t mind it the first time around, but the more I watch it, the more dire it is for me. I’m going to have to give the film a B- overall.

MO: I’m giving it a C+. The way I’ve always looked at it, B-/C+ mean essentially the same thing. They’re equally flawed. But B- films narrowly get my recommendation, whereas C+ films don’t quite cut it. I can’t recommend this film. The middle is too dire.

LG: It’s very dire and very irritating in the middle, but the action scenes are mesmerizing for fans of the genre. If you want to learn about action filmmaking, you owe it to yourself to see this.

Max’s Grade: C+

Loren’s Grade: B-

That's it for our discussion of True Lies. If you agree or disagree, feel free to post your comments bellow. You can like this blog on Facebook, and check out Max's blog, The Film Temple for even more awesome movie criticism.

Other Installments in the Cameron Roundtable series:
Xenogenesis 
Piranha II: The Spawning 
The Terminator
Aliens (Special Edition)
Reach
The Abyss (Special Edition)
Terminator 2: Judgement Day
True Lies
Titanic
Avatar (Extended Edition)
 

CAMERON ROUNDTABLE: TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY

If there’s one thing that Aliens proved, it’s that James Cameron knows how to do a sequel. But it's with Terminator 2 that Cameron first gets to follow up on his own material and knock it out of the park. As always on the Cameron Roundtable we are joined by Max O'Connell of The Film Temple.

Max O’Connell: Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Slightly obscure, but stay with us on this.

Loren Greenblatt: Yes, Cameron’s obscure avant-garde film.

MO: Oh, wait, we’re thinking of something else. This thing made $500 million, cost around $100 million, and was the most expensive film ever made at the time until…the next James Cameron film.

LG: It is technically an independent film, since he self-financed it. So when you think of independent film, think Terminator 2.

MO: I always do.

LG: It’s one of three occasions where Cameron made the most expensive movie ever made.

MO: Ten years after the events of the first film, it’s 1994, and Sarah Connor has had her child, John Connor, the future savior of humanity. Sarah is in a mental institution, as she tried to blow up Cyberdyne Systems, which made Skynet and the terminators. Her son is a punk living with foster parents, and two future people are sent back. They’re both terminators, but the Arnold Schwarzenegger model from the first one has been reprogrammed to protect John as a young boy, which is a nice twist. They play with him being the bad guy for a little while, at least. The other one, played by Robert Patrick, is an advanced prototype, the T-1000, who can morph his body into stabbing objects and shapeshift.

LG: It should be noted that a lot has gone on between the two films. Sarah had John and has spent the last ten years training him to be a killer and military leader. This meant her shacking up with people in Nicaragua and teaching him guerrilla warfare tactics. Eventually they were found by the authorities, she’s in a mental institution, and he’s disassociated from society. There’s a reason he’s a punk. He’s a criminal, he’s a hacker, he steals money, he has a record as a juvenile delinquent…he doesn’t give a fuck. That’s why John is cooler at ten than either of us will ever be.

MO: And he has a reason to be pissed off at the world: his mother is right, but she’s also mentally unbalanced.

LG: The world has convinced him she’s insane. It’s really traumatic: the world has convinced him to deny his own mother. It’s now John’s story more than it’s Sarah’s story. The first twenty minutes of the film has them chasing him before we find out Arnold is good.

MO: Before we get into the heavy stuff, I’d like to note that this is probably Cameron’s funniest movie.

LG: There’s a lot more humor in this film than his other movies.

Look at his funny face.

MO: The comedy is much more pronounced. It has that Schwarzenegger-movie thing from the 80s where there’s some acknowledgement of how ridiculous everything is, but it’s done better than just about any of his other movies.

LG: Cameron and Schwarzenegger play with the fact that the first film is so iconic. The opening has a scene where Schwarzenegger has to get his clothes, which was a quick sequence in the first film, but here it’s a drawn-out black comedy number. He’s butt naked in a biker bar, some people are checking him out (hey, it’s Arnold!), and he demands a biker’s clothes, boots, and bike. It’s an inherently funny situation, but it gets even funnier when a man stops him as he marches out and George Thurgood’s Bad to the Bone plays.

MO: And he could destroy a guy, but he just takes the sunglasses from him.

LG: His costume isn’t complete without them.

MO: There’s some great moments having to do with teaching him to be more human. John’s anti-authority bits are great…it’s a very funny movie.

LG: But there are 180 tonal shifts like in The Abyss, but Cameron handles them  better here. There's comedy, but that comedy gets brutally violent before the atmosphere lightens again with Bad to the Bone. Every scene with Sarah Connor is  grim. She’s no longer the scared girl from the first film. She’s basically female-Rambo. She’s in a mental institution, she’s buff now, Dr. Silbermann from the first film returns.

MO: I love Earl Boen in this role. He’s every jackass authority figure you ever met.

LG: I love the joke about her stabbing him in the knee with a pen in the past.

MO: Or when she breaks his arm, he complains, and she notes: “There’s 206 bones in the human body ­— that’s 1!”

LG: Cameron’s dialogue is perfectly delivered in this. He really nails the line between fun, goofy humor and dark cynicism. I’d love to talk about the political correctness in the humor as well: a lot of critics complained about the violence in the first film. Cameron gave a rebuke by having John order the Terminator to not kill anyone. He looks at the camera, does a Boy Scout hand-gesture, and says “I swear I will not kill anyone.” And he doesn’t…instead he shoots them in the kneecaps or spine.

MO: “HE’LL LIVE!”

LG: Which is probably cold comfort to the men he paralyzed. Now, Arnold was a great villain in the first film, where he symbolized 80s excess and technology coming to destroy society, but there’s an even better villain here. The T-1000 isn’t just a shapeshifter: he dons the guise of a police officer, which plays into Cameron’s pet themes of untrustworthy authority. In fact, all of the heroes are outlaws of sort.

MO: Perhaps a tie-in to Cameron's music video, Reach?

LG: No.

MO: I’m REACH-ing.

LG: I hate you. Anyway, John is exile from society- he wears a Public Enemy shirt (a literal but effective statement of his self-identification in addition to being a plug for a really good band). Arnold is dressed as a biker outlaw and looks identical to the infamous villain from the first film (who the authorities are still looking for). His mother is a mental patient and a domestic terrorist, it doesn’t matter that she’s right. The emphasis on Greek mythological Cassandra theme is easily quadrupled here. We get these terrible nightmares of her trying to warn people about a nuclear apocalypse but being unable to. Some terrifying sequences, some of the best Cameron ever did.

MO: And the cop can now blend into society. Robert Patrick looks much more normal and slender than Arnold, his line readings are less robotic, and he even seems friendly (in a creepy way) at times. Furthermore…this wasn’t intentional, but the film came shortly after the Rodney King incident, and that’s some nice timing there with a cop-villain.

LG: The film shot in the same area as the attack at around the same time, though that’s just a coincidence. Robert Patrick is fantastic here. He’s not another muscleman. He’s a very slight and birdlike man who doesn’t look like he could best Arnold in a fight, but that contrast makes him more menacing.

MO: Meanwhile, Arnold is very familiar to audiences at this point. He’s a very likable, goofy action star. Making him more likable  plays to his strengths. He’s always been a very gifted comedic presence, so giving him more to work with there is a nice contrast.

LG: He plays with his image a lot, but while he’s goofier, he’s not impotent. He’s still a dangerous machine. Cameron doesn’t go too far into making him silly the way the James Cameron-less Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines did.

MO: And Hamilton is great in this role. She’s always been great in this role. This is the one role she’s really known for other than the 80s Beauty and the Beast show with her and Ron Perlman, but this has surpassed it. She’s more unhinged in this, though. She’s less human and more of a human terminator, almost out of necessity. She’s less feminine than Ripley was in Aliens. She almost rejects her motherhood because she has to.

LG: I disagree there. Almost every decision she’s made in her life since the first movie is based on her need to protect her son and prepare him for his destiny. She sacrificed her whole life to be a better mother. I understand the femininity point, but she’s possibly the strongest mother character in Cameron's filmography.

MO: I see what you mean. What I’m saying is that she’s actively trying to be less connected to humanity and to not care about other people because, in her words, “they’re already dead.” They’re all going to die, and they don’t matter. It’s a disconnect from humanity in order to save humanity. When she goes to kill Dyson, the man who’s about to design the terminators, she pushes herself to horrific degrees.

LG: It went from people telling her she was insane to her actually being insane. Society’s diagnosis of her is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is a huge formula shift in the second half of the film: it’s no longer a “let’s outrun this other terminator and try to kill it”. It’s now a mission to alter the future itself, which is way beyond the scope of the first film. Aliens, the last sequel he did, changed things up but kept a lot of the formula intact from the original film. This is more of a debate between predetermination and self-determination. Sarah tries to save the future, but her methods almost sacrifice her soul to do that. John stops her by showing moral superiority to her by trying to save the future without killing anyone. She did a good job of raising him and teaching what’s right even when she forgets it.

MO: Cameron played a lot with the possibility of nuclear holocaust in his filmography- it’s in The Terminator, it’s in the margins of Aliens, it’s in The Abyss. This is his final word on the subject- it’s not his last film with nuclear elements, but True Lies takes it less seriously. It’s done much better here than he did it in his previous film, particularly in the material dealing with Sarah’s nightmares. It starts off with one of the greatest opening credit sequences of all time.

Pictured: Awesomeness

 LG: There’s this wall of flame image that’s just one of many powerful, iconic images (Cameron practically makes every image iconic here, he didn’t just settle for one).

MO: And there’s a playground on fire: a merry-go-round, a swing, and horse on fire.

LG: There’s four horses on fire, which feels like a Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse thing.

MO: And the context comes later when Sarah’s dream sequence starts: she walks through a field and looks into a playground where she sees people playing with her children, including herself playing with a baby John. Mother Sarah is wearing the same waitress uniform she wore in the first film…

LG: …which is funny, considering that she was so bad at that waitress job that you’d assume she’s have been fired.

                                                                                                                                   

MO: Cameron uses Hamilton’s twin sister in that shot rather than using opticals or something else. Judgment Day starts, and everyone is overcome with nuclear fire and their bodies crumble into ash.

LG: It’s a very powerful scene, and I’ve read interviews with people who have been involved with nuclear testing, who attest to how accurate this depiction is. Let’s talk a little more about the T-1000: it’s a great use of early CGI technology. People complain that CGI has ruined blockbuster cinema. I’ve never gone that far: it’s not the technology, it’s lack of imagination. The T-1000 is one of the most imaginative creations of the cinema and could have only worked with CGI.

MO: Stop-motion wouldn’t have cut it, and bear in mind that I love stop-motion.

LG: It would have looked cheesy. Cameron uses it to help tell the story, and it’s an amazing character made more effective with technology. It’s not that T-1000 is an unstoppable killing machine, like Ah-nold model he too is governed by rules. When you shoot him, the bullet hole regenerates, and he’s fine. You’d think it’d be a futile enterprise to shoot him at all, but if you look closely, the T-1000 can’t operate if he’s been shot up too much, and if he does want to regenerate he has to stop whatever he’s doing. It’s not a stated rule, it’s something Cameron leaves the audience to realize themselves.

MO: Cameron has always been very good at showing how technology is limited, even at its most advanced. He does this well also by showing how bullets are limited. It’s best shown where Sarah is badly injured and is trying to shoot the T-1000 into the molten steel, where he’d melt…but she’s one bullet short.

LG: Cameron turns the bullet-thing into an excuse to keep other characters active. John is the protagonist, but he’s a kid, so how do you keep him active? Have him reload the guns! If this were a normal film where guns have unlimited bullets, John would be sitting there, cowering under the seat. Cameron uses limitations as a way to keep all of the characters active.

MO: This film is very action-packed, though. It’s basically the gold-standard for action movies in the 90s, alongside Raiders of the Lost Ark for the 80s and, say, The Dark Knight for the 2000s.

LG: There’s something like five major action sequences in the first twenty-five minutes of the film. It’s wall-to-wall action, but the plot never stops to get the action in. The climactic action scene is an assault of Cyberdyne Systems to prevent Skynet from being made. It’s a classic example of Cameron’s gimmicky action scenes. What I mean by gimmicks is this constant series of obstacles and challenges to keep the action more specific rather than generic and predictable. It’s very well thought-out. They have to get past the guard, get into the vault, find the key card, hack, blow through the wall. It’s like a heist film, but without all the planning. It’s very in the moment, and it keeps getting harder as Cameron finds more and more obstacles. They’re possibly in the clear, and then the police show up. How many police? All of them.

MO: It’s a nice that the police are all over the place in this one cause they kind of disappear in the first one.

LG: And just when you think they’re out of that situation the T-1000 shows up and makes it that much more frightening, which leads to a thrilling helicopter-truck chase. What I love about the Terminator films, even the lesser ones, is that there’s never a Ferrari or something for the heroes to escape in. They get stuck with these ungainly, underpowered vehicles…

MO: The worst trucks in the world.

LG: And the villain gets a helicopter.

MO: I want to go back to the Cyberdyne thing. It’s maybe an even better depiction of untrustworthy authority: they know Sarah isn’t completely insane. They have the arm and the computer chip of the Terminator of the first film.

LG: The first film wasn’t left open for a sequel the way you might think, but Cameron does a great job of reverse-engineering it. There are scientists who have these materials and are working on creating the machines. They’re led by Miles Dyson, a computer scientist. First of all, I want to say “way to go!” to Cameron for having an upper-class black family in an early-90s action movie, since Miles and his family are black. Joe Morton is very good in this role, and when he realizes what he’s doing, he immediately tries to rectify it. Sadly, he doesn’t get a lot of screen time, but he’s very memorable. His facing this conundrum when he realizes what these things he’s been working on really are is one of the more interesting segments of the film.

MO: It’s interesting, since the Terminator films are, to some extent, technophobic, but they’re not blaming the guys who created it for everything. Cyberdyne is a conglomerate with heavy control like Weyland-Yutani in Aliens. After all, they covered up the chip and arm thing. But Dyson is some really intelligent guy they hired, and when he realizes what he’s doing, he doesn’t hesitate. He immediately says “I’m not going to do this anymore.” He’s a very decent man who wanted the best for his family, and in the end he’s still that. Now Cameron has always been a big Spielberg and Lucas fan- he has the same sense of kineticism- and you can still see the George Miller influences in the car chases, but I’ve always seen this film as a “fuck you” to Die Hard. That movie was wall-to-wall action combined with great characters and a fun plot, but it was deemed the ultimate summer action movie. With this, it’s like James Cameron watched Die Hard and said “I’ll fucking show you!”.

LG: Well the Cyberdyne assault is sort of a Die Hard sequence.

MO: And these action sequences are as tactile and bloody as Cameron ever did them. Aliens is my favorite Cameron film because it’s his densest and most thematically rich, but this has his best action sequences.

LG: And this was made in the early-90s, when PG-13 was still new and it was still possible to make an expensive R-rated movie and have it be a hit. In fact, the film was the biggest hit of 1991. It still happens every now and then these days, but it’s mostly unheard of for an R film to be really successful. It’s not that T2 is better because it’s R-rated, it’s just that the rating suits the material better. This is dark, apocalyptic material, and it’s actually trying to say something, and pulling punches in terms of content would be a disservice to the film.

MO: And you get that a lot with Terminator Salvation, which WAS PG-13 and was terrible, and you can tell it was engineered to be PG-13 and appeal to the widest audience possible.

LG: That film has moment’s where it could have been weighty, but they wanted to sell toys. It wouldn’t be off-topic to talk about where the franchise went after Cameron left. Cameron toyed with the idea of making Terminator 3 for years before deciding to do other things. The actual Terminator 3 came out in 2003 and basically turned out to be a lackluster version of Terminator 2. It follows the formula very closely but didn’t find a villain that was as iconic as the Terminator or the T-1000. The villain in the first film is an outlaw, the second film has a cop. Cameron was picking archetypes that we weren’t comfortable with in society in their respective times. The villain in the third film didn’t really do anything.

MO: She looks like a model.

LG: Maybe it’s mining men’s discomfort with women?

MO: It doesn’t really do that.

LG: No, not really. It’s basically a lazy version of Terminator 2.

MO: And it really hits the wrong balance with the jokiness. It’s way too broad.

LG: Terminator Salvation is like the fanboy version, everyone wanted to see the future war stuff. But it essentially turned into the story of how John Connor got that scar that one time.

To be fair, it is a bitching scar.

MO: The third one, by itself, is a perfectly passable summer blockbuster.

LG: It’s not bad…

MO: It’s just thoroughly generic, and it’s too jokey, and there’s too much fan service. And while Nick Stahl isn’t a bad actor (and we’re glad to hear that, after he went missing recently, he’s OK and in rehab) he’s not John Connor. Edward Furlong might actually be a less talented actor than Stahl, but Cameron got a really strong performance out of him, and he was right for the part. There aren’t really any other interesting characters either. Claire Danes is a terrific actress, but she’s kind of a bore there.

LG: And the fourth installment really threw into focus how not-terrible the third one was…

MO: …because it IS terrible…

LG: Absolutely. It went the other way, where it had no humor and no fun, and it tried to be very grim in a PG-13 film, but it didn’t earn any of the grimness it was going for.

MO: Having Christian Bale play up the glum factor brought it down even more…plus you’ve got Sam Worthington, who I’m sure we’ll get into come Avatar…

LG: We will talk about the strange career of Sam Worthington and why we’re worried about him.

MO: He needs some sleep, man. Back to Cameron: he’s had plenty of influences throughout his career from Spielberg to Lucas to Kubrick, but I always felt that his most pronounced influence, even though there’s great differences between them, is Ridley Scott.

LG: I can see that.

MO: Terminator 2 is, in a way, his Blade Runner, because he’s asking what makes us human. That brings us to the humanizing elements.

LG: Arnold comes back to protect John, but he can’t blend in. He’s a Terminator, for god’s sake. John sets about turning him into a more human, socially acceptable person. It brings in this empathy that was important in the first film. But it’s not just blending in. There’s great scene where he teaches the Terminator how to swear and do high fives and thumbs up, and he gives him this great line, “Hasta la vista, baby”, which became more or less the catch-phrase for Arnold, even more than “I’ll Be Back”. We still say that.

MO: I still say that.

LG: Me too, but people look at me funny because it’s been twenty-one years (this film can now drink!). Oh, brief note: I love that the film continues the hard-edged blue look Cameron had in The Abyss.

MO: That is great. Now, we chose to watch the theatrical version, which I think is stronger, but there’s one absolutely crucial scene in the Special Edition that should have been included.

LG: It’s crucial to the humanizing element, and it’s crucial towards John’s journey towards adulthood. They need to reset his chip to make him more human, since he’s in “read only” mode, and in order to do it they need to shut him down. While this happens, Sarah tries to destroy the chip and kill him. There’s an argument, and eventually John wins. He overcomes his domineering mother and he starts becoming the leader he needs to be. It’s very important, it shows his empathy, and it’s a pivot the movie turns on. For some reason it was streamlined in a much less memorable scene in the theatrical cut.

MO: Why don’t we talk about a few other changes in the Special Edition, some of which you like better than I do. We both agree that Michael Biehn’s appearance in Sarah’s dream is terrible.

LG: The chip sequence is why I usually prefer the other version, but Biehn’s cameo is cheesy and it feels like bad fan-fiction.

MO: It’s not as bad as the thankfully discarded ending (which doesn’t show up in either version) where, years later, Sarah shows up in the worst old-woman make-up I’ve ever seen and basically says “Judgment Day was averted!”.

LG: It would have been worse than the ending of The Abyss. But we instead get a much more effective ending, where we get this highway image that ties together what these movies are all about and closes out the series well. Which is why, even if Cameron had stayed on, the series should have ended here. They’re very self-contained and the second film ends the journey well.

MO: The third one makes everything that happened in the second film totally unnecessary.

LG: Well yes. The whole thematic arc of the second film is that the future is not predetermined and we can change.

MO: The third one is more or less “nope!”

LG: If we have no control over our lives, Judgment Day is inevitable, we’re all just sheep. It’s a very sad and depressing philosophy that the third film has. As dark as Cameron can be, he introduces optimism in the form of humanity’s ability to overcome obstacles and change the world for the better. It’s a theme we’ll see throughout his work, even in the much-maligned Avatar, which is about a technological force being overcome by a humanistic force. He’s pessimistic about technology, but less so about humanity.

MO: Which ties into how the Terminator is humanized. He grows a more self-aware sense of humor (his smirks to John are great). As the film progresses, he goes from not understanding what crying is to protecting John not just because it’s his mission, but because he has genuine concern over John. He’s about as heartbroken as a killing machine can be.

LG: He even learns to smile in a Special Edition scene that I like and you don’t.

MO: Oh no, I like the “smile” sequence, I just think it’s too broad. It’s a great deleted scene.

LG: One of the reasons True Lies doesn’t work as well is because Terminator 2 is such a culmination of everything Cameron was working on that he really needed to refill his batteries. That’s what True Lies is. He’s not working as hard. He’s less ambitious.

MO: Well, that’s not my problem with True Lies. We’ll get into that.

LG: There’s also a sequence I like in the Special Edition about the T-1000 malfunctioning in the climax after he was frozen. There’s a few tiny beats that show his body blending into the surroundings as he can’t control his shapeshifting anymore. It goes a bit far, but it shows that their effort to dent this thing is finally working.

MO: Here’s the reason I think it doesn’t work: it’s all building to the moment where he turns into Sarah Connor in a very impressive shot that uses Hamilton’s twin as a double again. Sarah is badly wounded and she calls John, he goes to meet her, and the other one comes around and yells “get out of the way John”, and we realize the weakened Sarah was really the T-1000. It’s a great moment. In the Special Edition, there’s an extra shot where John looks at T-1000/Sarah’s feet, which have melded into the metal grate. The reason I don’t like this shot is because it’s a stronger choice to have him trust what his mother is like to make a decision rather than rely on a technological fuck-up.

LG: That iteration doesn’t work, I agree, but the initial one where his hand fuses with a hand-rail is great.

MO: It works well, but without it building to anything it ultimately wouldn’t work, so it’s better without it.

LG: It’s too much.

MO: I like the idea, I agree, but it doesn’t work.

LG: He overplays it.

MO: You could also argue that Cameron overplays an earlier scene where two kids playing with toy guns yell “I got you!” to each other, and they comment on how it’s human nature to destroy ourselves. It doesn’t bother me so much.

LG: It threatens to be too preachy.

MO: It’s a little heavy-handed, but it’s not so terrible.

LG: It’s an extremely strong film no matter which version you see. Having watched the theatrical cut, I’m willing to give that, yes, chip scene aside, it’s the stronger version. But you really can’t go wrong. This is one of the greatest, deepest action movies you’ll ever see. It’s kinetic, it’s never boring, and it’s cool. No matter how dark it gets, it’s really a lot of fun. Theatrical cut gets an A from me…I guess the extended gets a slight A-, though there’s very good reasons to watch it.

MO: Agreed on both counts. It’s like Aliens, where my ideal cut doesn’t exist, but it’s one of his two best films, and it’s absolutely essential any which way you have it. And apologies to Aliens, my favorite Cameron film, to The Abyss, which sees him exploring more emotional heights, and to Titanic, the ladies’ favorite: Terminator 2 features the single most emotional moment in any of Cameron’s films. SPOILERS AHEAD: They melt the T-1000 in molten steel along with the old Terminator’s arm and chip, and they note that Judgment Day has been averted. But the now torn-up, battered Arnold says “No, there’s one more chip, and it must be destroyed”.

LG: And he’s right! As difficult as the moment is, he’s right. It’s a moment a lesser director would not have though of.

MO: This is Cameron’s version of the “Tears in the rain” scene in Blade Runner, where he realizes the value of humanity and cares too much to let them die.

LG: It’s also a bit of an Old Yeller moment. But if Old Yeller was your dad/big brother… so it’s 100 times worse.

MO: It’s so heartbreaking. If anyone ever asks me what the most emotional scene in an action movie is, I’m just going to give them a thumbs up.

Loren's Grade: A
Max'x Grade: A


That's our thoughts on Terminator 2. Obviously we really liked it. If you agree or disagree, you can post your own opinions in the comment section below, and check back soon for reviews of Cameron's other films as well as further entries in our Bondathon series and even some reviews of new films. In the mean time check out our Facebook page here, and check out our sister site The Film Temple where Max has just posted a review of David Lynch's classic, Eraserhead.

Other Installments in the Cameron Roundtable series:
Xenogenesis 
Piranha II: The Spawning 
The Terminator
Aliens (Special Edition)
Reach
The Abyss (Special Edition)
Terminator 2: Judgement Day
True Lies
Titanic
Avatar (Extended Edition)