How is this possible, you ask? Especially when I've seen T2 at least eight times, and wouldn't be surprised if it were double digits?
Well I never saw The Terminator in the years between when it was released in 1984 and when Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released in 1991. My first exposure to the Terminator universe was in T2, at which point my mind was blown and I was on board for however many decades of later releases were yet to come. (Most of which have been disappointing, but with intermittent pleasures along the way.) I might have caught five minutes of the original on cable at a friend's house, but that was it.
The actual date of my single previous Terminator viewing is lost to time. I didn't start keeping track of the dates I watched movies until 2002, so it was sometime between 1991 and 2002. I know I didn't rush out right away after T2 to watch it. It might have taken at least a few more years and happened somewhat organically.
The fact that I haven't seen the original The Terminator more than once until now seems even more absurd when you consider that I rewatched two demonstrably lesser Terminator movies, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and Terminator: Dark Fate, before I got to a rewatch of the original. That's very strange on the face of it, though at least those two are my next two favorites in the series. (Leaving Terminator: Salvation and Terminator: Genisys on the outside looking in. Like, way on the outside, barely able to see the inside from their vantage point.)
There's a reason I haven't watched The Terminator again since the 1990s. It's not that I think it's bad. In fact, I think it's quite good. It's just that it pales in comparison to T2, feeling like a fossil by comparison, certainly technology wise, and possibly even narratively.
We may generally prize practical effects over digital effects, but the liquid metal Terminator in T2 came along at a time when we weren't already ruined for digital, and it still looks good today. It's kind of like the digital effects in Starship Troopers. (In fact I've probably made that comparison before.)
That's in stark contrast to the practical effects of The Terminator, which probably already looked quaint even by 1991. We may feel warm fuzzies about the Schwarzenegger mask and the Ray Harryhausen-style movements of the skinless terminator endoskeleton, but that's only because it reminds us of a lost, simpler time -- not because it actually looks good.
The liquid metal, combined with some dynamite storytelling and action set pieces, levelled up the whole series, leaving that film's predecessor feeling antiquated and small by comparison. So when I'm looking to scratch a Terminator itch, I never think of being able to do that in the original Terminator. (You could also make the argument that I prefer my Arnie as a protagonist, which he is every other time he appears throughout the saga.)
And this was my thinking behind being uncertain about whether to show The Terminator to my kids, now ages 12 and 16.
Why is this even coming up, you ask? Well I'll tell you.
Sunday (today) is Father's Day in Australia. I'm not huge on days in my honor, and I treat it a bit like my birthday -- I'll take a few token gestures on my behalf, and I don't want to do anything I don't want to do, but other than that, I don't want a big fuss made over it. Especially this year, when my wife is overwhelmed with work-related things.
She asked if there were any good movies to see, but this is a bad time of year for that. Although the theatrical release schedule is not as black and white as it once was, late August/early September is still not a great time for new movie releases. Especially new movie releases that might feel "special" in some way.
But I can tell you what does feel special: Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Which I've already seen once in the theater this year, back when I saw the altered musical score (plus added laser effects) for the Hear My Eyes series, as discussed here. But that wasn't going to stop me from making this our Father's Day activity.
It's playing today at 3:45 at my favorite theater, The Sun in Yarraville, for its 35th anniversary. And I guess I need to stop pooh-poohing random anniversary years (see this post), because this will now be the second time I'm celebrating the 35th anniversary of the release of T2.
My last viewing brought home with me a resolve that we needed to show this to our kids, which I shared with my wife at the time, back in February. What a golden opportunity to do so, on the big screen no less.
The thing is, doesn't T2 have more impact if you've already seen The Terminator? My own personal experience notwithstanding?
I stand as living proof that you can love Terminator 2: Judgment Day on its own merits, not having consumed anything about this world previously, and not having your mind blown that there was a reversal from the first movie, where Arnold Schwarzenegger went from villain to good guy. I already knew that anyway, because of course it was in the culture back in the '80s.
But The Terminator isn't in the culture to the same extent, in that my kids don't appear to have grown up with its mythology. They've heard of the movie, but didn't even know the central tenets of the series, which is built on the need to kill John Connor before he ascends to command the rebellion against the machines, potentially even before he's born. In fact, they didn't even know who John Connor or Sarah Connor were.
So they were in a position indeed to be faked out by the start of T2, when you just think Arnie is back to try again to kill the young John Connor ... but only if they saw the original movie.
My wife could go either way on it. She left it up to me. I think she was excited to see the original again -- she's seen T2 few enough times that she actually thinks the original might be superior -- but she was willing to yield to my concerns, it being Father's Day and all.
And I definitely had reason for worry. The things that blew our minds when we were young are, in some cases, just too old-fashioned for today's young people. I knew this wasn't possible with T2, given how modern it still feels, but its predecessor lacks those bells and whistles. And if you think I'm overreacting and that I should give my kids more credit, I still remember well the time my older son started to watch Jaws on the plane, but then abandoned the viewing after less than 15 minutes because it was just "too old."
The danger was, we'd already bought the tickets to T2. If they both hated The Terminator, it would put quite the damper on our Father's Day activity.
Well I decided we should do it. I set up the projector in the garage -- my first projector movie in ages -- and popped up some popcorn. We'd order dinner during the movie, to arrive for its second half.
And I think it was pretty much a success.
Neither kid was effusive in their praise. My older son said it was "cool," but that could have been diplomacy, knowing that there was a lot riding on this viewing and not wanting to poison the well in advance of T2. My wife and I quickly took over with our own effusive praise, so I can't recall my younger son's reaction. But later he showed his engagement with the viewing when he talked about being faked out by Kyle Reese, thinking he was another terminator -- at which point my decision to watch the movie, in order to support a similar sort of fake-out in T2, was totally vindicated.
"Exactly!" I enthused. "You're supposed to not know and that's supposed to increase the tension!"
(That's not exactly what I said, but it was what I wished I'd said.)
I'm not going to include a lot of Terminator takeaways in this post, but one of them was just how little exposition there is in the first 25 minutes or so of this movie. In fact there's very little dialogue, and what's there is largely limited to Sarah Connor, her roommate and her roommate's boyfriend. Eventually the detectives played by Paul Winfield and Lance Henriksen get a fair amount of chatter too.
But exposition actually related to the time travellers? There's almost none. And indeed, that's designed to fake us out, but we're also just trying to get oriented in this world. There's some on-screen text at the start about the war with the robots being waged in present day, but after that, we don't really know who these guys are who materialized in a Tesla coil's worth of lightning. I noted specifically that we don't even see Schwarzenegger's POV computer readouts until it's firmly established that he's the villain, and definitely an android.
Once Reese gets talking it becomes a veritable exposition dump, making up for all the previous paucity of details. But we need it to fully acquaint ourselves with the stakes of Sarah Connor escaping her own assassination.
The action scenes are pretty good. The visual effects are, I try to tell myself, quite sophisticated for 1984. And the relationship between Reese and Sarah is touching enough.
But I know this is never going to stand a chance for me against T2, and a second viewing didn't change that. I need to remind myself that the concepts themselves -- among them the paradox of a person sent back in time to become the father of the very person who sent him back -- were part of what made the original Terminator so great. It's easy to take that for granted when you've lived with these ideas for 42 years.
But even if this movie hadn't worked for my kids, I knew I had the ace up my sleeve that the sequel was the best in the series, which I had told them. In fact, I had told them that the first one was a little old-fashioned but the second one was not. And whether she actually believed it or not, my wife now co-signed, at least verbally to the kids, that the second one was the best in the series. I didn't know if she was able to decide that based on this viewing and a retroactive memory of T2, but she enthused to me privately that this had been really fun, so I suspect The Terminator didn't suffer for her on her most recent viewing.
And so it's all down hill from here, in other words, now we can coast to Terminator 2, in about five hours. I'll let you know tomorrow how it goes.
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