Awesome / Terminator 2: Judgment Day

"HUMAN CASUALTIES: 0.0"

Awesome moments in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

• "You Are Already Dead, Silberman, everybody dies, you know I believe it, so DON’T FUCK WITH ME!" ... "open the door"
• Two words that flipped everything we thought we knew about the T-800 on its head as it closes in on John Connor, with the T-1000 approaching from the other direction:
  T-800: Get down.
  (The T-800 opens fire on the T-1000, saving John.)
• The T-800's introductory scene, in which he goes into a pool hall and demands that a burly biker dude give him his clothes, his boots, and his motorcycle. When he disagrees, the T-800 wipes the floor with the patrons, which includes throwing the biker on top of a burning stove, and walks out of there dressed in the coolest black leather ensemble ever, made more badass when it's done to George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone". After the fight, the owner acknowledges that he can take clothes and weapons but not the bike, and the Terminator calmly walks up to him, snatches the gun away, and grabs the guy's sunglasses. Forget the Tech Noir scene, this is the greatest Establishing Character Moment ever put to film.
  • The best part, he doesn't kill anyone.
    • Even better: this is before he was prohibited from killing anyone.
    • And if you've only watched the first film by this point (and missed the entirety of T2's ad campaign), you've probably assumed he was the villain again. Another dash of awesome on top of that.
  • The bartender deserves a mention for attempting to stop the T-800 from stealing his patron's motorcycle. Rather than allow what he believes to be some random nut (who he just watched wipe the floor with a group of guys) to get away, he goes outside armed with a shotgun to confront the stranger and threatens to shoot him unless he gets off the bike. He's quickly disarmed of course and forced to back off, but merits for trying.
• The Galleria chase and the motorcycle chase right after. Those two scenes immediately establish that Terminator 2 is bigger, awesomer, and more explodey than anything that came before.
  • James Cameron personally filmed the close-up shot of the truck crashing into the canal, as none of the other cameramen were willing to be that close to it.
  • At the end of the motorcycle chase, with the tow truck exploding, the T-800 waits to see what emerges from the inferno. When it's just a burning tire, he puts away his shotgun and speeds off with John in his safe care. Seconds later, a silvery shape calmly walks out, an almost human form that starts morphing into the shape of the T-1000 police officer. This was The Reveal of just what the more advanced Terminator is and how unstoppable it can be.
• After John realizes that Janelle is acting nice to him, the T-800 tricks the T-1000 into revealing that it has killed his foster parents and is currently impersonating them with this simple exchange:
  The Terminator: (to John) What's the dog's name?
  John: Max.
  The Terminator: (mimicking John's voice) Hey Janelle, what's wrong with Wolfie? I can hear him barking.
  T-1000 impersonating Janelle: Wolfie's fine, honey, Wolfie's just fine. Where are you?
  The Terminator: (hangs up the phone) Your foster parents are dead.
• Sarah Connor's escape from Pescadero State Hospital, which involves beating an orderly senseless (he licked her face earlier, though, and beats her with a baton in a Deleted Scene), holding Dr. Silberman hostage with a syringe full of what is probably drain cleaner, and generally kicking ass (while unarmed, barefoot and wearing only sweat pants and a tank top). When the T-1000 goes after them in the elevator, she demonstrates that she is not the frightened damsel that she was in the previous film (as if it wasn't obvious already) by grabbing a pistol from the T-800's belt and shooting straight through the roof. She doesn't stop shooting until they lose the T-1000.
  • Especially this exchange:
    Silberman: You broke my arm!
    Sarah Connor: There are 215 bones in the human body. That's one.
  • A minor moment for the female guard at the hospital, even when faced with the implacable T-800, she straight out punches him in the face, breaking his Cool Shades and causing him to look genuinely pissed. It's easy to miss, but that guard has her arm in a cast, and she used the cast as a bludgeon when she clocked the Terminator. His look could be interpreted as "Nice try, but no."
• It must be pointed out that none of Sarah's lockpicking was faked- Linda Hamilton really was strapped to the bed and she really did pick the locks with a paperclip. Linda legitimately picked the locks herself. Perhaps not that impressive with the hospital bed restraints. . . they're more designed to keep violent patients from hurting themselves than secured in a specific location. The deadbolt on her hospital room door, however, is another matter entirely. Sarah Connor (and Linda Hamilton) knew how to pick both of those with properly-shaped paper clips.
• The T-1000 gets a few of his own in that scene, including becoming part of the floor in order to sneak up on a guard (whose form he then assumes before stabbing him in the eye), and walking through a door by shapeshifting around it.
• After Sarah's assassination attempt on Dyson, it's John who takes control of the situation. Compared to the other examples here, it's very mundane, but it shows that even at the age of 10, he has the qualities of an excellent leader.
  • The Director's Cut also has him talking his mother down from destroying the T-800's chip. This is the Sarah Connor who was already plotting her own escape attempt and already made it partway out of the ward, and is very angry and very distrustful (and justifiably so) toward the T-800 due to her traumatic past with a machine that looks bang-on similar to the one currently helping her. And John doesn't dismiss her experiences or talk down to her, but merely asserts that they need the machine if they hope to have a chance of winning and that if he's meant to be the leader she wants him to be, she needs to listen to him. And she stands down.
  • Edward Furlong in general flawlessly sells John's natural charisma and leadership, able to speak and be listened to by all the adults in the room. It's easy to see where the man who unites humanity against the machines will emerge from the boy we see onscreen.
• Little Danny Dyson running over in front of Sarah, who's holding a pistol after shooting up the house with an automatic rifle, and flinging himself onto his dad's body, to prevent her killing him.
  Don't hurt my daddy!
• The Minigun Scene. The T-800 kicks a desk through a window, then opens up on the cops with a freaking minigun. Once the ammo for that runs out, he blows up their cars with a handheld grenade launcher. All with 0.0 casualties. An action movie that even makes NOT killing people awesome!
• And right after that, he wades through the cops' fire in order to get close enough to shoot them in such a way where they'll live if they get medical attention. He really meant it when he promised not to kill anybody.
• The attack on Cyberdyne Systems rapidly escalates to the point where the entire LAPD is no longer able to control the situation as a massive fiery explosion engulfs the building.
  Helicopter pilot: We got a war zone down here!
• The T-1000 gets one immediately afterward when he drives a motorcycle into the building, up the stairs and out the window in order to hijack a helicopter.
• The Car Chase that follows is the stuff legends are made of. They drive a police van out onto the highway, while the T-1000 follows in the helicopter, keeping it perfectly level about three feet off the pavement (including an incredible clearing of an overpass that looks to be evaded at the last possible second) . And shoots at them while doing it. The T-800 eventually gets the bright idea to let the helicopter crash into them, which gets rid of it as a threat but also disables their own vehicle. They end up commandeering a truck while the T-1000 follows in a liquid nitrogen tanker. John takes the wheel, and the T-800 climbs onto the hood of the tanker and shoots the T-1000 in the face repeatedly until they all crash into a steel factory.
  • Perhaps the coolest part of the T-1000 chasing them in the helicopter is a very easy to miss example of Mundane Utility. In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cut, you can see the T-1000 has given himself four arms in order to pilot the chopper, fire the submachinegun, and reload at the same time.
  • The start of the chase is also heralded by a fairly simple exchange between the T-800 and Sarah, which, despite its brief length, does a great job of setting up the scene.
    Sarah: Chopper, coming in!
    T-800: It's him!
  • This also counts as a CMOA for the stunt double, Peter Kent, who did the shot of the T-800 climbing between the trucks and shooting the T-1000 through the windshield for real. No wires attached.
  • The really awesome thing is few people seem to talk about or even remember the chopper going under the overpass and narrowly avoiding the other overpass... there’s so much awesome before and after that people forget these shots that could serve as the money shots for a full feature. The crew wasn't willing to film that scene, James Cameron had to film it himself - and that's not a drone or a model. It was a real helicopter flying under a bridge.
• Once they're in the factory, the T-1000 has a little trouble moving in the liquid nitrogen before freezing entirely, and the T-800 tells him "Hasta la vista, baby," before shattering him into a million pieces. With a single bullet. He gets better, but that was still pretty damn awesome.
  • And when he starts to freeze solid, you can tell from the look on his face that the T-1000 is suddenly being faced with the reality that he is not invincible.
• The T-800 finding an alternate power source and reactivating after being impaled and battered to the point it shut down, and the main theme starting up as he pulls the steel used to impale him out of his gut. It's like Kyle said in the first film, it will not stop.
  • When the T-1000 has Sarah Connor cornered, he stabs her in the shoulder with a finger needle in much the same way he stabbed the security guard from earlier. He then tells her to call for John so that he would come and be vulnerable. Sarah refuses, and the T-1000 twists the needle, hurting Sarah even more, and tells her to call for John again. She only gives him a cold stare of rage and contempt. The T-1000 then uses the same finger he stabbed the security guard with and turns it into another needle, extending and pointing it directly at Sarah's eye, and tells her to call for John one last time. Sarah Conner's response is a simple "Fuck you." Luckily for her, the T-800 cleaves the T-1000 with a metal pole at the last second.
  • That and his Big Damn Heroes moment as he rides the conveyor belt up to the platform Sarah and John are currently trapped on opposite the T-1000. Beaten to hell, a complete mess, with half an arm missing, he blasts the T-1000 in the gut with one last grenade. Cue one of the greatest Oh, Crap! faces on film.
    • In the last moments of its life, the heroes made a Terminator feel fear.
• Sarah gets yet another one near the very end, when the T-1000 assumes her form to try and trick John. She tells her son to get down, then blasts the Terminator from behind with a huge-ass shotgun, which she then pumps one-handed, and fires again, and again, and again, until the T-1000 is standing right over the edge. She runs out of ammo before she can land the killing blow, but that's where the T-800 comes in, riding a cog up and blasting the T-1000 with the last round of his grenade launcher, sending it into the steel below.
  • The scene is perhaps the best demonstration of Sarah having taken a level in badass. She goes from the standard Damsel in Distress in the first film to nearly being able to destroy the T-1000 on her own, without the T-800's help. And the reason they had her doing that at all was because Linda Hamilton had actually become strong enough in preparation for the film to rack a shotgun one-handed.
  • Remember that the reason Sarah was even doing her one-armed shotgun trick is because the T-1000 had previously stabbed her through the shoulder, twisting his finger in the wound for added effect, in order to get her to call out for John. She did not. Nor did she let the painful wound keep her from coming to her son's defense yet again. The glance the T-800 gave her after she attacked Miles Dyson? Likely that machine realizing that her single-minded determination to protect her child had transformed Sarah Connor into the closest thing to a Terminator a human can become.
• Okay, this is from the Guns N' Roses music video. After the song we are shown a stinger with the band leaving the gig where they come across the T-800. As he walks past he identifies the band members by name, then when he identifies Axl Rose his Stat-O-Vision declares Waste of ammo, Arnie lowers the shotgun, and smirks. Yeeeeaaaahhhh.
• During the Flash Forward in the prologue. We see a wave of terrifying killer machines rolling across the battlefield, slaughtering humans left and right, but then we see another human soldier giving a crippled Terminator a coup-de-grace, followed by one of the flying Hunter-Killers getting knocked out of the sky by an Anti-Air missile. Even better, most of this was straight out of Kyle Reese's Flash Back from the first movie, except the last two bits happened after the flashback ended, making it a case of Once More, with Clarity.
• Every time the T-1000 sprints and runs like a demon and is just this close to grabbing its target. Implacable Man made even more awesome through sheer speed.
  • Even moreso is the fact that you never see the T-1000 looking winded or tired after a sprint. That's not special effects or camera work; that's the end result of Robert Patrick training with a sprinter to get himself to where he could sprint over fair distances without showing signs of distress afterwards.
  • He reputedly got so good at sprinting that the scene of him pursuing a fleeing bike had to be reshot multiple times because he kept catching it.
• Be honest: You want to be able to do Arnie's one handed shotgun flip, don't you?
• The T-1000's incredibly haunting Dissonant Serenity is awesome in its own terrifyingly understated sort of way.
• Here's an example from a scene that was cut from the film but thankfully preserved in the novelization: A young Resistance soldier comes across another soldier that he identifies as a Terminator. Not from past experience or from nearby dogs barking, but because he was wearing the wrong color on his uniform (specifically, the color from last week). Without even hesitating, he fires a grenade launcher and blows it to bits before it even gets a chance to act. Even better? This was the same Terminator that Kyle Reese witnessed shooting up the Resistance base in the first movie.
• The alternate ending is both Heartwarming and awesome if not for one thing: humanity was saved. Skynet is now destroyed, both of its last hopes to survive crushed, and Judgement Day? It hasn't happened. No bombs fell. Computers didn't take control. Mankind stopped Judgement Day, and it is to never happen at all.
  • Somewhat mitigated come Terminator: Dark Fate - while the oblivious human race is already at work with constructing a new A.I., Legion, it is confirmed multiple times that Skynet itself is still a complete goner. Mankind may not be out of the woods just yet, but the ultimate Big Bad of the franchise is definitely destroyed for all time.
• Most people seem to think that freezing the T-1000 in liquid nitrogen, then having it thaw, meant that freezing it did nothing, but then basic chemistry kicks in. Metals REALLY dislike extreme temperature differentials, and they IMMENSELY loathe when such variations in temperature happen rapidly, because they get brittle due to the molecular bonds being damaged so much. And Robert Patrick shows this in some subtle cues. The T-1000's reaction times are slower than before, as if the machine is trying to work with a damaged computer. Its movements are less graceful and precise, and the T-1000 seems to be unable to keep up with a 10-year-old, an injured adult, and a damaged robot. And finally, it seems to be recovering from damage at a lesser rate. Granted, all of these changes aren't obviously telegraphed, just nuanced, but they show that the T-1000 has been wounded and damaged, and is having to resort to the tactics of trickery and deceit it was using when it was assuming a low profile. The changes/damage ARE telegraphed pretty blatantly in the Special Edition, via a few scenes that were deleted from the theatrical cut. It shows that it is having trouble maintaining its shape, and even accidentally sticks itself to a metal railing.
• The T-1000 is searching through the arcade and approaches John's delinquent mate Tim^note A character so minor that he was quite literally shoved out of the franchise after this scene, never to appear again asking for his whereabouts. Without missing a beat Tim looks at the photo as cool as a cucumber, shrugs and says "Nah, I don't know 'im", and then rounds the corner and runs to warn John that a cop is looking around for him and he should disappear out the fire exit. In other words: A good-for-nothing, school-skipping street punk with a crap haircut unknowingly saved mankind. By lying to a cop. Without Tim there, the T-1000 would have found John haplessly playing on the games and assassinated him before the T-800 would acquire him. Talk about Small Role, Big Impact.

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