From rec.arts.sf-reviews Tue Jul 9 09:58:27 1991 Path: herkules.sssab.se!isy!liuida!sunic!mcsun!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!know!stroke.princeton.edu From: sksircar@stroke.princeton.edu (Subrata Sircar) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf-reviews Subject: REVIEW: TERMINATOR 2: Judgement Day Keywords: author=Sircar, forgot to crosspost Message-ID: <30757@know.pws.bull.com> Date: 3 Jul 91 20:06:52 GMT References: <1991Jul2.202912.3330@cbnewsj.cb.att.com> Sender: wex@pws.bulL.com Reply-To: sksircar@stroke.princeton.edu Followup-To: rec.arts.sf-lovers Organization: SPAMIT Lines: 81 Approved: wex@pws.bull.com Nntp-Posting-Host: stroke.princeton.edu TERMINATOR 2: Judgement Day A film review by Subrata K. Sircar Copyright (c) 1991 Subrata K. Sircar Quick Take: SEE THIS MOVIE! NOW! WOW! GREAT! Capsule Review: Arnold Schwarznegger returns to modern-day LA from 2029 as a Terminator assigned to protect John Conner against another Terminator with advanced mimetic powers. Linda Hamilton turns in an excellent performance, but the actors play second fiddle to awesome special effects. Rating: 8+ [1 to 10 scale]. Spoilers: Wow. See this movie. Arnie is back as a Terminator, only this time he's a generation behind in technology. The new T-1000 series Terminators are made of mimetic metal, and can take on any form with the same mass, able to form any solid metal object. The new Terminator takes out a police officer and assumes his form to hunt John Conner, while Arnie appears nude near a biker bar. Some nasty mayhem later, he's got clothes, boots, a shotgun, a Harley and the all-important shades. The two machines find John at nearly the same time, and battle it out through the mall, several roads, and a few trucks, with Arnie finally saving John. In the last few years, things have not gone so well for Sarah Conner. She has been shacking up with anyone who could teach her and her son about combat and survival, and eventually went over the edge and attacked a computer factory. She's been locked up in a mental institution for a few years, while John Conner has been turning into a juvenile delinquent with foster parents. So of course, Terminator and John go to bust Sarah out, minutes ahead of the evil Terminator ... The movie also seems to be the last Terminator flick, as there was a good effort to wrap up all the loose ends from both movies. The first movie pointed out the alternate reason for sending a Terminator to the past the first time; his remains were needed for the cybernetic breakthrough which triggered Armageddon. This time, all remains of all three Terminators are incinerated, and the movie ends on a somewhat positive note, implying that the future the Terminators came from is no longer inevitable. Overall, this movie was just as good as the original, which is an amazing accomplishment. There are two science-fiction gimmicks; time travel and mimetic metal. Get past those and the rest is one hell of an action movie. Usually, when watching a science-fiction movie, I tend to think of six different ways the villains could use their powers to end the movie somewhere after the first half hour; not so this time. The mimetic Terminator uses his abilities very intelligently, especially in combat; reforming around bullets, sliding through grills, reforming around Arnie's hand when he punches him, etc. About the only trick he missed was abandoning the human form altogether and going to the octopus mode for combat, but overall the evil Terminator was right on the money. Linda Hamilton plays Sarah Conner as a woman driven by the spectre of global annihilation; she has a recurring dream of the world ending, destroying all the children in a playground. She is not quite sane, and has become determined to prevent the holocaust by any means necessary, including the sacrifice of other lives as well as her own. I kept seeing Sarah Conner as someone who was alternately trying to be a mother and a soldier, never sure which one was right, knowing which one was practical. I won't attempt to describe the special effects, except to say that Industrial Light and Magic did themselves proud. The evil Terminator looked convincing and very very menacing. Lots and lots of explosions, gunfire and mayhem, and all of it was spectacular. The opening scene was wonderful, as were the two knock-down drag-out fights between Terminators. In short, I loved this movie. Great special effects, a good performance by Linda Hamilton, and some excellent science-fiction to mix into a truly excellent Arnie action film. You'll like this, and it will make back its $100 million (rumored) budget. -- Subrata Sircar | sksircar@phoenix.princeton.edu |Prophet& SPAMIT Charter Member I don't speak for Princeton, and they don't speak for me. "May their souls rot in easy-listening hell!" - Johnny Melnibone, GRIMJACK #76 "I seem to suffer from irrelevant flashbacks." - Paul, PAUL THE SAMURAI #1 From rec.arts.sf-reviews Tue Jul 9 10:00:23 1991 Path: herkules.sssab.se!isy!liuida!sunic!mcsun!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!linac!att!cbnewsj!ecl From: leeper@mtgzy.att.com (Mark R. Leeper) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf-reviews Subject: REVIEW: TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY Summary: r.a.m.r. #01059 Keywords: author=Leeper,xpost Message-ID: <1991Jul8.150420.20941@cbnewsj.cb.att.com> Date: 7 Jul 91 14:28:18 GMT Sender: ecl@cbnewsj.cb.att.com (Evelyn C. Leeper) Reply-To: leeper@mtgzy.att.com Followup-To: rec.arts.movies Organization: AT&T, Middletown NJ Lines: 154 Approved: ecl@cbnewsj.att.com [Followups directed to rec.arts.movies] TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY [Spoilers] A film review by Mark R. Leeper Copyright 1991 Mark R. Leeper Capsule review: A big sci-fi (as opposed to "science fiction") film with amazing special effects has Arnold Schwarzenegger again playing a robot caught up in a battle for the future being fought in the present. Stronger on action than intelligence, it still manages to expand the ideas of the first film. Rating: +1 (-4 to +4). (There are films plotted in such a way that it is very difficult to say anything without giving away twists in the plot. This review has been worded carefully to avoid spoilers that have appeared in *every* other review I have seen. A spoiler section will follow the review to discuss matters that could not be addressed in the main body of the review.) On August 29, 1997, so the story goes, the world is plunged into nuclear war, though of about six billion people, only about half are actually killed. The remaining three billion people are locked into a life-and-death struggle of humans against machines. The machines achieve sentience and set out to kill all humans to make the world safe for machine-kind. But the one human who most stands in their way is John Connor. So the machines send a killer robot, a "terminator," into the past to the year 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, who is destined to be the mother of John. The humans manage to send back a human to protect Sarah Connor. The struggle of these two time travelers and the conception of John Connor is the plot of the 1984 film THE TERMINATOR. The first robot, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, failed in his mission so the machines, who could send only one robot back before, suddenly found a way to send a second robot. The humans, too, who could send only one human before, find the means of sending back their own representative for their own second shot. This time each sends to somewhere around the year 1995, one with a mission to kill the now ten-year-old John Connor, the other with a mission to protect John Connor. Their conflict is the story of TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY. Sarah Connor's reaction to the events of the first film bordered on the psychotic. She made it her mission to learn everything she could about guerilla warfare and survival tactics to pass on to her son. She slept with mercenaries and made friends with military personnel to help achieve her goal. She was eventually placed in a mental institution and John was given to foster parents. He seems to have aged fast and behaves like a much older boy. He even apparently has a license for a dirt-bike that he rides like a teenager and has broken the security on local cash machines. One might assume that the sequel is more of a juvenile film if the main character is so young, but director James Cameron uses that device only to widen the band of audience appeal to include younger people. Arnold Schwarzenegger is as tough as he was in the first outing but this time has more of an opportunity to put personality into his character. The new script adds some new concepts and forgets about some of the old. And both actions are welcome. We discover this time around that the nuclear war was not with the Soviets. This might have been considered a necessary change since month by month the possibility of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviets seems more and more remote. But without the Soviets as foes, the question would be whom would we be fighting with. The film provides an answer, as Cameron often does, by borrowing a concept from another major science fiction film. (See the spoiler section if you dare.) Not entirely gone but soft-pedaled is the ridiculous idea that only living matter can go through the time portal. So the time portal strips away clothing and weapons but for some reason leaves intact other dead matter like hair and fingernails. However, at one point in the film, the machines of the future send back a piece of metal and it makes it through just fine without being living tissue. The concept that some physical process in the time portal recognizes what is living and what is not is dubious at best. This of course does raise an inconsistency in the plot, but then Cameron considers and develops the ideas of the film only enough so they do not get in the way of all the action scenes. Along those lines it still has not occurred to the humans of the future (is "still" the right word for events in the future?) that their efforts might be better spent in sending back agents actually to avert the war, rather than just to lessen its impact. The action scenes and special effects--what most of the audience has come to see--are delivered, even if not always in the most intelligent manner. I consider Cameron's last film, THE ABYSS, a much more intelligent and interesting action film. It had better characters and a much more engrossing story. In one sequence of TERMINATOR 2, one of the good guys is sprayed with machine gun fire that should have been instantly fatal, but he lives considerably longer to exact his revenge. It is a little redundant, incidentally, to say that it is a good guy sprayed with machine gun fire. >From a certain point in the plot on, the good guys undertake to do what has to be done without killing any more of the bad guys, much like in the Japanese action film SANJURO. The special effects are extremely well done and undoubtedly account for a big piece of the film's price tag of somewhere around a tenth of a billion dollars. That cost was apparently partially defrayed by rubbing the audience's collective nose in the name of a well- known soft drink. While much of the special effects budget went into creating some really impressive robot effects, there was enough left over to spend some very impressive effects on a dream sequence. In the film THE MOUSE THAT ROARED, in the midst of showing some screwball characters playing tag with a nuclear super-weapon, we see a huge nuclear detonation. The narrator reassures us that it did not really happen in the plot and the scene was just to remind us what could happen any moment. Similarly, we see some of the most frightening and realistic scenes ever created of a city destroyed by a nuclear bomb. And we see them in a dream sequence to tell us, this is what Sarah Connor is trying to avoid. In those scenes and many others the audience can only marvel at the incredible technology used to create this fervently anti-technology film. TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY is a large film with large virtues and large faults. Like Mt. Rushmore, it is huge and a must-see, but one wonders if it really was such a good idea in the first place. I would rate this Mt. Rushmore of a movie +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. ***SPOILER SECTION****SPOILER SECTION****SPOILER SECTION*** One of the nice touches of the script is its use of the audience's expectations from the previous film to surprise the audience this time around. Once again you have a mean-looking Arnold Schwarzenegger and a smaller and more human-looking guy--thin, short, and his ears stick out-- arriving from the future. The natural assumption the audience has is that the Schwarzenegger robot will be a killing machine aimed at John Connor, and the other visitor will be playing defense. It would have caught the audience nicely off-guard when each does precisely the opposite thing. Unfortunately, you are looking at the first and only review I have seen that does not spoil this twist for the audience. Every review also gives away the nature of the bad terminator, a truly awesome idea for a killing machine which it strikes me was borrowed from a 1960s DC comic book called "Metal Men." Visually the effect, a close relative of the "water-tentacle" used in THE ABYSS, is very impressive. However, the story simply did not carry through with the power of this killer. In at least three of the scenes, he should have been able to take out John Connor by turning himself into a strong clamp and a very long sword. He should have been able to kill any human within twenty or thirty feet of him fairly easily. There may have been some rule that said only a certain percentage of his weight could go into the sword, but if that were the case they should have said so. And this thing is many orders of magnitude advanced over the old-style terminator. Where did the new technology come from? It seems unlikely for 2029 that any such technology will be possible. It is nice that Sarah Connor starts to use her head, but why does nobody in the future think in terms of stopping the nuclear war? And destroying the computers is a good thought for someone like Sarah, but it probably would not work. It is a standard security precaution to store important software backups off-site just in case two robots from the future decide to use your lab as a battleground. Or in case a defense computer becomes sentient and starts dictating terms. I think Cameron probably borrowed that idea from COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT. One last question: When the liquid nitrogen truck took the liquid robot into the foundry, am I the only one who knew the next two forces that would be used against him? No, I thought not. Mark R. Leeper att!mtgzy!leeper leeper@mtgzy.att.com