Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Friday, January 31 - Saturday, February 1, 2020

DCP Projection


“In the enjoyably overwrought TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY, director-cowriter James Cameron pulls a smart switch: This time, Arnold’s terminator isn’t a menacing villain but a good guy, a father protector who is sent from the future to guard the son of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). The first movie, you may recall, ended with Sarah becoming pregnant. Her son, now a punky preteen (Edward Furlong), is destined to become the rebel leader in the coming war against the machines. Now another terminator has been dispatched to alter history by killing him.


“This new terminator (Robert Patrick) is boyishly handsome but with pursed lips and cold, dead eyes. He suggests a stoic, emaciated James Dean — he’s like Dean as a troop leader of the Hitler Youth. For most of his screen time he skulks around in a policeman’s uniform, pursuing his prey as relentlessly as Arnold did in the first picture. This time, though, Cameron adds a special-effects coup. Where Arnold has a metal skeleton under his synthetic skin, the evil terminator, one of the advanced T-1000 series, is made entirely of liquid metal. He’s a kind of mutating mercury globule who can bleed through bars, pour through windows, and take on the physical characteristics of any object he touches, from a person to a floor. His arms instantly convert into three-foot-long stilettos, and when he’s shot in the head, his exploded ‘flesh’ simply welds itself back together. The transformation effects are spectacular, in part because there’s real magic to them, a sense of technological wonder. By the end of the movie, we feel that this shape-shifting terminator, this sinister mass of chameleonic metal, has an identity all its own… packed with extravagantly violent sequences in which helicopters, diesel trucks, and entire buildings are blown up with delirious gusto. Cameron, director of the first Terminator, Aliens, and the underrated deep-sea epic The Abyss, has become our reigning master of heavy-metal action.” – Entertainment Weekly


Screening as part of our Winter 2020 series, “Waverly Midnights: Hindsight is 2020s.”

  • Country USA
  • Rating R
  • Year 1991
  • Running Time 136 minutes
  • Distributor Rialto
  • Director James Cameron
  • Accessibility Assistive Listening, T-Coil

IFC Center does not generally provide advisories about subject matter or potentially triggering content in films, as sensitivities vary from person to person. In addition to the synopses, trailers and other links on our website, further information about content and age-appropriateness for specific films can be found on Common Sense Media, IMDb and DoesTheDogDie.com as well as through general internet searches.