Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Terminator 2: Judgment Day is a 1991 American science fiction action film produced and directed by James Cameron, who co-wrote the script with William Wisher. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, and Edward Furlong, Terminator 2 is the sequel to the 1984 film The Terminator and the second installment in the Terminator franchise. In its plot, the malevolent artificial intelligence Skynet sends a Terminator—a highly advanced killing machine—back in time to 1995 to kill the future leader of the human resistance, John Connor, when he is a child. The resistance sends back a less-advanced reprogrammed Terminator to protect Connor and ensure the future of humanity. The Terminator was considered a significant success, enhancing Schwarzenegger’s and Cameron’s careers, but a sequel failed to progress because of animosity between the pair and the Hemdale Film Corporation, who partially owned the film’s rights.
in 1990, Schwarzenegger and Cameron convinced Carolco Pictures to purchase the rights from the financially struggling Hemdale and The Terminator producer Gale Anne Hurd for $15 million. A release date was set for the following year, leaving Cameron and Wisher seven weeks to write the script. The pair frequently conferred with special effects studio Industrial Light & Magic to determine if their ideas for the extensive special effects were possible. Principal photography began in October 1990 and lasted until March 1991, in and around Los Angeles, on an estimated $102 million budget, making it the most expensive film ever made at the time. The cutting-edge visual effects, including the first use of a computer-generated main character in a blockbuster film, resulted in schedule overrun and the theatrical prints were only delivered to theaters the night before its July 3, 1991 release.
On its release, Terminator 2 earned $519–520.9 million, making it the highest-grossing film of 1991 in the United States and Canada, as well as worldwide, and the third highest-grossing film of all time. It received generally positive reviews, with critics praising the visual effects, action scenes, and the cast, singling out Patrick’s performance as the T-1000 in particular as a great cinematic villain, but was criticized for its violent content. It won several accolades including Saturn, BAFTA, and Academy Awards. Alongside tie-in promotions with brands such as Pepsi, Terminator 2 spawned a series of merchandise including video games, comic books, novels, and T2-3D: Battle Across Time, a live-action attraction including filmed footage featuring Schwarzenegger, Hamilton, Patrick, and Furlong.
Plot.
In 2029, the Earth is a wasteland dominated by the war between the malevolent artificial intelligence Skynet and the human resistance. Skynet sends the T-1000, an advanced prototype shapeshifting Terminator made of virtually impervious liquid metal, back in time to kill the resistance leader, John Connor, when he is a child. The resistance sends back a reprogrammed T-800 Terminator, a less-advanced metal endoskeleton covered in synthetic flesh, to protect him. In 1995 Los Angeles, John’s mother, Sarah, has been incarcerated at the Pescadero State Hospital for her violently fanatical efforts to prevent “Judgment Day”, the prophesied events of August 29, 1997, when Skynet will gain sentience and, in response to its creators’ attempts to deactivate it, incite a nuclear holocaust. Taken in by foster parents, John considers Sarah’s beliefs delusional and resents her efforts to prepare him for his future role.RELATED:
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The T-800 and the T-1000 converge on John in a shopping mall, and a chase ensues after which John and the T-800 escape together. John calls to warn his foster parents but the T-800 deduces the T-1000 has already killed them. Realizing the T-800 is programmed to obey him, John forbids it from killing people and orders it to save Sarah before the T-1000 kills her. They intercept Sarah during an escape attempt but she flees because the T-800 resembles the Terminator sent back to kill her in 1984.[b] John and the T-800 convince her to join them and they escape the pursuing T-1000. Distrustful of the T-800, Sarah uses it to learn that a revolutionary microprocessor, being developed by Cyberdyne Systems engineer Miles Bennett Dyson, will be essential to Skynet’s creation.
Over several days of their journey, Sarah witnesses the T-800 serve as a friend and father figure to John, who teaches it catchphrases, hand signs, and encourages it to become more human.
Sarah plans to flee to Mexico with John until a nightmare about Judgment Day convinces her to kill Dyson. She ruthlessly assaults him in his home but becomes distraught when faced with executing him and relents. John arrives and reconciles with Sarah, while the T-800 convinces Dyson of the future consequences of his work. Dyson reveals his research has been reverse engineered from the damaged CPU and severed arm of the Terminator from 1984. Believing his work must be destroyed, Dyson, Sarah, John, and the T-800 break into Cyberdyne, retrieve the CPU and the arm, and set explosives to destroy the lab. The police assault the building and fatally shoot Dyson, but he detonates the explosives as he dies. The T-1000 pursues the surviving trio, eventually cornering them in a steel mill.
Filming.
Three-months of pre-production began, which was truncated to meet the release schedule, leaving Cameron without the time he wanted to prepare all aspects before filming began. He spent several hours a day over one week choreographing vehicle scenes with toy cars and trucks, filming the results, and printing the footage for storyboard artists. There was also no time to properly test out practical effects before they would appear in filming, and if they did not work they had to be worked around. Principal photography began on October 8–9, 1990, on a $60 million budget. The production was long and arduous, in part because of Cameron, who was known for his short temper and uncompromising and “dictatorial” manner that resulted in the crew making T-shirts bearing the slogan “You can’t scare me—I work for Jim Cameron.” Schwarzenegger described him as a supportive but “demanding taskmaster” with a “fanaticism for physical and visual detail.”
Cameron was hands-on when making scenes fit his vision, in one instant angrily fixing a broken camera when the operator could not, and Morton said that, during his death scene, Cameron decided on a whim to detonate surrounding glass to see how it would look. Cameron worked throughout Christmas owing to the tight schedule, editing on Christmas Eve and convinced Schwarzenegger to cancel multiple Christmas events and a visit to American troops in Saudi Arabia with President George H. W. Bush to be available for filming. By the 101st day of filming, Schwarzenegger and Hamilton were frustrated by the number of takes Cameron performed, with five days spent on Hamilton’s closeups in the Dyson home alone. Scenes were filmed out of sequence to prioritize those requiring extensive visual effects to be added. Schwarzenegger found this difficult because he was meant to convey subtle signs of the T-800’s progressive humanity and was unsure what was fitting for each scene.
Returning from The Terminator, cinematographer Adam Greenberg described the greater scope of the sequel as the most daunting prospect; where he had been able to shout instructions to his crew on the original film, he used one of 187 walkie-talkies to conduct efforts over an expansive area. The production used many locations in and around California. The now-destroyed Corral bar in Sylmar, Los Angeles is where the T-800 confronts a group of bikers. Location manager Jim Morris chose it because it was raised above ground, allowing the scene to take place over different levels. A woman wandered into the bar oblivious to ongoing filming and when she asked Schwarzenegger, who was wearing only a pair of shorts, what was going on, he replied, “It’s male-stripper night.” Executives suggested cutting the scene to save money but Cameron and Schwarzenegger refused. The T-1000 arrives at the Sixth Street Viaduct, John hacks an ATM at a bank in Van Nuys,
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a nd his foster parents’ home is in the Canoga Park neighborhood. It was chosen because it looked generic. The Terminators confront John inside the Santa Monica Place mall, although exterior shots were filmed at the Northridge Fashion Center where there was less traffic. When the on-foot T-1000 chases John on a bike, Patrick’s training made him faster than the bike and so its speed was increased. The T-1000 pursues John and the T-800 in a truck at the Bull Creek spillway in North Hills. The final highway chase was filmed along the Terminal Island Freeway near Long Beach, of which a 2.5-mile stretch was shut nightly for two weeks. The future war of 2029 was filmed in the rubble of an abandoned steel mill in Oxnard, California in a space 0.5 miles square, enhanced with burned bikes and cars from 1989 fire at the Universal Studios Lot, and with effects such as flying vehicles
added in post-production. Terminator 2’s ending was filmed in the shuttered Kaiser Steel mill in Fontana, which Greenberg made appear operational mainly through various lighting techniques. Despite appearing to be actively smelting steel, the mill was frigid and dangerous because of the moving machinery and high catwalks. The T-800’s thumbs-up during his death was added during filming; Hamilton believed it was too sentimental. Six months of filming concluded on March 28, 1991, about three weeks over schedule. Hamilton described the production as the most “difficult, exhausting, physically, and emotionally stressful experience of my life.” She suffered permanent partial hearing loss after forgetting to wear earplugs when the T-800 fires a gun in the hospital elevator, and experienced shell shock from months of exposure to violence, loud noise, gunfire, and action setpieces.
Special effects and design.
Terminator 2 makes extensive use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) to vivify the T-1000. The use of such technology was the most ambitious since the 1982 and 1984 science fiction films Tron and The Last Starfighter respectively, and would be integral to the critical success of the film. CGI was required particularly for the T-1000, a “mimetic poly-alloy” structure, since the shapeshifting character can transform into almost anything it touches. Most of the key Terminator effects were provided by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) for computer graphics, Pacific Data Images (PDI) for optical effects and Stan Winston for practical effects. Creation of the visual effects cost $5 million and took 35 people, including animators, computer scientists, technicians, and artists, ten months to produce, for a total of 25 man-years.
This lengthy process yielded a total of only five minutes of CGI runtime. Stan Winston’s studio produced articulated puppets, prosthetic effects, and the metal skeleton effects of the T-800. ILM’s Visual Effects Supervisor, Dennis Muren, remarked, “We still have not lost the spirit of amazement when we see … [the visual effects on the T-1000] coming up.” The technical achievements in CGI won the visual effects team the 1992 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
For Sarah’s nuclear nightmare scene, Robert and Dennis Skotak of 4-Ward Production constructed a cityscape of Los Angeles using large-scale miniature buildings and realistic roads and vehicles. The pair, having studied actual footage of nuclear tests, simulated the nuclear blast with air mortars to knock over the intricate cityscape
Box office.
The film received a wide release in the United States (U.S.) and Canada on July 3, leading into the Independence Day holiday weekend. Between Friday and Sunday, the film earned about $31.8 million from 2,274 theaters, an average of $13,969 per theater, making it the number 1 film of the weekend ahead of The Naked Gun 2½ ($11.6 million) in its second weekend and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves ($10.3 million), in its fourth. Over the five-day holiday weekend (Wednesday to Sunday), Terminator 2 earned a total of $52.3 million, the second-highest-grossing opening five-day total ever behind 1989’s Batman $57 million. The opening week audience was evenly split between adults and teenagers/children, without about 25%–30% made up of females although Tri-Star said the figure was higher. The film benefitted from repeat viewings by younger audience members. One theater chain executive said “…nothing since Batman has created the
frenzy for tickets we saw this weekend with Terminator. At virtually all our locations, we are selling out … the word-of-mouth buzz out there is just phenomenal.”
It retained the number 1 position in its second weekend, earning $20.7 million, ahead of the debuts of the re-release One Hundred and One Dalmatians ($10.3 million) and Boyz n the Hood ($10 million), and in its third weekend with $14.9 million, ahead of Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey ($10.2 million) and One Hundred and One Dalmatians ($7.8 million). It fell to number 2 in its fifth weekend, earning $8.6 million against the debut of the comedy Hot Shots! ($10.8 million). It remained in the top five highest-grossing films for twelve weeks straight and the top ten highest-grossing for fifteen weeks. In total, the film spent about twenty-six weeks or 184 days in theaters, across a maximum of 2,495 theaters, and earned $204.8 million, making it the highest-grossing film of the year, ahead of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves ($165 million),
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Beauty and the Beast ($145 million), Silence of the Lambs ($130 million), and City Slickers ($124 million). This also made it the thirteenth-highest-grossing film of its time, behind Back to the Future (1985), and the highest-grossing R rated film, a record it held for just over a decade. The Los Angeles Times estimated that after the theater and distributor cuts, the box office returns to Carolco would be well over 20% of the film’s cost.
Outside of the U.S. and Canada, the film set numerous box office records including a 3-day opening of $4.4 million and a one-week record of $7.8 million, and earning at least $30 million in the United Kingdom, $9.5 one-week in France (biggest opening since Rocky IV) and $16 million in two weeks, Germany ($8 million in five days), $1.2 million in Thailand (becoming its highest-grossing western-hemisphere film ever),
and a record Australian opening weekend, as well as performing well in Brazil, and earning at least $51 million in Japan. It earned about $312.1 million, making it the first film to gross over $300 million outside of the U.S. and Canada. Terminator 2 is estimated to have earned a total worldwide gross of $519–$520.9 million, [d] making it the year’s highest-grossing film and the third highest-grossing film ever, behind 1977’s Star Wars ($530 million) and 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial ($619 million)
Cast:
- Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator: T -800
- Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor:
- Edward Furlong as John Connor:
- Robert Patrick as T-1000:
- Earl Boen as Dr. Silberman:
- Joe Mortonas Miles Bennett Dyson: