Terminator 2: Judgment Day

James Cameron understands something most action directors don’t. Scale without feeling is just noise. Terminator 2: Judgment Day has scale to burn, but it earns every explosion because it gets the feelings right first. It’s a story about fatherhood disguised as an action epic.

The setup is a neat inversion. Arnold Schwarzenegger returns as a Terminator, but this time he’s the protector, not the killer. His charge is John Connor, played by Edward Furlong, a punk kid who will someday lead humanity’s war against the machines. The machines know this too, so they’ve sent their own agent: a T-1000, played by Robert Patrick, who is made of liquid metal and can assume the form of anything he touches.

Cameron did something similar with Aliens, swapping in trained marines for the first film’s blue-collar crew. He understands that sequels work not by repeating the formula but by altering the equation. Give the audience a more competent hero, then give them a reason to need one.

Patrick is that reason. Where Schwarzenegger’s original terminator was a Cold War nightmare, all bulk and inevitability, Patrick is something else entirely. He doesn’t barrel through obstacles. He stalks. There’s a Michael Myers quality to him, right down to a deliberate head-tilt during a kill. He’s not emotionless like the first terminator. He’s cold, which is worse. Empty implies nothing inside. Patrick suggests a darkness that enjoys the work.

The film is a triumph of pacing. Cameron builds it like a roller coaster. A high-speed chase through a Los Angeles drainage basin. A breakout from a mental hospital. A break-in at a secret research facility. A final showdown in a smelting plant. Each one tops the last.

The staging insists on a sense of geography and spectacle. Cameron uses wide shots, cranes, and helicopters like a magician showing he’s got nothing up his sleeve. When Patrick drives a tractor-trailer off an overpass and crashes into the basin below, Cameron shows us the entire width of the channel, the full arc of the fall. When a small army of police surrounds the research facility, we see every car. He never hides. He never cuts around the difficult shot. He delivers the goods.

But Cameron’s real gift is emotional. Consider the moment Schwarzenegger and Furlong first meet. Furlong is fleeing Patrick, who’s disguised as a cop. He rounds a corner in a back hallway and finds Schwarzenegger blocking his path, shotgun rising. “Get down.” Two words. Then Schwarzenegger steps around the boy and absorbs an entire magazine of bullets into his back, shielding the kid with his body. For a boy who has never had a father worth the name, this machine becomes everything a father should be: decisive, selfless, effective. One scene, two words of dialogue, and Cameron has sold the emotional stakes of the entire picture.

He should have trusted that instinct more often. Cameron’s weakness has always been dialogue. Schwarzenegger and Patrick benefit from having almost nothing to say. Linda Hamilton, returning as John’s mother Sarah, and Furlong are not so lucky. Cameron uses them to explain things the camera has already shown us. The worst offender is a voiceover in which Hamilton spells out that the terminator would make a perfect father figure. We can see that. We don’t need the lecture.

Hamilton, a skilled enough performer, mostly survives the exposition. Furlong does not. His dialogue aims for streetwise and precocious but lands on whiny. Some of that is the writing. Some of it is the kid. The role needed a young River Phoenix, someone who could make bad lines sound lived-in. Furlong makes competent lines sound recited. The film works in spite of him, which is a testament to everything around him.

These are blemishes on a great picture, not fatal flaws. Terminator 2 ages uncannily well with its fears about artificial intelligence and autonomous warfare. Like Aliens, it doesn’t compete with the original so much as restage it at a different tempo and a grander scale. The first film is a horror movie. This one is an action epic. Pick whichever you’re in the mood for. You won’t go wrong.