To keep giving the AFI the stinkeye, we here at Red America are even giving you a countdown list out of order. Rebellious, no?
Our eleventh awesome-est movie moment is the end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, where the Terminator is lowered into molten steel to destroy the final piece of Skynet. As he goes in, he gives John Connor the thumbs up.
You know, for a film concerned with robots, the apocalypse, explosions, car chases, and all that, Terminator 2 is a really good film about fatherhood. The Terminator franchise is really being whored out at the moment (what with Hollywood being out of ideas), and in retrospect, there’s not even that much there. The first film was a hokey sci-fi film that managed to overachieve and be really interesting, and the third film was a two hour car chase that barely qualifies as a movie. The current TV series looks like a joke, and the upcoming film with Christian Bale… well, who knows? James Cameron intended for the saga to end with the second installment, and he up and refused to do the third. We all know now that he pretty much told Arnold to do the third for a “shitload of money”.
Anyhow.
So we’re all familiar with the plot: boy is destined to be great, future machines hate boy, send killer assassin robot back in time after boy, future humans panic, future humans reprogram future machine to go back in time to save boy, drama ensues. Arnold Schwarzenegger reprises his role as The Terminator, a T-800 model. In the first film, he was after Sarah Connor, but now, he’s the cuddly protector of her son. Fortunately for the Connors, the T-800 is fitted with a Neural Net Processor, a learning computer. (Or, in Arnold’s words: A NOOWALL NET PWACESSAH, A LERNINK COMPOOTAH) So, the machine can learn from his surroundings. Instead of reading books or watching TV, the Terminator learns everything from his assignment and commander – John. The only problem is that John is a pretty lousy kid. He swears, steals, is friends with the red haired kid from Salute Your Shorts, etc., and now has a futuristic killing machine at his disposal. Yeah, at first, he dicks the robot around, but quickly realizes what kind of power he has when the robot almost shoots someone. John grows up in a hurry, apparently, and orders the Terminator not to kill anyone else. The T-800 suggests they go into hiding to avoid the T-1000, but John instead decides to save his mother. Even after busting his mom out of a mental hospital, she goes off on her own to try and kill innocent people to prevent the future, and John intervenes again to do the right thing.
Sarah eventually comes to the same conclusion we do: John’s not a bad kid, he just needed what he didn’t have before – a father figure. The Terminator may not be his biological father, but he would protect him, watch him, and never leave him. Somehow, the three actually form a, well, a dysfunctional family unit. John teaches the Terminator how to cope, express emotion, and about the value of life. All pretty sappy stuff, I suppose, but it’s all accomplished in a non-sappy way. With guns!
Of course, the film has to end at some point, and the attachment that John’s forged with a machine has to end. The future, they’re sure, can’t be one of a nuclear holocaust if all the pieces to the puzzle are destroyed. So, the three destroy the lab that created Skynet (and Skynet’s primary creator), destroy the terminator hunting John, and destroy the pieces of the original Terminator. The Terminator, however, realizes he’s the final piece, and has to be destroyed. Panicking at losing the only real father figure he’s known, John tries to bargain, but the machine convinces him there’s only one way for things to end. And that’s that. Arnie is lowered into molten metal, and is gone, and gives us the signal to let us know that the ride’s over. The thumbs up from the Terminator is, yeah, a sign to John that his fantasy relationship with a “real dad” is over, but that he’s going to be okay. And so is the future.
Well, until Terminator 3.
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