and the popular entertainment media before "T2" even goes into production. There's consequently a weird postmodern tension to the way we watch the film; we're aware of what the bankable star's demands were, and we're also aware of how much the movie cost and how important bankable stars are to a big-budget movie; and so one of the few things that keeps us on the edge of our seats during the movie is our sus- pense about whether James Cameron can possibly weave a plausible, non-cheesy narrative that meets Schwarzenegger's career needs without betraying "T1"'s precedent. Cameron does not succeed, at least not in avoiding heavy cheese. Recall the premise he settles on for "T2": that Skynet once again uses its (apparently not all that limited) time- travel device, this time to send a far more advanced liquid metal T-1000 Terminator back to 1990s L.A., this time to kill the ten-year-old John Connor (played by the extremely an- noying Edward Furlong

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, whose voice keeps cracking pu- bescently and who's just clearly older than ten), and that the intrepid human Resistance has somehow captured, subdued, and "reprogrammed" an old Schwarzenegger-model Termin- ator -- resetting its CPU's switch from TERMINATE to PRO- TECT, apparently

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-- and then has somehow once again gotten one-time access to Skynet's time-travel technology

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and sent the Schwarzenegger Terminator back to protect young J.C. from the T -1000's infanticidal advances.

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Cameron's premise is financially canny and artistically dismal: it permits "Terminator 2"'s narrative to clank along on the rails of all manner of mass-market formulae. There is, for example, no quicker or easier ingress to the audience's heart than to present an innocent child in danger, and of course protecting an innocent child from danger is heroism at its most generic. Cameron's premise also permits the emo- tional center of "T2" to consist of the child and the Terminat- or "bonding," which in turn allows for all manner of familiar and reliable devices. Thus it is that "T2" offers us cliche ex- plorations of stuff like the conflicts between Emotion and Lo- gic (territory already mined to exhaustion by "Star Trek") and between Human and Machine (turf that's been worked in everything from "Lost in Space" to "Blade Runner" to "Rob- ocop"), as well as exploiting the good old Alien-or-Robot- Learns-About-Human-Customs-and-Psychology-From- Sarcastic-and/or-Precocious-but-Basically-Goodhearted- Human-with-Whom-It-Bonds formula (q.q.v. here "My Fa- vorite Martian" and "E.T." and "Starman" and "The Brother From Another Planet" and "Harry and the Hendersons" and "Alf" and ad almost infinitum). Thus it is that the 85% of "T2" that is not mind-blowing digital F/X sequences subjects us to dialogue like: "Vhy do you cry?" and "Cool! My own Terminator!" and "Can you not be such a dork all the time?" and "This is intense!" and "Haven't you learned that you can't just go around killing people?" and "It's OK, Mom, he's here to help" and "I know now vhy you cry, but it's somesing I can never do"; plus to that hideous ending where Schwar- zenegger gives John a cyborgian hug and then voluntarily im- merses himself in molten steel to protect humanity from his neural net CPU, raising that Fonziesque thumb as he sinks below the surface

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, and the two Connor hug and grieve, and then poor old Linda Hamilton -- whose role in "T2" requires her not only to look like she's been doing nothing but Nautilus for the last several years but also to keep snarling and baring her teeth and saying stuff like "Don't fuck with me!" and "Men like you know nothing about really creating something!" and acting half-crazed with paramilitary stress, stretching Hamilton way beyond her thespian capacities and resulting in what seems more than anything like a parody of Faye Dunaway in "Mommy Dearest" -- has to give us that gooey "I face the future with hope, because if a Terminator can learn the value of human life, maybe we can, too" voi- ceover at the very end. The point is that head-clutchingly insipid stuff like this puts an ever heavier burden of importance on "T2"'s digital effects, which now must be stunning enough to distract us from the formulaic void at the story's center, which in turn means that even more money and directional attention must be lavished on the film's F/X. This sort of cycle is sympto-

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It augurs ill for both Furlong and Cameron that within minutes of John Connor's introduction in the film we're rooting vigorously for him to be Terminated.

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A complex and interesting scene where John and Sarah actually open up the Te rminator's head and remove Ahnode's CPU and do some further reprogramming -- a scene where we learn a lot more about neural net processors and T erminative anatomy , and where Sarah is st rung out and has kind of an understandable anti-Termi nator prejudice and wants to smash the CPU while she can, and where John asserts his nascent command presence and basically orders her not to -- was cut from the movie's final version. Cameron's professed rational for cutting the scene was that the middle of the movie "dragged" and that the scene was too complex: "I could account for the Terminator's behavior changes much more simply. " I submit that the Cameron of "T1" and "Aliens" wouldn't have talked this way. But another big-budget formula for ensuring ROI is that things must be made as simple for the audiences as possible; plot and character implausibiliti es are to b e handled through distraction rather than resolved through explanation.

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(Around which the security must be shockingly lax.)

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That's the movie's main plot, but let's observe here that one of "T2'''s subplots actually echoes Cameron's Schwarzenegger dilemma and creates a kind of weird meta-cinematic irony . Whereas "T1" had argued for a certain kind of metaphysical passivity (i.e., fate is unavoidable, and Skynet's attempts to alter history serve only bring it about.) "Terminator 2"'s metaphysics are more active. In "T2," the Connors take a p age from Skynet's book and try to head off the foreordained nuclear holocaust, first by trying to kill Skynet's inventor and then by destroying Cyberdyne's labs and the 1st Termina tor's CPU (though why John Connor spends half the movie carrying the deadly CPU chip around in his pocket instead of just throwing it under the first available steamroller remains unclear and irksome). The point here is that the protagonists' attempts to revise the "script" of history in "T2" parallel the director's having to muck around with "T2"'s own script in order for Schwarzenegger to be in the movie. Multivalent ironies like this -- which require that film audiences know all kinds of behind-the-scenes stuff from watching Entertainment T onight and reading Premiere magazine -- are not commercial postmodernism at it's finest.

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