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His way of dealing with this was some ballsy sleight of hand, setting the film in a 1995 that looked exactly like 1991 (which is to say, the most accurate rendering of the future in cinematic history). But he didn't go far enough. He arbitrarily stopped in 1995, giving us a 10-year-old John Connor who, upon repeated viewing, is so obnoxious that you spend most of the movie wanting to see him shot in the face, fate of the world be damned.

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Now let's imagine Cameron had moved Judgment Day to the year 2000 and set the film in the waning days of the millennium. Instead of Bart Simpson, we get a 15-year-old John Connor. Casting director Mali Finn never has to fish for a male lead at a Pasadena Boys and Girls club, Edward Furlong never turns into a walking cautionary tale of childhood stardom, and more importantly for our purposes, Cameron never shits up a damn near timeless Terminator with botched attempts at taking the pulse of early '90s youth culture. Instead he would have given us a John Connor who, like his best movie, is too far into the future to touch any cultural touchstones, but still wouldn't have been too distant to listen to a kickass Guns N Roses song.

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We can't say who Cameron would have cast had he set T2 four more years into the future, but some pretty intriguing actors were the right age in 1991. Christian Bale was 16 at the time, but if Newsies-era Bale wasn't striking his fancy, he always had the option of Leonardo DiCaprio circa What's Eating Gilbert Grape?. No matter who was cast, he would have saved one of the best action movies of all time from feeling like an obnoxious Nerf commercial.