Sunday, October 10, 2010

Watch The Hit Film Terminator 2: Judgment Day

By Naomi Gilliam

There is a lot to love about Terminator 2 - Judgment Day. It is up there with many other classic science fiction movies as one that is indispensable to the genre. The cinematography is great, and when the aspects of fate and trying to save the world are mixed in with the sometimes cheesy dialog and acting, we are left with one incredibly charming movie.

This movie pits a ragtag group, Sarah Conner, John Conner, and the original Terminator against a much more sophisticated robot from the future, the T-1000. The T-1000 is a nearly indestructible robot that has a liquid metal that allows it to mimic almost anything it wants to.

The heroes of the story are trying to stop the global Armageddon that lead to the rise in the machines. They believe that if they can change a few things in the present, then the robots will never be able to rise up against the humans. By the end of the movie they think that they have succeeded. We find out later, in the next movie, that they only moved back the date of the robots taking over.

There is a lot about fate in this movie. Fate and destiny are recurring themes throughout the series. Strangely, there is a lot about changing fate, changing the future. There is a little bit of a modern political argument that can be seen here. Environmentalists say that humans are destroying the planet with pollution, but that we can still change the future and save the planet. This argument may or may not hold water, but what is safe to say is that it is a big topic, and this movie was on top of it a long time before it came into the mainstream of politics.

There are other issues at play here as well. Sarah Conner is in a mental institute at the beginning of the movie. This could be seen as a sort of discussion on the state of mental health care in America. Though her story does seem very crazy, and she has become quite a violent woman, she actually isn't crazy. The audience knows that.

Everyone treats her like she is nuts. The filmmakers may be trying to say that this is part of the problem with our system. If someone says something that seems outlandish, it must be mental illness. Granted what she was saying did seem very crazy, and maybe they were trying to point out how hard it was to be Sarah Conner and not really saying anything bad about our health care system, but it seems fair that it could be saying something about both.

John Conner is supposed to be the great savior of mankind when he grows up. Yet at the time of this movie he is just a kid who has had a bizarre upbringing and is starting to get into a life of crime (stealing from ATM machines). John doesn't actually know that what his mom has told him is true anymore than the mental health professionals think its true.

The strange thing about Terminator 2 - Judgment Day is that if we take the time-traveling robots out of the equation, then we see a completely different story. Without them showing up, John is being raised by a series of foster parents and a crazy woman. He is being told crazy things that really don't make a lot of sense. And it's all coming from the mind of a very seriously mentally ill woman. Fortunately, the robots do so up, so instead of a story about a horribly dysfunctional family, we are instead treated to a story with some of the most amazing action sequences ever put on film.

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