Apocalypse never felt so good

Rating: Null/10 (26 August 2003)

T2 opens with a series of shots showing typical LA morning. The everyday joys of life and the things we imagine as a happy day, and then at its peak we see a slow fade to white and the desolate vision of a hopeless future. And over the opening credits, while the longing mechanical sound of the Terminator main theme plays, we see fires consume the dead remains of a shattered city. This is the poetic craft of James Cameron.
Terminator 2 never comes across as a sequel. It forever comes across as the film James Cameron wanted to make with the first--it's the film he wished he had the funding for to make. While the original Terminator is an incredibly well made film (especially considering the financial restraints), T2 takes everything the original couldn't do and does it. Now we have a director who isn't scraping along to survive, now we have a visionary with funding ready to show the world how to make an action film, and James Cameron delivered.
After viewing Judgment Day for the first time in nearly a decade (after seeing T3), I have to say I liked the special effects of this film over T3, Matrix 2, and the Star Wars prequels. And I have to say I'm developing a growing distaste for the excessive CG in films. There's something more menacing and intimidating about the army of endoskeletons in this film and the raw gritty feel we see in the future scenes with HKs and the resistance struggling to survive. Star Wars had action figures and toys battling in out, Matrix was a video game, T3 was something in between, but T2 was real.
The turn of events - making the killer robot from the first film, Cyberdyne model 101, the protector in T2 - that rocked. Since it's T2, why not send 2 terminators back through time? That idea rocked. Then Cameron introduction us to the T-1000. That so rocked.
Robert Patrick's performance along with his array of inherent special effects made him one of the more memorable film villains. The key with the T-1000, though, he never does an effect for the hell of it. Limited to only 'knives and stabbing weapons,' he makes such incredible and effective use of the morphing ability you're never intimidated by the likes of Freddy or Jason again.
Every effect has a purpose and is integral to either the plot or the characters. T2 makes no detours for the sake of special effects or action. Cameron gives reason for them to be there and goes from there, weaving it into the storyline and characters and cuts right to the point and gets away before it gets boring.
The premise is simple and effective - a mother and her son fighting for survival, and then the fight for survival becomes a pre-emptive war against the machines. T2 wisely avoids explaining or even mentioning the inevitable paradoxes time travel concepts create. And never unmasks the ominous future entity that eventually takes over: Skynet.
Despite not being the greatest characters ever conceived, I really liked John and Sarah Connor and the personality-less machine who gains his own personality in this film. Cameron doesn't go for overly dramatic with his cast, but instead infuses them with just enough traits and quirks to make them believable and likable without going into overdrive. The most extreme we get is Sarah Connor's mad ravings and venomous remarks towards Skynet's creator, but if you found out the exact date the world ended, why, and how and had to escape a machine from the future to preserve the survival of the human race . . . how would you act on a daily basis?
Cameron has a way with the lights and the cameras that make his work transcend above standard action, and sets it in its own little category that's describable as 'James Cameran.' Seldom is there a visually boring moment in Terminator 2. Terminator has its own distinct look and feel. Brad Fiedel answers this with an appropriately unique score to match, now armed with superior synths.
T2 succeeds because the music, the characters, and the images never loses its personal nature while the scope expands. Despite being a 'bigger' film, we're zoomed in on a few characters and these characters can and do grow on us. From there we can imagine the coming Armageddon being fought against billions of people just like these characters and not a faceless horde of people we neither know nor care about. It disturbs me that the popular trend is to increase the scale of these films to epic levels and yet throughout the whole experience you never find one character worthy of the film idea their inside.
Terminator 2 brings Judgment Day its sad truth. Yes in the storyline 3 billion people die sometime in the future . . . but unlike T3, Cameron has the balls to show the faces of these people, and thus T2 is all the more powerful experience.