Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Annotation for 70mm film seminar 2009 by Radomír D. Kokeš

In the context of American film, T2 represents a phenomenon far beyond the action science fiction genre, and every shot exudes perfectionism that goes beyond the usual framework of Hollywood production. The plot is de facto copied from the first part: An evil robot from the post-apocalyptic future moves into the ‘present’ to kill a specific person, thus changing the flow of time in favor of machines controlling humanity. The good side sends its fighter to prevent this.

While the first part was mainly based on the plot, the sequel complicates it on a number of levels and pays much more attention to themes such as responsibility, family, upbringing, tolerance, humanism, technophobia or the potential of the relationship between a machine and a human (all of these motifs will surface even more in the director’s extended version). The horizontal flow of the clearly linked narrative is thus constantly problematized by vertically distributed meanings, which force us to perceive the story in a much broader context than the genre.

However, the film is revolutionary, especially from the point of view of the technical history of American cinematography. Firstly, it incorporated elements into the narrative that depended on the then very complicated method of digital morphing (i.e. the continuous transformation of one object into another). Secondly, it offered a very impressive and, according to physicists, also plausible reconstruction/simulation of the behavior of a large city during a nuclear explosion. Thirdly, it uses the then latest possibilities of film sound.

Despite the fact that the individual elements largely correspond to the opinion that Hollywood film in its ‘digital’ form has returned to the mode of so-called cinematography of attractions, T2 primarily involves all technical aspects in the power of the narrative and offers exceptionally captivating entertainment that has lost none of its impact even after eighteen years.