When Terminator 2: Judgement Day was released in 1991, it was the first film to have exceeded a $100m budget. The opening nuclear holocaust scene cost more to put on screen than the entire sum that James Cameron had had to spend back in 1984 on his first Terminator film. All that investment paid off for its backers as T2 went on to make over $520m at the box office worldwide. Four Academy awards and 35 years later, it’s still paying its backers handsomely.
Given its venerable age and popularity, it doesn’t seem too big a spoiler to mention the twist that Cameron kept quiet before the initial release. Although Arnold Schwarzenegger had lived up to his catchphrase promise "I’ll be back", in the sequel he returns as the hero rather than the relentless killer cyborg of the first film. Since the first film had been released, Schwarzenegger had become a star with his easy charm on the chat show circuit. When I interviewed him in 1984 he told me how he'd taken the role originally as it required night-time shooting and didn't interfere with his daytime work developing real estate. He caught up on his sleep in the make-up chair. After the interview as we left the hotel, two shuffling, anorak-wearing fans came up to him. In a masterclass of self-deprecation Schwarzenegger told me: "I pay them 20 dollars to follow me around and make me look popular." It's not hard to see why in the intervening period, Cameron brought him back as a hero not a villain.
Set some 13 years after the first film’s action, Schwarzenegger's nameless T800 cyborg has been reprogrammed by John Connor (Michael Edwards) and sent back to protect his younger self (played by Edward Furlong) from a new T-1000 cyborg assassin (Robert Patrick). Stalwart throughout and endearing the film to its legions of female fans, is Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton, pictured below) as the warrior mother determined to save her son and consequently, humanity.
As Bill Gates takes to the media to warn us of a job apocalypse and the dangers of ‘bad actors’ using artificial intelligence to create new bioweapons that could threaten the globe, it’s intriguing to look back on Cameron’s 1984 vision of an AI future. In the original film, Skynet was an AI supercomputer, designed by the US military as a global defence system. When AI became capable of autonomous thought, its creators realised the threat Skynet posed and tried to shut it down. The stage was set for an apocalyptic battle for survival between AI and the human race in T2: Judgement Day. Cameron didn’t envision the role of social media or populist despots in spreading disinformation. The ecological idealism he was to espouse so clearly in the Avatar films is strictly on the backburner in the Terminator movies. But the growing acknowledgement of the threat of AI makes his movie feel more pertinent, 35 years on.
