Look, sorry to knock your socks off with this brave confession, but I, an iconoclast, never saw any of the Terminator movies before watching Terminator 2 for this book. It wasn’t on purpose, although it IS true that I am too sophisticated for popular things. I just accidentally never sought out Terminator stuff or watched it or asked anyone what it was about or thought about it. I do not know why. I knew that there was a Sarah Connor and a John Connor and that a possibly good or possibly not good robot was going to “be bock,” but that’s it.
And that’s really all you need to know to believably fake Terminator discourse for your entire life! I was able to bank those two hours and thirty-six minutes like an efficiency queen, and you all have been two hours and thirty-six minutes behind me this whole time. Until now.
It’s Los Angeles, 2029 AD (LOL @ the idea we’ll make it to 2029!). Seems like a normal day. The sun is shining, people are sitting in traffic, kids are swinging on swings (safety tip: never let your kid swing on swings at the beginning of a movie!). Uh-oh! A white-hot blast, three billion human lives lost, the swing set has been nuclearly broken to shit. As it happens, humans are on the losing end of a war against an army of machines ruled by an intangible collective robot brain named Skynet, and they just got Judgment Day’d.
Skynet! Huh! Skynet’s a Terminator thing! Heard people talk about Skynet my whole life, never knew what it was. Sometimes internet trolls would say things like, “Lindy West is what happens when PIE-net becomes self-aware!!!!!” and I was impervious to the burn because it meant nothing to me. Watching Terminator 2 has now weakened me in that way. Hmm.
The machines are really hard to fight because some of them are planes, some of them are bombs, and some of them are like if a skeleton were a tank. They are so good at fighting! We should not have made them like that! “We should not have made them like that” is, I think, what this entire franchise is about (?), so let’s see how things unfold.
Man, remember when FLAMES on METAL were really cool? No offense because this is actually a compliment, but the opening credits of Terminator 2 look like the opening credits of Guy’s Grocery Games. A metal skull emerges from the flames. Oh no! It’s the mayor of Flavortown! And he’s come to TERMINATE CHEESE. Hasta la vista, gravy! <—I am not sorry!
Cut to a parking lot at night. A portal through time opens up and look who plops through it! It’s Arnold, squatting in a custom time-traveling Glassybaby. He’s bock, and, schwing, the time travel has terminated his pants! Arnold clomps to a nearby country biker bar with his bockwurst hanging right out there, and the horny cougars of the bar love it. Hey, though! Why would they give the Terminator a dick!? What’s he supposed to use it for? Also, why is he Austrian? Call me old-fashioned, but I think it’s weird not to explain why your robot is Austrian and has a dick.1
Arnold approaches a tough biker and tells him, “I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle.” The biker, reasonably, refuses, so Arnold griddles his face on the flat top, then impales his friend on the pool table, then steals all their stuff. (Terminator! You are the asshole here!) The bar owner follows Arnold outside with a shotgun and is like, “I can’t let you take the man’s wheels, son,” which is bafflingly kind of him. Arnold walks right up to the guy and you think he’s going to terminate him, but instead he takes the shotgun and—B-B-B-B-B-B-B-BAD TO THE BONE—the guy’s bitching Oakleys too. Now Terminator is a biker boy!
The lack of taste it takes to actually play the song “Bad to the Bone” right here belongs in a museum!
Meanwhile, somewhere else in LA, another time portal opens up, and another naked robot bloops into the ’90s. This time, it’s Robert Patrick a.k.a. T-1000 a.k.a. Robot Patrick a.k.a. a liquid metal absolute bitch. A cop notices him and is like, “10-4, uh, we got a liquid metal guy,” but Robot Patrick kills him easily and takes his clothes. OF COURSE liquid metal guy is a COP.
Basically what’s going on, I think, is that in Terminator 1, the T-800 (Arnold) was sent to the ’80s to terminate Sarah Connor, so that she could never give birth to extremely effective anti-robot resistance leader of the future John Connor. But it didn’t work (don’t know why, never seen it, not my purview), so now in Terminator 2, Skynet has sent a different, more advanced Terminator back in time to terminate John Connor as a child, while future John Connor sent a reprogrammed, nicer T-800 (that he STILL DECIDED TO MAKE AUSTRIAN AMERICAN) back in time to protect his child self from T-1000.
T-1000 looks up John Connor’s personal info in the cop car computer and, like, you didn’t have that already? You’re from the future! Print it out before you come!
John Connor is chillin’ out with his best friend, Bobby Budnik, riding his bike around town and not cleaning his room in a month. This is back when everybody liked the same things: bein’ bad, not cleaning your room, and pizza. John lives with his foster parents, who need to get a divorce but otherwise seem nice.
Sarah Connor, meanwhile, is confined to a mental hospital because she won’t stop trying to warn everyone about the upcoming nuclear robot apocalypse, and also she “blew up a computer factory” (fair).
Officer T-1000 swings by John’s house and asks his foster mom for a picture of him, for police business. “Do you mind if I keep this picture?” Yo, you don’t even have a picture of him? HE IS STILL ALIVE IN THE FUTURE WHERE YOU COME FROM. You have a computer for a brain!
T-1000 locates John at the arcade and starts chasing him around without even stopping to say hi to the video games, which are at LEAST his in-laws. In a back hallway, just when he’s about to get terminated, John runs into Arnold, who’s carrying a dozen long-stemmed roses in a box—isn’t that nice? He must have known that John Connor is having a tough day, what with being chased by a liquid metal guy. But Terminator’s roses are actually a gun! Terminator inconveniences T-1000 by shooting him about a million times, but, unfortunately, you know, he is liquid metal. They manage to get away on a motorcycle while T-1000 oozes his body (INCLUDING GENITALS—HE HAS THEM TOO) back together.
T-1000 can’t catch them on foot (why would there be a limit to how fast a liquid metal man could run?), so he carjacks a big truck and starts chasing them through Burbank. On the one hand, how does he know how to drive? They don’t drive 1984 Freightliner FLA heavy-duty commercial trucks in the land of the machines! On the other hand, why isn’t he better at driving? He basically is a car.
T-1000 looks stressed. Why is Arnold so much better at being a Terminator than he is? He’s supposed to be the newer model! He’s the one who can turn his arm into a pizza cutter! Why is this happening to him? It’s not fair! But, as Freckle tells us, sometimes things that are expensive are worse.
Eventually, T-1000 smashes into an overpass, and his truck blows up. He walks out of the fire, still dressed as a cop (if he can generate any outfit he wants out of liquid metal, WHY DID HE NEED TO STEAL THE COP OUTFIT THE FIRST TIME?), but Arnold and John Connor have already gotten away. They are safe, for now.
Eddie Furlong as a child has the energy of an old Kristen Stewart.
Arnold tells John they have to get out of town and avoid the authorities, which is why he chose such a subtle, low-profile look. John insists on calling his foster parents first, to warn them that a psycho robot from the future is probably coming over.
John: Look. Todd and Janelle are dicks. But I’ve got to warn them. Shit. You got a quarter?
Terminator: I AM A QUARTER.
Janelle picks up the phone, but it’s actually T-1000 who has shape-shifted into Janelle! Arnold is suspicious, so he performs the Wolfie Test, a complex tactical maneuver wherein you ask a woman whom you suspect of being Robot Patrick, “What’s wrong with Wolfie?” and if she says, “Nada, amigo, he’s my good boy,” then you know she has most likely just turned her arm into a big metal knife and impaled your foster dad through the face. If she says, “Our dog is named Max, do you need to go to the brain hospital?” then you can continue to love her. Janelle fails.
Terminator, to a child: Your foster parents are dead.
As they scram outta town, Terminator explains the plot holes to John:
T-1000 can imitate anything it touches, or “samples,” which is why it now has a permanent sexy policeman costume for skin.
“But only an object of equal size.”
But what about mass and density?
Don’t worry about it.
“But why doesn’t it just become a bomb or something?”
“It can’t form complex machines. Guns and explosives have chemicals, moving parts. It doesn’t work that way.”
HUMANS HAVE CHEMICALS AND MOVING PARTS.
“It can form solid metal shapes—knives, stabbing weapons.”
Disrespectfully, what the fuck is the point of a futuristic robot that can only become a knife? A robot is already like a gun! You had to make a robot less like a gun to make it a knife.
John tells Terminator that they have to go break his mom out of the mental hospital before T-1000 gets there and kills her or takes her hostage. “Negative,” says Arnold. “This does not help our mission.” Then John discovers that since technically he built the Terminator and sent it into the past to rescue himself, he is the Terminator’s boss and the Terminator has to do what he says! It’s PIZZA PARTY TIME! He immediately abuses this power, and has Terminator “prank” a couple of jocks by almost murdering them.
John Connor: Jesus, you were going to kill that guy!
Best line in the movie: Of course. I’m a Terminator.
T-1000 disguises himself as the floor so he can sneak into the hospital and get Sarah Connor, braless icon. He becomes a security guard and pokes the real security guard to death, and I know, I know, let the plumber fix the sink, as my president Sam Irby would say, but that really doesn’t seem the best way to terminate someone during a stealth infiltration of a hospital! It’s really conspicuous!2 Just keep being the floor!
Sarah kills her molestery nurse and steals his keys and nightstick, and then runs into Arnold in the hall, who she understandably assumes is there to kill her, since he is purpose-built for that one single exact thing and the last time she saw him he was unbelievably uncool. Instead, he’s like, “Come with me if you want to live,” and her kid’s like, “Ditto, cowabunga,” which has to have been a lot to process for her! They run away from T-1000 and manage to escape into the elevator, but then T-1000 turns his finger knife into an elevator spreader! Shit! Terminator shoots him right in the head,3 which takes him a second. They escape.
Now that they have some downtime, John Connor decompresses a little and starts to cry. “What’s wrong with your eyes?” says Terminator. “Why do you cry?”
John: It’s when there’s nothing wrong with you, but you hurt anyways. Get it?
Terminator: No.
Then, like literally the next second, Terminator starts sewing up Sarah’s wound, and she asks, “Do you know what you’re doing?” and he’s like, “I have detailed files on human anatomy.”
Oh my god, then why don’t you know what crying is???????????????????????
To kill time, John teaches Terminator the traditional human rituals of thumbs-up, down low/too slow, plus some slang so he can be “not such a dork all the time.” They cover the five most vital English phrases:
“Eat it.”
“Later, dickwad.”
“Chill out.”
“No problem.”
And, most important, “Hasta la vista, baby.”
Watching them, Sarah Connor realizes that the Terminator is the perfect dad. “This machine was the only one that measured up.” Wow, horny!
Sarah Connor has a nightmare about everyone burning up on Judgment Day, so she abandons John and Terminator and drives off to blow away Miles Dyson, who was just about to invent the microprocessor that would become Skynet—which, incidentally, he reverse engineered from dead evil Arnold’s severed arm from the end of Terminator 1, which seems like the kind of logical loop that would melt space-time? Having to think about time travel should be the punishment we give to criminals instead of prison.
Terminator thinks blowing Dyson away is a pretty good idea, but John explains that you can’t just go around killing people even if it’s to prevent a nuclear holocaust that you know is definitely going to kill three billion people.
COUNTERPOINT: MAYBE YOU CAN!
They chase Sarah to Dyson’s house, where she’s absolutely torturing this poor man and his wife and child but not killing anyone because it turns out it’s actually hard to just blow someone away in front of their kid when they haven’t even invented Skynet yet.
Arnold deescalates the situation, but then instantly reescalates it by cutting some of his flesh off to show Dyson his metal bones and explain that he needs to stop building evil robots. Dyson is like, “EXCUSE ME?” But he agrees to take them over to Cyberdyne Headquarters and obliterate his life’s work. (Hey, do you have to have the only Black guy in the movie be responsible for three BILLION deaths??) Man, it would have been way harder to prevent Judgment Day if they had had the cloud in 1991. Instead, they just have to go down to the office and smush all the floppies. Easy, right? Not really!
They break in and plant explosives to destroy all of Dyson’s research, but the cops arrive and there’s a very big gun battle. (Another thing everyone liked in the ’90s was saying, “We’ve got company.”) While Dyson sets up the bombs, Terminator uses his big guns to terminate all the cop cars in the parking lot. He has a little counter on his Terminator Google Glass that tells him “Human casualties: 0.0,” so he can make sure he doesn’t violate John’s no-murdering rule. But why is there a decimal, though? In case you kill 0.25 of a person? In case you kill a person’s spirit and leave their body alive but depressed? In case you terminate the kid from Two and a Half Men?
The cops enter the building and are shooting everyone real bad. A badly injured Dyson hides behind the office equipment like, “WOW, I’m glad we bought these bulletproof fax machines! People said I was crazy!” With his dying breath, he manages to detonate the bombs and fireball the lab. Man, can you imagine if you sacrificed your life and legacy to save humanity, and then just twenty-five years later, they elected motherfucking Donald Trump to be the president? The 2016 election was disrespectful to Miles Dyson most of all, IMO!
T-1000 FINALLY shows up at the lab and rides his motorcycle up the stairs???? There’s no way that’s the fastest way! Arnold zooms away in a police car, so T-1000 rides his motorcycle onto a helicopter and then turns into a wiggly snake.
BUT OH MY GOD, WAIT: Wouldn’t the Terminator and T-1000 both disappear once you destroyed the lab?????????????????????????????????????????????? How do they exist if Skynet was never developed???????? Please, I’m crying.
One big draw of Terminator 2 was that, in the ’90s, it was really exciting to hear a kid say, “Shit.”
T-1000 chases them to a steel mill, and Arnold crashes a liquid nitrogen truck into him. The liquid nitrogen briefly freezes T-1000 solid, so Arnold says, “Hasta la vista, baby,” which is precious because he learned it from his dad-son-boss and now he’s all grown up, and then he shoots T-1000 with a gun and explodes him into little pieces.
A lot of people don’t know this, but making hasta la vista, baby his catchphrase was huge for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political career. Hasta la vista got him the Latino vote, and baby got him the baby vote! He won the governorship in that moment.4
Arnold and John stand around feeling good about themselves for a minute, but then the steel mill’s river of hot lava thaws out the T-1000 and he starts to re-form. Dude, that’s why you gotta get the dustpan! Sweep that shit up! Now T-1000 is POed. If there’s one thing he hates, it’s being frozen and then blasted into little pieces and then thawed by lava.
T-800 and T-1000 have an epic battle all over the steel mill. At one point, T-1000 takes Sarah hostage and tries to get her to call out to John because apparently he only knows two impressions: Janelle and the mental hospital security guard!? Eventually, T-1000 thinks he has squished Arnold to death at last, but then Arnold’s alternative power activates and he blasts T-1000 into the lava for good.
John can’t wait to go home and start a life with his mom and new robot dad, but Arnold is like, “No. Dere is one more chip.” Sarah and John will have to terminate T-800 or else scientists could still use his brain to create Skynet. (Presumably, also Sarah will have to go to prison now for her many murders? Does John have to go back to being a foster kid? WTF?)
As Sarah lowers Terminator into the lava because he cannot “self-terminate” and she read a lot of books about how to operate smelting equipment in the mental hospital, I guess, he raises his arm above his head, and just before his hand sinks below the surface………he gives John a thumbs-up!!!!!! And I can’t BELIEVE NONE OF YOU EVER TOLD ME ABOUT THAT, SIMULTANEOUSLY THE WORST AND BEST MOMENT IN ALL OF MOVIES, THE CORNIEST AND THE TENDEREST, UNBEARABLY DORKY YET INTOXICATINGLY ENTERTAINING, A COMMITMENT TO PURE ENTERTAINMENT THAT I WOULD LIKE TO INJECT INTO MY VEINS TO COUNTERACT THE UTTER VACUUM OF CARE IN WHICH WE ARE ALL GASPING OUR LAST BREATHS, THE PLAGUE OF DISINGENUOUSLY IRONIC CRUELTY AND FASCIST INDIVIDUALISM THAT INFESTS THE DECAYING RUIN OF TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY AMERICA, THE TRUE RISE OF THE MACHINES (US). I DO NOT KNOW WHY OR HOW THIS ROBOT LOVES THIS TERRIBLE LITTLE BOY, BUT IT KINDLES IN ME A HOPE THAT ONE DAY WE MAY LOVE ONE ANOTHER AND OURSELVES.
I’m getting a dog.
RATING: 7/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
1 It’s possible this line of questioning reveals a lack of faith, on my part, in the creative imagination. Just as Pollux Troy gave his mega-bomb “Sinclaire” the persona of a cartoon woman with outrageous sky-high naturals, perhaps the creator of the T-800 too wanted to imbue his metal son with something personal, a signature of sorts, the accent of a beloved grandfather, maybe, or the dick of another beloved grandfather. Not everything has to have utility, Lindy!!!!! Some things are just art!
2 Also, I know that T-1000 is technically very skilled at mimicking the exact body and voice of a person, but here’s a harsh toke: Terminators have bad personalities and are obvious robots no matter how much their perm looks like your mom’s! Sorry!!!
3 Why do you keep shooting him? That just gives him more metal for finger knife!
4 It was way more successful than his previous catchphrase, “Auf wiedersehen, kinderbjorn!” Unrelated: I do not speak German.