Terminator 2: Judgment Day

A sequel and a reversal of roles. In the first film a machine came to kill a woman. In this one the same model is sent to protect her son. John is ten. His mother is being held in a psychiatric hospital, he is in foster care and recognises no rules at all. A new machine arrives. The T-1000 is made of liquid metal; it changes shape, becomes whoever it touches, and cannot be stopped. From there the film is an escape. Getting her out of the hospital, a desert road, a helicopter and a steel mill. Sarah Connor is a completely different person here. The waitress from the first film is gone; in her place is a woman who has prepared, who is hard, and whom nobody listens to. What the narrative is interested in is not action but learning: the child teaches the machine not to kill, and all the feeling in the film comes out of that relationship. There is also an argument about fate. The narrative reverses the same sentence twice and says the future is not written. The T-1000 effects were new at the time. The liquid metal was made with computers and this was the first production to use it at that scale; the sequences largely still hold up. Linda Hamilton's twin sister was used for the mirror shots. The budget was the highest ever spent on a film to that point. There is also a longer version, containing an ending that was not released in cinemas. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong and Robert Patrick are in the cast. James Cameron directed. Who it is for: anyone who wants one of the best constructed action films there is. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the darkness of the first film; this one is bigger, brighter and sentimental in places.