Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) on Netflix
Skynet sends the shape-shifting T-1000 back to 1995 to kill John Connor, the resistance's future leader. A reprogrammed T-800 arrives to protect him and his mother Sarah.
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Trailer
Plot summary
By 2029, war has devastated Earth, and the human resistance battles Skynet, a malevolent artificial intelligence. Skynet sends the T-1000, a shape-shifting prototype Terminator of liquid metal, back to 1995 to kill resistance leader John Connor while he is still a child. The resistance answers with a reprogrammed T-800, an older model with a metal endoskeleton beneath living tissue. In Los Angeles, John lives with foster parents and dismisses his mother Sarah as deluded; she is confined to Pescadero State Hospital for her attempts to prevent Judgment Day. When the T-1000 closes in on John at a shopping mall, the T-800 steps in. Recognizing that the machine must obey him, John forbids it to kill and orders it to help him free Sarah.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Singer Billy Idol was originally cast as the shape-shifting T-1000 but lost the role after seriously injuring his leg in a motorcycle crash; James Cameron later said he probably would not have cast him anyway.
- Denzel Washington was the filmmakers' first choice to play Cyberdyne engineer Miles Dyson, and the role was written down after he turned it down because it mainly required him to act scared.
- At the Academy Awards, Terminator 2 became the first film ever to win an Oscar despite its predecessor never having received a single nomination.
- Rendering the T-1000's CGI was so labor-intensive that a team of up to 35 people at Industrial Light & Magic worked on just five minutes of the character's total screen time, and finishing 15 seconds of footage could take up to ten days.
- The Corral bar in Sylmar, used for the T-800's biker-bar scene, was the site of the real 1991 police beating of Rodney King exactly a week later, captured on the very same bystander's videotape that had recorded the movie being filmed there.
- Linda Hamilton said she suffered permanent partial hearing loss after not wearing earplugs during the hospital elevator gunfire scene, along with shell shock from months of exposure to violence, loud noise, and gunfire on set.
- The Visual Effects Society ranked Terminator 2 among the most influential effects films of all time, and Guinness World Records lists the T-1000 as the first major blockbuster movie character ever generated entirely using computers.
- Co-writer William Wisher suggested George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone" for the scene where the T-800 puts on biker clothes; Cameron said he disliked the idea at the time but used the song anyway and later forgot it had been Wisher's suggestion.
