A big disappointment

Rating: 2/10 (30 August 2002)

Once upon a time there was a talented young director called James Cameron. He made a classic low-budget sci-fi thriller called The Terminator, and followed it up with other minor classics such as Aliens and The Abyss. Then he was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force and started making s***.
***PLOT SPOILERS FOLLOW*** Terminator 2 is an appalling film. Certainly, the special effects were ground-breaking (although look ordinary now)but I'm more than a little sick of hearing people say this in its defence. Special Effects alone are not enough. There needs to be a plausible story, decent dialogue, solid acting performances and a basic artistic integrity. Linda Hamilton excepted, the performances here all suck. Arnie was perfectly cast in the original as a cyborg villain - for once his mechanical tics and twitches actually worked in his favour. His attempts to make the robot in T2 more human are just tragic. The plot is totally lacking in plausibility. Edward Furlong, we are supposed to believe, turns into a ruthless future guerilla leader. Someone who orders his troops not to kill the enemy (as he tells Arnie in that patronising "You can't kill anybody" sequence)clearly isn't meant to be a general. In the first film, we were told that the time-travel equipment had been blown up after Kyle Reese had been sent back in time. So how come it's now working again? And if they're capable of sending more Terminators back, why didn't they just send back a cyborg to kill Sarah Connor when she was in labour? She could hardly have fought back then. It seems as though Cameron thought he could blind his audience to these obvious discrepancies by bombarding them with special effects. The whole film is a mess. Everything that made the first Terminator film great was sacrificed to make a gaudy, crass effects-fest. I had been looking forward to a sequel set in the future, featuring John Connor fighting against the machines. Instead, they made the biggest fake in history. And the thumbs-up bit at the end? I vomited a river.