Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator II: Judgment Day
Chris Forrester articulates how James Cameron films like Terminator II and Aliens work so well as sequels with established iconography and higher stakes than their predecessors.
James Cameron has conquered quite a few things through his nearly 40 years in Hollywood — among them the blockbuster, the epic romance, motion capture, production delays, the Schwarzenegger one-liner, the all-time box office charts (twice) — but no achievement was ever so career-defining as his mastery of that oh-so-finnicky staple of studio filmmaking, the sequel. And no sequel he made was ever better than Terminator II: Judgment Day (1991), a perfectly calibrated piece of entertainment you’d be well within your rights to call the greatest sequel ever made.
Though often thought of as a safe bet financially, the sequel is a testy thing creatively, and to pull one off requires a measure of daring and an even greater knack for creative concoction. If we’re to invoke the old analogy of filmmaking as a kind of magic, then sequel-making might be alchemy — a careful mixing of available components that requires near-scientific precision and yields something greater than the sum of its parts. Get it right and the result is a euphoric elixir; mess it up and the explosion might incinerate the block (think of the most insufferably divisive films in recent memory and ask yourself how many are ill-received sequels). Where some filmmakers have built entire careers as sequel-makers and others have seen theirs go up in smoke for a misstep in the wrong franchise (David Gordon Green), James Cameron has proven himself a master in this particular magic — capable of striking just the right balance between fresh and familiar, and then infusing it with enough bombast to make it unforgettable.
Consider (if you’ve seen the film; if not, stop reading and buy a ticket) the scene that unfolds thirty minutes into Terminator II: John Connor (Edward Furlong, the film’s one weak link), on the run, finds himself trapped between two imposing men, one we recognize (Arnold Schwarzenegger, reprising the titular role) and one we don’t (Robert Patrick, perfectly cast as a new antagonist of slippier frightfulness than his counterpart). Familiar with the first film’s dynamic of hero-threatened-by-one-time-traveler-and-protected-by-another, we’ve assumed correctly that John is now the target and incorrectly that Patrick is his new protector, and so Cameron yanks the rug from beneath us and, as we’re swept off our feet, catches us in a pulse-pounding action setpiece that cements this film’s grander scale.
The ensuing motorcycle vs. truck chase echoes the big-car-little-car dynamic of The Terminator’s finale, even ending in a death fake-out that sees the antagonizing machine emerge from his truck’s flaming wreckage to reveal an inhuman true form. But in the heat of the moment we’re likely too awed by the spectacle to note this parallel. And so, in concise summation of his approach to sequels, Cameron has both cleanly subverted and met our expectations, but also pushed beyond them.
An old threat gets a new face in Terminator II: Judgment Day
This is the same M.O. behind all three of Cameron’s notable sequels — Aliens (1986), Terminator II, and Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) (and a fourth, Piranha II: The Spawning, that he’s all but disowned) — which operate via an easily describable formula but yield results better felt than explained. Each is set some years after its predecessor, retains a familiar structure, and contrasts a grander scale with more intimate stakes via the inclusion of children. Motifs (“Come with me if you want to live”) and familiar antagonists abound, though in the latter case the antagonist is typically a more threatening version of his previous iteration: the xenomorph queen in Aliens, the shapeshifting T1000 in Terminator II, the human colonizers reborn as Na’vi in The Way of Water.
They straddle a fine line between remixing and retreading, but the plotting and conception of these films on paper hardly represents the raw spectacle of seeing — or rather feeling — them on a movie screen. Just as one can note that the surprise smackdown between Ripley and the alien queen in the finale of Aliens echoes the Xenomorph’s surprise survival on the escape pod in Alien, the car chase/industrial plant cat-and-mouse games that end both Cameron Terminator films are of not insignificant similarity, and the acclimatization of characters to new environments and animals in each Avatar film are clear echoes of one another, each film feels satisfyingly complete by virtue of the pure craftsman brilliance on display. In these instances, just as in the previously noted parallel between car chases, observation of the specific parallel belies the actual thrill of watching it, and the verve with which they’re distinguished; each animal-mounting sequence in the Avatar films reveals new facets of Cameron’s awesomely realized worlds, the Terminator finales allow greater insight into the human characters’ resourcefulness against increasingly threatening robot killers — and its viscerally exciting potential as action fodder — and the Aliens finale reminds us of the nigh unkillable threat of the Xenomorphs.
A bigger threat emerges in Aliens
But the particular genius of Terminator II even among Cameron’s other sequels is that its repeat elements further align with the franchise’s themes of looming fate and malleable futures. At the end of the first film, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) drove into a coming storm, and in Terminator II its impending darkness has grown into apocalyptic nightmares that plague her nights as history repeats itself. The threat of death-by-Terminator is less a once-avoided predicament and more an inevitability to be thwarted or consumed by. Where on paper the film amounts to a grander repetition of its predecessor’s techno-paranoia premise, in execution its familiar beats attain a weightier significance, as points in a cycle that threatens to spiral toward hellfire.
Thus the film becomes about the characters’ struggles to thwart that fate, and the narrative’s repeat elements function as reminders of their perpetual danger should they fail. And likewise, its increased stakes (as allowed by a budget over ten times that of its predecessor, the threat is visualized as both war-torn future and flesh-melting, city-leveling nuclear incineration) suggest an even greater doom to come in the pendulum’s next swing. The same might also be true of the Avatar films and the endless cycle of colonial violence that plagues their alien protagonists and the Alien films where capitalist greed manufactures encounter after encounter with acid-bleeding killing machines, but it’s rarely so viscerally felt as in Terminator II, where each expertly conceived and thrillingly staged chase and shootout is punctuated by Hamilton’s grave ruminations on coming doom.
A looming threat of hellfire in Terminator II: Judgment Day
It’s fitting, all this considered, that a film so perfectly engineered concerns a piece of machinery of equal perfection. And likewise, that for every well-oiled piston and finely shaped contour, it manages an organic warmth that transcends that machine-ness altogether.
Join the Resistance Thursday, November 14, at 7pm with a new 4K restoration of Terminator II: Judgment Day, screening as part of the IU Cinema series Sequilibrium.