James Cameron makes the kind of movies you fall in love with as a child, write off as trashy action flicks when you develop a superiority complex around film, and eventually regard as masterpieces. Watching the Yale Film Archive’s 35mm print of Terminator 2: Judgment Day on Wednesday, November 8th, I was transported to my childhood. For a second time, I sat at the edge of my seat as the evil superintelligence system Skynet sent their nefarious agent into the past to murder John Connor, the future leader of the human resistance against robot dominion.
On this watch I was struck by an aspect of Terminator 2 which had gone under my radar as a child: the film’s villain, the T-1000. An advanced Terminator model, the T-1000 is constructed from liquid metal, allowing him to morph into any shape imaginable. Cameron endlessly exploits the conceptual possibilities of the villain’s form; he turns his arm into a blade to lacerate the head of John’s foster father, then turns it into a wedge to force open the doors of an elevator. More than Terminator 2’s plot or characters, it is this visual concept of a formless evil, a villain with no true form underlying its constantly changing appearance, that drives the film forward.
Terminator 2 (1991) introduces the scarily prescient idea of A.I. as a nebulous killer, a virtual being with no physical core and no possible limitation on its quest to eliminate its future opposition. The terrifying force of this concept has led many to read the film in a boringly technophobic light, invoking Terminator 2 alongside 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner as a warning against the dystopian potential of A.I. This past June, Schwarzenegger himself commented that Terminator’s plot “has become a reality.” But this luddite angle feels too simplistic for Cameron, whose films clearly find a certain beauty and elegance in technology, even in terrifying forms like the T-1000. Let us not forget that John Connor is only saved from the T-1000 through the efforts of a benevolent machine; technology’s allure may destroy us, but it is also the only tool that can save us.
I want to introduce another, geopolitical dimension which further complicates this reading, inspired by some introductory remarks at the screening given by Yale Professor Theodore Kim. Explaining Cameron’s groundbreaking use of reflection mapping to simulate the T-1000’s liquid metal body, Kim, who is currently working on a book about the history of CGI, mentioned that the technology that allowed Cameron to imitate the physics of liquid metal is the very same technology the military uses to replicate enemy terrain for soldiers and pilots in training. This observation, along with Kim’s comments on the film’s anti-militaristic undertones, drew me to consider Terminator 2 in a new light—not simply as a dystopian vision of A.I. dominion, but a concrete critique of the U.S. military’s technological advances. There is a chilling resonance between the tactics of Terminator’s villainous A.I, “Skynet,” and the U.S. military’s own practices of “clean warfare.” Today, drones piloted from across the globe fire at enemies before they are even aware they have been targeted. American foreign interventions have transformed from direct combat to remote manhunt. Our military presence abroad is that of an amorphous virtual combatant like the T-1000—shifting, stealthy, and unstoppable. If technology allows, perhaps one day the U.S. will adopt Skynet’s own method of time-traveling subterfuge, avoiding combat altogether by killing their opposition in the past.
Such an interpretation brings Terminator 2 closer in line with Cameron’s work, an œuvre riddled with anxieties about America’s presence abroad (most obviously in the anti-colonial metaphor of Avatar). His films portray the struggles of small, victimized groups, like The Resistance which John Connor goes on to lead, against immense, technologically advanced enemy forces. Read as a chilling distillation of present geopolitical reality rather than a mere warning about the future, Terminator 2 acquires a new urgency. Beyond its father-son dynamics and its Schwarzenegger fight scenes, the film encapsulates the feeling, experienced by many in the world right now, of being hunted down, chased by an enemy which cannot be contained, defeated, or stopped.