Retrospective: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Patreon)

Sarah Connor begins her day in the psych ward, training for the end of the world. She is the only living person who knows the date of the apocalypse. Even as she dogmatically repeats "no fate", she lives as if everything is preordained. Linda Hamilton ramps up her character from The Terminator, who is unrecognizable after years of living as an Amazonian Cassandra. Whatever problems I have with Terminator 2: Judgment Day are at least partially alleviated by Hamilton's performance.

But you still have a largely uninterrogated home invasion of a Black family's house by a white lady (can you tell, viewer, from the reprisal of the T-800's theme, that Sarah has become a Terminator?). You have a Black man's gratuitous sacrifice for the future of white people. There's the way Judgment Day thinks it's subverting the original movie when in fact it's merely inverting it. Great swaths of the movie are just "hey, we did The Terminator with more money and some different plot twists."

Somehow it still works. Judgment Day at least feels like it's wrapping up the story of the first movie, which rather than stopping the apocalypse simply ensured there was someone to fight evil after the world's end. Judgment Day lets us see John Connor start to become the hero he'll be one day, shows what being the mother of the messiah has done to Sarah, and sees the Resistance adapting and moving forward. Cameron loves stories about short-lived found families and loves that only last a day or two. If this one isn't quite as clever as The Terminator, it speaks well of that movie.