Word: t2
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...culture" of our suburbs has fared little better. This summer every mall Cineplex in the nation showed The Doctor, T2 and City Slickers. Every mall has a Gap, the Wonder Bread of clothing stores. Upscale malls have The Sharper Image; downscale malls have Spencer Gifts. Utility and necessity have faded into the distance as things suburbanites don't have to bother with...
BUTCH. In The Terminator, Hamilton's Sarah Connor evolved from a klutzy waitress to a warrior woman who crushed the killer robot in a hydraulic press and spat out the immortal line: "You're terminated, f---er." In T2 Sarah is a guerrilla gone south, dynamiting computer facilities, threatening to inject drain cleaner into the veins of her captors, stashing weapons with her own righteous version of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. She is a more twisted sister of Sigourney Weaver's Ripley in Aliens (also written and directed by T2's James Cameron), who proves her maternal mettle by blasting...
...ultra-violent Bible story? This is only one of the movie's complex, even contradictory, vectors. T2 is also a macho movie that scorns the male-stud ego: the picture believes that the only good man is a mechanical man. And it parades its fabulous film technology while predicting that the world could end when military technology -- the Strategic Defense Initiative, here called Skynet -- runs amuck. It's a Star Wars movie that is anti-Star Wars. All these colliding metaphors feed nicely off Cameron's belief in the duality of human nature. "Within us," he says, "we have both...
...good while, T2 operates persuasively on the gut level where most moviegoers live. It establishes Schwarzenegger as a stolid icon with a sense of humor, swatting down some bikers like a bad-to-the-bone good ole boy, reloading one of the movie's zillion firearms with a fancy twirl of the wrist -- proving he has become, in Schwarzenegger's words, "a kinder, gentler terminator" by forswearing murder: he merely shoots off a record number of kneecaps. And T-1000 seems an ideal villain. It can replicate any person it touches and annihilate its victim with a slash...
...moment never comes. T2 dithers off to transform Schwarzenegger into a mixture of E.T. and Shane. As for Hamilton, who in The Terminator had been a precursor for all the tough-as-kryptonite women in Cameron's later films, she degenerates into a radical ranter, like Patty Hearst in her S.L.A. phase. Is this worth $100 million? Who cares? Ask instead: Is it worthy of our expectations for this Sequel of Sequels? The answer is: not quite. Terminator 2 had to be more than just the summer's best action movie...