This Week In Retro: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

July 3, 1991: He said “I’ll be back” and he meant it

by Diamond Feit

Happy birthday America! I am not and have never been a “patriot” but I’ve always had a weakness for the Fourth of July. Ever since my youth, July 4th has meant fireworks, barbecues, and going to the movies: Three things I really enjoy listed in order of ascending importance to me. I saw the original Ghostbusters on the Fourth of July and spent the rest of my summer laughing at the jokes and listening to the soundtrack on my Walkman.

Thirty years ago, America saw the birth of a new kind of blockbuster film. Hollywood had bet big on the Fourth of July weekend for years, and this highly-anticipated sequel starring one of Earth’s most famous actors looked like another winner. Yet there was an air of uncertainty surrounding its release, thanks to its well-documented extraordinary budget of $100 million. Could “the most expensive movie ever made” really connect with audiences and turn a profit?

The answer was a resounding “No Problemo” as Terminator 2: Judgment Day became an immediate social phenomenon. T2 (as it was dubbed in marketing materials a full year prior to its premiere) made more money in its first weekend than The Terminator had accumulated throughout its 1984 theatrical run. A runaway tow truck of a film, T2 would end up as the highest grossing film of 1991 and remains to this day the biggest hit in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s long and storied career.

The circumstances surrounding Terminator 2 are very different than that of its indie predecessor. Then-unknown college-dropout James Cameron wrote & directed the 1984 science-fiction thriller, casting a famous bodybuilder (though not a famous actor) as the titular villain. When the low-budget, high-concept flick about a robot from the future sent back in time to kill a woman before she gives birth to a revolutionary hero became a surprise hit, it earned Cameron a job at 20th Century Fox to make Aliens.

Yet the movie business is a fickle one, and no filmmaker is more than one bomb away from being ostracized. The Terminator and Aliens were hits, but Cameron's effects-heavy underwater parable The Abyss did not make as big a splash. Once T2 made headlines with its nine-figure budget, speculation began that Cameron had gone off the deep end.

The high cost must have motivated the studio to get the word out early and often, as the hype train for T2 started back in June 1990. Total Recall, another science-fiction action-adventure film starring Schwarzenegger, hit theaters with a special teaser trailer announcing that a Terminator sequel was coming the following summer. At that time, Cameron hadn't yet finished T2’s script and not one minute of footage had been shot, but the die was cast: Everyone who saw that minute-long Terminator assembly-line sequence was sold on the concept—even kids like me who had been too young to see the first film when it came out.

Marketing for T2 pushed the film across all fronts and aimed at the widest possible audience, even though rated-R films are not intended for kids under 17. That didn’t stop the studio from plastering Schwarzenegger’s sunglasses-adorned mug on any surface that could bear the weight, including a Guns N' Roses music video which regularly aired on MTV.

(Important context: MTV was once a ferociously hip cable channel that only aired promotional footage of musical performances, and Guns N' Roses was once the loudest, biggest rock band in the world. Nothing could have reached more teenagers in 1991)

If I’m taking my time before discussing the merits of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it’s because I’m betting anyone reading this knows that movie backwards & forwards by now. T2 was everywhere and permeated pop culture at previously unimaginable speeds. I actually couldn’t get to the theaters to see it until late July that summer, and even in a pre-internet world I felt like I had already seen/heard about three-quarters of the story through commercials and second-hand conversations.

Of particular note was the film’s swapping of allegiances, turning the villainous killbot from the first film into a hero for the sequel, and sending a new model of Terminator to kill young John Conner before he became a hero. This foe, played expertly by Robert Patrick, takes the guise of a Los Angeles police officer but is actually a shape-changing super-predator who far outclasses the older Schwarzenegger model. Patrick's T-1000 has a charming smile and asks people questions in a friendly manner, which, along with his false veneer of authority, allows him to lie convincingly and acquire information he needs from unaware civilians. That the villain of the picture dons a police uniform was not a casual choice, for the record, as James Cameron felt that "cops think of all non-cops as less than they are, stupid, weak, and evil."

The T-1000 would provide the film with its most famous moments, as James Cameron needed the latest in computer-generated images to bring the multi-formed antagonist to the screen. As a creature made of "liquid metal," the T-1000 can assume any form at will and recovers from damage within seconds by re-shaping itself. These scenes were heavily featured in Terminator 2's advertisements, but in fact the CGI shots represent a tiny portion of the overall film. Instead, many of the action scenes, including all the futuristic battles and the Terminator endoskeletons, were accomplished via traditional effects. My favorite example is the stunt guy brawling with Arnold while wrapped in tin foil pretending to be the T-1000.

Despite the marketing hook of "this time, there are TWO Terminators," I would argue the story is actually about three Terminators, as Sarah Conner from the first film is now just as willing to execute a stranger for actions they have yet to take. Not only did actor Linda Hamilton transform herself physically from a naïve waitress into a shredded bad-ass, but the character of Sarah has been hardened to the world which she knows is ending soon. She is unwilling to trust anyone and given the opportunity, she aims to change the future herself by assassinating the scientist whose work will trigger the war with the machines—just like the robots that have been sent back in time to kill her and her son.

As part of the aforementioned promotional blitzkrieg for Terminator 2, the movie arrived in theaters just as two different game machines appeared in American arcades. One was a rail-shooter adaptation of the film that featured the likeness and voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the player(s) controls a Terminator trying to fight their way from the future to the past and defend young John Conner from the T-1000. It's an incredibly challenging game with multiple "escort" missions designed around defending an on-screen target from threats; failure means a forced restart of the entire stage. However, its usage of movie footage and audio clips were highly innovative for the time, and it always drew a crowd because it gave players a sense of being inside the movie.

The other major tie-in was a pinball machine which served as a vanguard for the future of the medium. Instead of a traditional alphanumeric scoreboard, Terminator 2 uses a dot-matrix screen capable of displaying graphics. The machine also features a gun handle to launch the ball into play instead of the usual plunger, and like the arcade machine, makes use of Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice throughout the game. Today's pinball cabinets have full-color flatscreen displays but the technology seen in Terminator 2 quickly became standard and remained that way for at least 20 years afterwards.

While these two adaptations were seen everywhere in the summer of 1991, the movie's end credits encouraged the audience to "PLAY THE HIT NINTENDO GAME FROM ACCLAIM/LJN ENTERTAINMENT." That game would not hit store shelves until the following summer, making it a late-era 8-bit release and the polar opposite of the other two contemporary licensed games. Terminator 2's arcade incarnations were downright cutting edge, and embodied the hit film to varying degrees of verisimilitude thanks to the use of Arnold himself.

Meanwhile, Terminator 2 on NES is an action platformer starring a very tiny Arnold who must punch his way through the first level, shoot the T-1000's truck in the second, and then shoot humans in the legs for the rest of the game because he promised "not to kill anyone." It's exactly the sort of cash-grab licensed game that makes the entire "Nintendo Seal of Quality" an oxymoron: As a piece of software, it functions, but as a game, it's bereft of entertainment value (save for the Geoff Follin soundtrack possibly).

30 years later, Terminator 2: Judgment Day stands tall as a science-fiction adventure. With its engaging action sequences, memorable characters, and still-potent special effects, the film is just as captivating today as it was in 1991. For better or for worse, Terminator 2 established that no budget could be too big for summer blockbusters; a $100 million movie is almost mid-tier by modern multiplex standards. T2's other dubious achievement was turning the once stand-alone 1984 film into a legitimate "franchise," though I think even the biggest fans would readily admit that none of the subsequent films hold a candle to the first two (Personally, I really like Terminator 3 and Dark Fate, but neither of them are on T2's level by any standards).

I find it ironic that such a massive film property left as large an imprint on the world of games as it did the cinema. Licensed games don't hold the sway today that they did in the 1990s, but I would argue that tying Hollywood actors to a video game is even more lucrative now that AAA games are just expected to deliver photo-realistic graphics. Also, the T2 philosophy of spending big in order to reap the rewards is an even larger part of the modern video game business than it is in filmmaking.

Laying it all out like this, I can see that Terminator 2 changed the media landscape as we know it, and not necessarily for the better. James Cameron set out to tell an elaborate story and spent many years and a significant amount of money to make it come to life. It's a pattern he's since repeated many times—Titanic and Avatar were also ballyhooed as "the most expensive film ever made"—and each time he's found success.

Yet the popular takeaway seems to have been "what if everything we make is the most expensive thing ever made" and that's a game of attrition. I like big-budget movies, I like fancy video game graphics, but just as I can't eat chocolate for every meal, not every piece of media in the world can be a billion-dollar idea. Hell, not even every Terminator movie can be a billion-dollar idea, but that hasn't stopped studios from dipping into that well over and over again. It's the American way: relentlessly pursue financial success at the cost of quality and human dignity. USA! USA! USA!

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.