SEQUEL, PART II: FX2, TERMINATOR II: JUDGEMENT DAY - Page 2

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Feb 18, 2003

And there's an awful lot to surround them here. Franklin and Condon apparently decided it was the convolutions, rather than the inventiveness, of the first film's plot that made people like it, so they pile them on. We not only get corrupt cops (led by Philip Bosco), we also get the Church and buried treasure (though curiously enough, the mob turns out to not be the bad guys here). And while the effects were good in the first one, they were used just right; here, they go on and on. Sure, some are fun (the suit used by Rollie that controls a robot is a hoot), but mostly, they're just empty. As are the motivations; in the first one, Rollie thought he was being set up for murder, and then watched his girlfriend being killed, while Leo was obsessively tracking that mobster. Here, Rollie's trying to avenge the murder of his girlfriend's ex-husband, which is honorable, but doesn't have the same pull on us, and as welcome as Leo is, he's only here because the plot demands that he is. Basically, FX2 may not be a complete wash, but it's simply not necessary.

For people other than me who care about sequels, there's usually a rule about them - those with regular numbers stink, while those with Roman numerals are at least decent. TERMINATOR II: JUDGEMENT DAY is at least decent. The original 1984 movie was also not expected to do much until it became a hit with audiences and critics, and made Cameron and star Arnold Schwarzenegger household names. Unlike most sequels, while this repeats the story of the original, it also tries to deepen it.

Cameron, who co-wrote with William Wisher, flashes back to the end of the first one, where Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), mother of John Connor, is driving off to the desert. She recaps the first one - basically, that the Terminator (Schwarzenegger) was sent back from the future to kill her before she could give birth to her son, who was leader of the resistance - and gives us a bit more background. On August 29th, 1997, the world is destroyed, and a computer named SkyNet takes over the world. To stop Connor, they send another terminator, this one called the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), back to kill him when he's a boy (Edward Furlong). Connor is living with foster parents, since Sarah is in a mental hospital since she's predicting the apocalypse and no one believes her. The resistance sends one of the old models of Terminators (Schwarzenegger) to protect Connor. The three also try to stop Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), the man who originally created SkyNet.

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