TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY [1991] review

I believe that TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY was the first movie I saw in the theater twice in my teenage years (I saw ROCKY IV numerous times in the theater as a kid).  It was a huge deal.  I was a dedicated Guns ‘N Roses fan and the release of the new single “You Could Be Mine” had me worked up into a frenzy.  I have not seen the movie since its release, to my knowledge, so I was very stoked to re-watch in preparation for the new TERMINATOR SALVATION.  The nostalgia factor was high.  Yet I found myself being increasingly skeptical of T2.

THE TERMINATOR is a sci-fi masterpiece.  So incredibly simple and focused, and entirely gimmick free.  I now think that anytime you introduce a kid into a movie franchise, that is the point of its failure, or at the very least, its fall into gimmick.  For comparison, T1 had ZERO one-liners (at least no lame ones Arnold), while T2 was chuck full of them and lines I perhaps thought were badass when I was 17, I know cringed at.  

T2 has a huge down stretch in the middle of the movie where my mind wandered a bit.  Basically whenever the T-1000 was off the screen the movie dragged a bit.  

There was also no real sense of dread in this movie.  In the climax of T1, I’m a nervous wreck trying to will Sarah to safety.  In T2 I don’t feel that at all as the sense of danger is much less, most likely due to relying on CGI.  T2 is one of the very first movies to incorporate true CGI on a large scale.  

Other questions I have, why does the T-1000 scream in pain like a wild beast sometimes when it is “hurt?”  Why did Arnold shoot up all the police outside of a building when he later just gassed them into submission anyway?  

So to my great surprise T2 was not a grand stroll down memory lane, but rather the tarnishing of a decades long shining memory.

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