Still one of the best action films ever made, with fantastic levels of entertainment but careful and chilling substance as well.

Rating: 10/10 (23 March 2009)

On face value, Terminator 2: Judgment Day is a gripping and rip-roaring chase film constructed, in an entertainment sense, around three scenes of great action and tension that rely on the element of chase as their respective drives. Those scenes take place in Los Angles' flood control system between a motorcycle, a truck and a second motorcycle; an escape from a mental institution which primarily takes place on foot within the dark and precise confines of bleak, colourless corridors before branching out into an individual chasing a car load of protagonists; before finally settling for what is arguably the best of the three: a thrilling chase on a public highway between a SWAT van and a pursuing helicopter. This scene itself pauses to transform one involving a tanker truck chasing a much slower, smaller van. But the film is also a chilling warning, a film that borders on the political as it outlines the positive and negative aspects of modernity.
While Terminator 2 has and will probably continue to wow audiences with its fast pacing, gripping chase scenes and general all round entertainment aesthetic; Cameron has crafted something that carries great substance, something that is lost on more contemporary action directors. When films are made nowadays about robots bashing the life out of each other, people like Michael Bay can only come up with things like Transformers but back in the day, a certain guile or craft; a certain thought process was the result of it.
The film revolves around the statement that 'the future is not set', clearly stating that what we make up our own future as we go along and in the ever changing world of consumerism and modernity in which we live, there are no bounds as to where we can reach. The film was produced and released in 1991, coinciding with the end of The Cold War during which nuclear war was averted. The film's closing voice-over from a certain character is a warning of sorts; a statement that just because we've averted nuclear war in the most desperate of situations (echoing the character's actions in the film with the overall global situation), doesn't mean that there can never be a conflict as intense or as dangerous ever again. The closing voice-over makes reference to a 'new future', a future in which they hope technology and modernity is controlled and observed and that arms races' no longer exist.
The film is of course about two robots sent back from 2029, one with a murderous agenda and the other with a more protective one. The target is John Connor (Furlong), whose mother Sarah (Hamilton) was the target in the first film. The pitch here is that a young boy is now the target rather than a mature woman, creating a sense of urgency or desperation before anything has even happened when we realise this new target really is a complete innocent and utterly helpless if he were to come across either of these machines. Meanwhile, Sarah is being treated as mentally ill in a local institute for the delusional.
One of these machines acts as technology used 'for good' as it becomes apparent it is designed to protect John. This acts as the core of Sarah's argument when one of the more humbling scenes of realisation takes place in the desert half way through the film as she watches the machine interact with John. She states it was better than any (human) father in this regard and would fight and die protecting her son. While initially hostile towards the machine, wanting to destroy it at first chance, Sarah realises that machines are able to have a place in the world and she acknowledges the fact modernity exists and can be used for 'good' rather than to hasten H-bomb construction procedure or, indeed, to prolong nuclear war.
But Cameron's crowning glory could well be the way that, despite the 'cinema as a spectacle' approach and despite all these studies of the advancement of technology and the warnings they carry, is the manner in which Cameron develops his characters. The first Terminator film was progressive enough; taking Sarah Connor from a passive, submissive waitress whom drives to work on a quaint little moped to killer robot killer but here, the development continues and progresses Sarah into this strong, hard bodied and very independent women â€“ a fighter, a soldier but still a mother. Effortlessly, on the other side of the coin, Cameron studies the fatherly relationship between John and the protective Terminator, fleshing him out to become more human. One key part of this, I feel, is the shedding of the sunglasses thus ridding a very artificial and anonymous characteristic of the Terminator's face and allowing the study to occur following this. Additionally, Sarah becomes more of a killing machine herself during these segments, much to her regret when she realises she's become the one thing she once feared and fled from not so long ago.
Terminator 2 is Cameron's crowning glory. The first one was impressive enough given how much it took on with such limited resources, but here Cameron blitzes his previous effort, albeit the first one was still thoroughly impressive. This film was a reminder that, as we stood on the brink of the 21st century, this 'thing' called technology existed and could well be used for good, or for evil as wonderfully demonstrated in this film.