Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991

A towering entry in the action genre, Terminator 2 has so many sequences—the truck chase down the L.A. River, the Cyberdyne building infiltration, the climactic steel mill face-off—that viewers will never forget. Its most brilliant element, however, might be James Cameron’s decision to have the same actor who played the first film’s terrifying, relentless hunter become this film’s beleaguered savior, pit against a villain even more formidable and terrifying than himself. Made when the limits of CGI in cinema were still constantly being tested and pushed, Cameron used those limits to his advantage, giving the T-1000 the kind of silvery shine and formlessness that top-of-the-line effects of the time could believably handle. In the hands of a perfectly cast Robert Patrick, the T-1000 invokes a very different kind of fear than the first film’s T-800 did, all smooth confidence (“Say, that’s a nice bike”) and abuse of power.

And this was by design. As Cameron said in an interview for the 2010 book The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron, “The Terminator films are not really about the human race getting killed off by future machines. They’re about us losing touch with our own humanity and becoming machines, which allows us to kill and brutalize each other. Cops think of all non-cops as less than they are, stupid, weak, and evil. They dehumanize the people they are sworn to protect and desensitize themselves in order to do that job.” What makes this theme shine through all the stronger is the way that, contrasted with this profoundly inhuman machine in the guise of an authority figure who we expect to dehumanize others, we also see a machine learn to be more human, and the scene in which that machine must sacrifice itself for the sake of the future is genuinely moving. The world arguably grows more dehumanizing and desensitizing every day. Let this big, bombastic sci-fi action movie be a reminder: stay human. — Carolyn Petit