Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong, Robert Patrick, Joe Morton, Earl Boen, S. Epatha Merkerson, Castulo Guerra, Jenette Goldstein, Xander Berkeley, Danny Cooksey. Screenplay: James Cameron, William Wisher. Cinematography: Adam Greenberg. Production design: Joseph C. Nemec III. Film editing: Conrad Buff IV, Mark Goldblatt, Richard A. Harris. Music: Brad Fiedel.
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced his support of the Strategic Defense Initiative, a complex system that would use satellites to detect the launch of nuclear missiles and then destroy them in mid-flight with automatically launched anti-ballistic missiles. Critics of SDI called it unrealistic, fanciful, and ultimately destablizing for international peace. It became known by a nickname familiar from the movies: "star wars." The following year, James Cameron released a film called The Terminator in which a cyborg arrived from the future to make sure that a potential leader of a rebellion against his fellow cyborgs and other creatures of artificial intelligence never gets born. It wasn't immediately clear to most people at the time that Cameron's film contained a sly reference to what many people feared might be a consequence of Reagan's SDI: out-of-control automated weaponry. By 1991, when Cameron released the sequel to that film, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, that reference had become explicit: The "Skynet" of the sequel is clearly a fantasized version of SDI, in which the AI creations began a war against humans with a nuclear strike that killed three billion people in 1997. Today, that historical subtext is probably lost on most viewers of the movie, as Reagan's "star wars" has faded from memory, except in some think tanks and Pentagon brainstorming sessions. But to those of us who lived through the Reagan years, the reference in the movie was more than just subtext. There are some actual digs at supporters of SDI in the film, as when Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), the scientist behind Skynet, attempts to defend technological research and John Connor (Edward Furlong) retorts that the kind of research that proceeds without considering the consequences produced the hydrogen bomb. One of the most ardent proponents of SDI, who sold Reagan on the idea, was Edward Teller, the physicist who became known as "the father of the hydrogen bomb," a title he never fully rejected. But even without the historical underpinnings, Terminator 2 is a kind of landmark in popular entertainment: an exciting concoction of violence and special effects, with old-fashioned touches of humanity and wit that lots of today's CGI blockbusters no longer find necessary. Cameron never seems content just to dazzle us but to make us think and feel. If there's too much feeling in his Titanic (1997) and not enough thought in Avatar (2009), there's the right amount of both in Terminator 2.
