We've Nuked 'Em!

Rating: 9/10 (13 April 2006)

This film is a mini-gun of action scenes, tearing you apart before throwing you several meters across the cinema. But nowhere does a dystopian film start more aptly than in the opening shots of a sweltering LA traffic jam transposing into nuclear fire.
The dynamic difference between Terminator 2 and the original Terminator is that Arnie now plays an anti-hero. Despite that being common knowledge before the film was released, for me that is a spoiler. Because the first meeting of the T-1000 and the T-800 should lead us to suspect that the machine in police uniform is the saviour, and the robot in biker leathers is the monster. And when the T-800 protects John Connor instead of killing him, we are thrust into the There are so many fantastic action scenes to relish in this film - the bike chase scene with one-handed shotgun reloads, the police shootout scene with the T-800 brandishing a helicopter mini-gun, the T-800 surfing the upturned nitrogen truck. This is the standard of the action genre.
You should acknowledge, however, that Terminator 3 has action scenes, perhaps on an even greater scale than Terminator 2. But this film is more. The industrial soundtrack emphasises the unstoppable, pitiless drive of the machine. The development of mother and son develops, somehow, what should be unchanging machine. Taking the place of the missing father-figure for John Connor, the T-800 becomes the protector we desperately need in the face of the relentless T-1000.
Credit must extend to Cameron's unique direction, who mixes an intense and serious action with occasional dark humour - witness John's attempts to make the T-800 speak 'cool language'. In painful contrast, the tone becomes franchise slapstick under Jonathan Mostow's direction in Terminator 3 - hear the self-congratulatory bird singing in the aftermath of the mini-gun shootout.
Your final focus, however, should be on the implications that the T-800 has on our relationships with each other. To take the words of Fight Club's Tyler Durden, "Our fathers left us. If our fathers were role-models for God, what does that say about God?" Sarah Connor offers us one possible reply to this indictment, "Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too."