Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (some people call it T2) is a 1991 American action-science fiction movie set in Los Angeles. It was directed, co-produced, and co-written by James Cameron, and stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong and Robert Patrick. It is the second movie of the series, the 1984 movie The Terminator was the first, and picks up ten years after the events of the first movie. It follows Sarah Connor, her 10-year-old son John, and a helper from the future (as in the first movie), as they try to stop Judgment Day, a day in the future when machines will start to kill all humans.

T2 was a good movie as audience and critics say. It had an impact on people, and is known by many to have had power in the genres of action and science fiction. The movie's visual effects include many discoveries in computer made special effects, marking the first use of natural human movement for a CG character and the first computer made main character.

Story

In 1995, eleven years after Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) killed the original Terminator that was sent to kill her with the help of Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), two men arrive in Los Angeles from the year 2029. The first is a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) identical to the one that Sarah first met, while the second is an unknown man (Robert Patrick).

John Connor (Edward Furlong) is now living with foster parents. He has grown up being told by his mother that he would someday lead the human race to beat the machines. Sarah has changed a lot because since the first movie - being stronger in mind and body - making people think she is crazy, and so she is sent to a mental hospital - Pescadero State Hospital.

Meanwhile, the Terminator and the unknown man both find John Connor in a shopping mall. Then, there is a twist: the unknown man is not the one who is meant to stop John getting killed, as the people watching thought so based on the first movie. The Terminator from the first movie is now the one meant to stop John getting killed, and the other man is another Terminator trying to kill John. When the good Terminator rescues John, he tells him what is happening. He is a Model 101, made by the future John Connor to act as the one to keep him from harm. The other Terminator is a T-1000, sent to kill him. It is made of mimetic polyalloy, or liquid metal, making it able to morph anyone or anything he touches of equal size, except "complex machines" like "guns and explosives" because they "have chemicals, moving parts." It can however form "knives and stabbing weapons."

When John learns that the T-1000 will copy Sarah and then kill her, he and the Terminator go to rescue her. Sarah is very afraid by it, but after seeing it fight off the T-1000, she accepts that they need its help. As they escape the city, the Terminator tells her about the future of Skynet, the supercomputer that will get rid of humans. He tells her about its maker, Miles Bennet Dyson (Joe Morton), who makes a learning computer that suddenly becomes self-aware on August 4, 1997. It begins learning very quickly, and on August 29, 1997, it launches nuclear missiles that kills most humans.

Sarah, John, and the Terminator arrive in the desert at her friend Enrique Salceda’s camp, who has kept an underground weapons stash in the event that the war does happen. Sarah plans to take John and flee over the line that is between the US and Mexico. While at the camp, she finds out that by killing Dyson, she can stop Skynet from being made, stopping the war with the machines. After she leaves, John and the Terminator figure out what she is going to do and take off after her. At Dyson's home, Sarah tries to shoot him with sniper rifle, but when she misses, she finds that she can not kill him up close in front of his family. When John and the Terminator arrive, they tell Dyson of the bad things that will happen of his research. They make sure he knows why they must break all the things to do with his chip idea, including the CPU and arm from the first Terminator.

Sarah, John, the Terminator, and Dyson break into the Cyberdyne building and find the parts from the first Terminator. While make bombs to blow up the rest, security tells the police who show up in force. When the SWAT team enters the building, they shoot Dyson quite a few times which really hurts him, he stays behind to press the button to blow the place up, which killed Dyson.

They leave in a SWAT van, with the T-1000 chasing them, first in a helicopter, then a liquid nitrogen truck. The truck crashes into a steel mill, this makes the tank to open and liquid nitrogen to spill all over the place, freezing the T-1000. Even though the Terminator breaks him into many small pieces by shooting him, they thaw and come back together. The T-1000 and Model 101 begin to fight hand to hand, with the T-1000 stabbing him through the power cell with a metal pole, switching him off. The T-1000 then goes to hunt John, he turns himself into a Sarah copy. As John finds the two Sarah's, the Terminator, who had turned itself back on using a different power source, shoots the T-1000 with a grenade launcher, throwing it back into a pit of molten metal, melting it.

After John throws the parts from the first Terminator into the molten metal, the Terminator tells him that he too must die to stop his technology from being used to create Skynet. He tells Sarah that he cannot kill himself, and she must lower him into the steel. As he goes down, he reaches up with a thumbs up, the last thing to go under. The movie ends with a dark highway at night, and Sarah's repetition of the phrase that Reese told her in the first movie. "The future is not set."

Terminator 2: Judgment Day Media

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  Director James Cameron in 2016

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  The intersection in Bull Creek spillway, North Hills (pictured in 2018), from which the T-1000 crashes into the flood-control channel below

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  The interior of Kaiser Steel mill in Fontana, California (circa 1949), served as the location of the film's ending.

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  Waxwork of the T-800 at Madame Tussauds, London

Other websites

• Terminator 2: Judgment Day on IMDb
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day - Script