Father-absent series: Terminator 2.

Rating: 10/10 (19 June 2010)

The moment T-800 took John Connor with one arm and bosom-ed him against his leather jacket, I knew it's cozy, safe to be in there. Why? Because my dad used to put me in his bosom and ride me home on his bicycle. If all the CGI and camera work made Terminator 2 way ahead of its time, then it was the stubborn terminator who refused to die again and again made this movie nearly timeless.
This review along with other reviews in the "Father-absent series", intends to explore how the absence of fathers affects people's mind and spirits, in and out of movies.
Terminator 2 is the kind of movie that reminds you why you love to see movies. As an enthusiastic fan of the series I bought DVD-9 deluxe set the moment it's released. After maybe 3-4 viewings it again bothered me as what did I own when I say I have this DVD. Do I own the 120 million dollars of budget making T-1000 alive on the screen? No. Do I own the finest hour of Arnold's career? Nope. Maybe even Arnold didn't really enjoy being Terminator after all. What I owned might be the chance to enjoy being chased by crazy cyborgs then being saved by a father-like T-800. It was timeless to me because it was cemented in my childhood memory. 30 years later, when some teenagers buy it in some ultra-definition format, they may not be entirely impressed by the SFX, but they'd be very impressed by their grandfathers' definition of a "father figure", or someone with impenetrable chest and belly muscles, a willingness of iron to protect his family, and an unconditional oath of alloy to stick with you.
In this sense, Terminator movies are not only mindless Science fictions, but also a crazy prophecy about our status quo. The prophecy states that we as mankind already failed decades before our destined nuclear holocaust, because in our hands something superior was born. The terminator as the movie portrays, have all the desirable male qualities: versatile, strong, disciplined, and favorably indestructible, blah blah blah. This also reflects how the modern society, how the "here and now" philosophy teaches us about man. We are put into jobs to provide accuracy, efficiency in our performances. We are put into families to be an effective money-making machine. Don't get me wrong I have nothing against Capitalism. Ever since my primary school, my arts teacher used to call me "examination machine" because he was angry to see my excellence in doing examinations but dull mind in painting. But for some reason, I believed man stands for something unique, something to do with the greater good, something only man can stands for. It seems John Connor's puberty was also a lost journey to find out about man.
The savior in the movie John Connor never met his birth-father, he was raised up by a overburdened, apocalyptic-fanatic mother who's given him everything except a father. Though the later stories about him were all about an ongoing struggle as a savior he may never come to be, Terminator 2's story might just be the most important part of John's life. What he lacked in flesh, the terminator made him up in machine, a perfect substitute of father. Even better, in Sarah Connor his mother's eyes, this "father" is better than any father he can have because "he will stick with John in any circumstances". Sadly, with his magic "neurological CPU" and "progressive learning", the terminator finally learned about human's feelings and love, and in his noble action to self-destruct, he completed his dedication to greater good, thus completed his way of martyr.
I don't know about you guys, but I don't have "Neurological CPU" and "progressive learning function". That being said, my logic would never catch up with the Terminator's logic, so I can't find the answer about the greater good by calculating. Guess as a dumb student who was a "examination machine", I can only believe such a thing as "greater good" existed. Unlike Mr. Connor who found out about the greater good on a terminator, I find it on Jesus Christ. Also unlike many people's presumption, Christianity had very similar notions with the terminator story. The one that stood out was man's failure to carry on the greater good. The Bible told us mankind has failed their relationship with the Lord God, therefore even this species is going on to exist on the surface of the earth, every one of them can't escape the final destination of death. In other words, they failed before their actual "judgment day" just like in the Terminator movies. The difference between the point of the Bible and Terminator movie is just the question why humans failed. If you are particularly curious, please find yourself a copy of Bible to read deeper about it.
John Connor in his 20s, need the harassment of terminators in all genders and all models to remind him of the urgency of apocalypse. Without crazy machines tailing us, what do we need to remind us such urgency? Are natural disasters enough? How about pollutions? Along with our own personal pains, health issues, emotional traumas, political insecurities, these pains of human can very well be our gift from the one who created us, "a flag of truth in the fortress of sins" as a great man once said. It's a time to reflex.