What’s Aged the Best?
Liquid-metal T-1000; hidden good-guy twist; Robert Patrick; cutting the Cyberdyne plot from Terminator 1; catchphrases; "It's in your nature to destroy yourself"; rat-boy John Connor; police as villains
In the discussion (17)
Approx. transcript time · 00:47:53Read transcript
- The idea of an improved Terminator 2.0 made of liquid is fantastic.
- Hiding that Schwarzenegger was the good guy during the run-up to the movie aged well.
- Young Robert Patrick running and quickly murdering people with metal hands is a three-way tie for aged best.
- Would Usain Bolt beat Robert Patrick? Why didn't the T-1000 morph into a sprinter like Michael Johnson or Carl Lewis?
- Patrick reportedly took sprinting technique so seriously that he was catching the motor scooter and was told to slow down.
- Robert Patrick is certainly one of the great movie athletes. — Chris Ryan
- Patrick's later career (Cop Land, a key Sopranos role, action films) looked like an effort to escape the Terminator image; he reprised the role for one scene in Last Action Hero.
- Teaching Arnold slang ('no problemo', 'hasta la vista, baby', 'chill out, dickwad') is a borderline rewatchable scene that shouldn't work but does.
- This is one of the only movies helped by narration; narration usually signals script trouble, but her voice works here.
- The narration is great and ties to the alternate ending.
- Narration usually sucks but works when sparse, as in Stand by Me, Shawshank and Goodfellas. — Van Lathan
- Destroying Cyberdyne was an idea cut from the first Terminator and left in its deleted scenes; Cameron banked it as the nucleus of T2, making that cut an aged-best decision.
- 'Hasta la vista, baby' and 'I'll be back' became iconic pop-culture lines repeated even by a mother at the shopping cart.
- The last aged-best pick is the Terminator coldly telling John 'it's in your nature to destroy yourself'.
- The line hit close to home and made the movie a tough watch for a self-described neurotic, anxious Van; his father would side with the Terminator ('nah, he right'). — Van Lathan
- Rat-boy John Connor, with the Public Enemy shirt, motocross bike, arcade scams and foster-parent friction, is a great conception of the future resistance leader; finding Furlong outside the Pasadena boys club was one in a million.
- The police as the bad guys aged best: the film has a healthy skepticism about the police, and it flipped the heroic-cop mentality of Colors from two years earlier.