Rage against the machines

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Dir: James Cameron. Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Edward

Furlong. IFI 137min

The IFI’s current strand, Dark Skies: Man vs Machine, is o ering a range of classic sci- titles, from Bryan Forbes’ The Stepford Wives (1975) to Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s cult 1992 feature, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer. The centre-piece of the festival is undoubtedly this pristine, 70mm screening of James Cameron’s visually striking dystopian tale, Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Seven years after announcing himself in the rst feature, Arnie was too famous and well-liked to play a nasty cyborg, so this time around the scenario was ipped and he was now the good robot, helping to save young John Connor (Furlong) and his mother (Linda Hamilton once again) from the clutches of nasty Terminator, Robert Patrick. Thanks to the success of the original, Cameron was given a huge budget for this sequel. In fact, T2 was the rst lm in history to cost more than $100 million, and in fairness, it’s all up there on the screen. The action scenes are tremendous, the special e ects are impressive (notably in 70mm), Cameron’s script is smart and Arnie even manages to show o a few of his acting chops. Incidentally, the Austrian Oak was paid a then-whopping $15 million salary for his performance. Given his total of seven hundred words of dialogue, that meant he was paid $21,429 per word. As one commentator pointed out at the time, Arnie was thus paid $85,716 to utter the immortal phrase, “Hasta la vista, baby.”