But first, some background.
If you read yesterday's post, you know that we watched The Terminator on Saturday night as a family movie in order to prepare for yesterday's Australian Father's Day viewing of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The first was a mild success, which I celebrated with a relieved exhale.
See, we'd already bought the T2 tickets. If the first had been a huge fail, the second would have been tainted from the start.
Which it almost was anyway.
When the pre-show ads finished at the Sun in Yarraville, an image of a robotic foot crushing a human skull came on the screen so quickly that it shocked me. Does Terminator 2 really have such an abrupt beginning? Isn't there at least a production company logo or something?
And a part of me knew this was wrong. For some reason I always remember that the first shot of Terminator 2 is of traffic on the 405 freeway.
This wasn't the movie. This was some little short film accompanying it.
And soon it was confirmed that this was some sort of short documentary, an abbreviated version of the kind of thing that once appeared as a DVD extra. Edward Furlong, Robert Patrick, James Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd were all being interviewed in short snippets.
What's worse, though, is that there were little snippets of the movie.
Little snippets of all parts of the movie.
The beginning. The middle. The end. All the coolest liquid metal shots. All the most moving emotional beats. Everything.
The audience started howling. My wife and I started panicking.
See, one of the reasons we watched The Terminator was because we wanted to create the same preconceived notions in our children that audiences had coming into T2 in 1991, having only seen the original, and having only seen the trailers for this movie. (I don't know how spoilery the trailers were. Probably pretty spoilery.)
We wanted our kids, like the movie hopes, to think, for at least a little bit, that Arnold Schwarzenegger might be coming back for his second chance to kill John Connor, and Robert Patrick might be filling the Kyle Reese role of John and Sarah's less physically imposing protector.
Well, this little short film started to spoil that right away, not to mention almost everything else in the movie -- even though any individual snippet of the film was only one or two seconds long.
Yes, this short film included the actual shot of the good terminator descending into the molten steel and giving a thumbs up as his final gesture.
I repeat: THE DEATH OF ONE OF THE MAIN CHARACTERS WAS REVEALED IN THIS ACCOMPANYING SHORT.
Fortunately, my younger son didn't see it. Realizing pretty early on what was happening, he closed his eyes and put his hands over his ears. I can't remember if his mother told him to do that or if he just did it on his own. If it was his own instinct, he certainly takes after me, as I will sometimes do this when a trailer comes on for a movie I don't want spoiled.
My older son? He was too cool for that sort of evasive action. And he pretty much saw everything in this short film. Even if it was out of context, it was spoilerific as hell.
I made a lame attempt to put my arm in the path of his eyes when the Arnie thumbs up came on screen, but the damage was already done.
I have to imagine that 80 to 85 percent of our audience had already seen the movie. But surely there were at least 15 to 20 percent, which would have been maybe 20 to 25 people, who just never got around to it, or were too young and this was their first time. The audience was alive with people laughing in disbelief at what was happening.
I was beside myself. I even yelled "You're ruining the whole movie!" which got quite a big laugh.
"I can't believe that just happened," I said to my wife. Neither could she.
Mercifully, this finally ended and we were able to watch the movie.
I guess I don't blame the Sun for this. The Sun is, by far, my favorite cinema, and they would never co-sign something like this if it weren't attached to the film itself. And I actually don't know if they even knew it was on there. I think this may have been the first (only?) showing of T2 at this theater.
And even if they did know, and if they did consider it to be as sacrilegious as I did, what would be their capacity to start the movie late to skip this? And would that be communicated to the projectionist?
In any case, if you do want to include this short video -- which also shows all these people looking very old and broken down by the world, particularly the 49-year-old Edward Furlong -- couldn't you put it at the end? And if you're worried people will leave before it shows, just include a message at the start "Stay tuned after the film for a short documentary about the making of Terminator 2: Judgment Day."
The movie is so good that I relaxed into the viewing pretty quickly and put it behind me. At least one of my children had largely avoided spoilers. I guess the other would just have to deal.
To make myself feel a little better, I did watch the movie specifically from the angle of inspecting how closely it guards the secret of which terminator is which. And I decided it gives up that ruse pretty quickly. Even when Arnie goes through the biker bar to get clothes and a motorcycle, the scene is played for comedy -- violent comedy, but comedy nonetheless. There are no fatalities, and it ends with George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone" playing. Way too light if this is your villain. And though we can't be sure that the naked T-100 actually kills the cop he knifes in the stomach -- in fact, we don't even know it was a knifing until we deduce it retroactively from his later behavior -- we can see that this cop is lying on the ground without moving. Seems like a fatality to me.
I should mention one other concern I had about this movie, which was a concern I had (to a lesser extent) with the original, which was the gory deaths. The metal finger through the eye of the mental hospital security guard. The metal sword-arm through the head of Todd, John's foster father. But even more than that, the traumatizing (to me at least, in 1991) footage of the nuclear explosion that skeletonizes Sarah Connor and blows apart the kids in the playground "like leaves," to quote Sarah herself. I looked over at the younger son on each of these, and he didn't look as horrified as I was worried he'd look. I guess my 2026 12-year-old is probably more blase about violence and scary imagery than I was as a 17-year-old in 1991.
Well, I don't know that their viewing of the movie was significantly impacted by anything that was spoiled for them. However, neither did they fall in love with the movie like I hoped they would.
They seemed to indicate the two Terminator movies they'd seen in the last 24 hours were of a piece. That in itself would have been a bit of a disappointment to me, but that's only because of personal preference. I know there are people out there who think that The Terminator is the "real" Terminator movie and that T2 is effectively a cash grab. They're wrong, but they're entitled to that opinion.
We went to Father's Day dinner at a neighboring burger place, and my wife and I filled the space that is typically left by my children in any dinner conversation with more praise of the film and prompts for discussion about the details of the film. We actually talked a fair bit about Schwarzenegger, whom they don't otherwise really know.
And as for her? Well, she said she really enjoyed it -- she specifically commented on how different it was that all those stunts were done practically back then -- but she also said she thought it was "a little long." Yes T2 is a half-hour longer than The Terminator, but for my money, every second is exactly as it should be. Again, though, I can't quibble with other people's opinions.
The kids did get involved in a couple of the discussions, my younger son more than my older one, but the things that engaged them were not the things I would have thought were their big takeaways. Because we had about 30 minutes to fill at dinner, I even got into a few of my nitpicks about the movie -- Sarah Connor is only 29 years old?? -- and one of these was actually something they took issue with.
I said I thought it was funny that Robert Patrick came through looking like Robert Patrick, when he could have just come through as a metal blob, and that it was funny that when he sampled that first police officer, he incorporated only the uniform into his own shape while keeping the default Robert Patrick appearance. Shouldn't he actually look like the cop?
The kids decided -- my younger one, backed up by the older one -- that the T-1000 had actually taken the cop's clothes and was wearing them over his metal. Which of course doesn't make sense. Where does the fabric go when he takes another shape? They didn't seem to have an answer for this but were unwilling to move from their position.
All in all, it was a close approximation of the Father's Day experience I was hoping for. I mean, obviously I hoped they would love T2 as much as I do, would be as impressed by the visual effects as I was in 1991. But they've seen 35 years' worth of more advanced digital effects, and basically, anything they can imagine conjured in a movie. A liquid metal villain is inevitably not going to gobsmack them the way it gobsmacked me 35 years ago.
And there was a little something else in the movie that made it appropriate for that day. I really got the feels any time the movie either implicitly or explicitly evoked the father-son relationship between the good terminator and John Connor. The part where John stops Sarah from killing Miles Dyson -- or at least arrives to do so after she's already made that choice for herself -- is still the film's most emotionally resonant moment for me, but given that I'm a dad celebrating Father's Day, this other material worked on me more than usual as well.
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