James Cameron's sequel to The Terminator. The first major film whose CGI character was treated as a real performance.
Los Angeles, 1995. Eleven years after the events of The Terminator, Sarah Connor is institutionalised in a psychiatric hospital for her 'delusions' about machines from the future. Her son John, now ten, is in foster care. Two terminators arrive from the future: a T-800 (Schwarzenegger) reprogrammed by the future John Connor to protect his younger self, and a T-1000 (Robert Patrick), a more advanced model made of liquid metal, sent by Skynet to kill the young John.
The film tracks the three protagonists — Sarah, John, and the protective T-800 — across roughly three days as they evade the T-1000, attempt to assassinate the Cyberdyne researcher whose work will lead to Skynet, and finally fight the T-1000 in a Los Angeles steel mill. The film closes with the T-800 lowering himself into molten steel to ensure his own components cannot be reverse-engineered, with Sarah's voiceover suggesting that the future is now genuinely uncertain rather than predetermined.
Terminator 2 is the first major studio film whose central character (the T-1000) was rendered substantially in computer-generated imagery and treated by the production as a real performance rather than a special-effects gimmick. The T-1000's liquid-metal morphing — pioneered by Industrial Light & Magic's CGI department — was, in 1991, technologically unprecedented at this scale. The character's roughly 18 minutes of CGI screen time required two and a half years of digital effects development.
The achievement was foundational. Almost every subsequent major CGI character — Jurassic Park's dinosaurs (1993), Gollum (2002-2003), the Avatar Na'vi (2009-present) — is descended from the techniques developed for the T-1000. The film is the inflection point at which Hollywood began to treat CGI as a primary tool of character creation rather than a means of supporting practical effects. By 1995 the studios were greenlighting major projects specifically on the basis of what the new digital pipelines could deliver. The 1990s VFX revolution starts here.
Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 is one of the great female-action transformations in mainstream cinema. The Sarah Connor of the original Terminator (1984) was a young waitress thrust into circumstances she did not understand. The Sarah Connor of T2 is a woman whose preparation for the inevitable apocalypse has hardened her into a near-paramilitary figure — physically transformed, tactically competent, emotionally hollowed-out.
Hamilton reportedly underwent thirteen weeks of training before the shoot under the supervision of an Israeli commando. The physical transformation is visible: Hamilton's arms in T2 are visibly muscled in ways the previous film's Sarah Connor's were not. The performance is, structurally, the film's quietest argument: the woman who was the original film's victim has become, by the sequel, the most-dangerous human in the world. Cameron returns to this kind of female lead — Ripley in Aliens, Neytiri in the Avatar films — repeatedly. T2 is the template.
The film's most-discussed action sequence is the mid-film chase: the T-1000 driving a hijacked semi-truck through the L.A. flood-control channels in pursuit of young John Connor on a dirt bike, with the T-800 on a Harley-Davidson firing a shotgun at the truck. The sequence runs roughly five minutes. The truck flips at the end of the sequence and erupts into flame; the T-1000 emerges from the flames unharmed, his liquid-metal body re-forming.
The sequence was shot in actual Los Angeles flood-control channels, with multiple practical-effects rigs, stunt drivers, and one of the largest pyrotechnic sequences in American cinema to that date. The CGI work — primarily the T-1000's re-formation from the burning wreck — was added in post-production. The combination of practical large-scale stunt work and digital character effects is the technique that Cameron has, across his career, made central to his action filmmaking.