A robot from the future arrives in 1995 to murder the future leader of humanity in the war against the machines. Luckily, another futuristic robot shows up at the same time to save the 10-year-old kid. Gun violence, explosions and foul language abound in this sci-fi sequel.
In an age of machines, John Connor is humanity’s best hope. Since he was born, he’s been trained to lead and fight by his mother and her slew of ex-military boyfriends. That training has served him well, allowing him to lead a faction of human survivors against their machine overlords in the year 2029.
The machines have tried and failed to kill John on multiple occasions, the first attempt on his life taking place before John was even born. As chronicled in The Terminator, the machines sent a robot back in time to 1984 to terminate Sarah Connor, John’s mother. Luckily, John knew about this. So he sent an agent of his own, Kyle Reese, to stop the terminator, save his mother and, well, help her conceive John.
Reese died protecting Sarah, and John was born just nine months later.
But the machines are back once again. Having failed to eliminate Sarah, they send another terminator to the year 1995, hoping to kill John and ensure their total dominance in the future.
Once again, future John is ready. He matches the machines move for move, sending a terminator of his own to find and protect his adolescent self.
Of course, 10-year-old John isn’t what you’d call compliant. His mom, Sarah, never forgot her encounter with the first terminator. She told John all about it, hoping to prepare him for that future. Unfortunately, Sarah also did everything she could to stop that future from ever happening—and that hasn’t worked out so well so far.
Reese had given Sarah plenty of information about the future, including information about the day the machines would take over: August 29, 1997, Judgment Day.
Sarah tried to warn the authorities, but due to a coverup by the very company that would design the homicidal machines in the future, there was no evidence to support her claim. And after blowing up a computer company, Sarah was arrested and interned at a psychiatric hospital.
That messed with young John’s head quite a bit. As far as he’s concerned, his mom is crazy, and robots are never going to take over the world.
Imagine his surprise when a hulky, muscled terminator shows up on a motorcycle to save him.
“Come with me if you want to live,” the machine says.
Sounds like good advice.
John—the 1995 John—harbors a lot of resentment toward Sarah early on. He feels like his whole life has been a lie, and due to her rash actions, he’s been placed in foster care. (And he doesn’t particularly like his foster parents.)
However, once John realizes that Sarah has been telling him the truth, he lets go of that anger pretty quickly. It’s a shock, but better to love a mom who would risk everything to protect him than to love a mom who would risk him to protect her false beliefs.
John proves himself to be brave, just like his parents. When he realizes that the machines’ terminator will probably go after Sarah to get to him, he orders his own robot protector to save her, in spite of the danger.
And speaking of danger, although John’s terminator has been sent to protect John, it hasn’t been given orders to protect anyone else. John quickly remedies that, directing his terminator not to take any human lives, even the ones that might be shooting at them.
John’s a thoughtful kid, too. Watching some younger kids playing with toy guns, he muses on how humans seem determined to wipe each other out. And because of that, he tries to stop his mom from killing the man who would become responsible for creating the genocidal machines in the future.
It’s actions like that that prove to the adults (and robots) around John that violence doesn’t have to be the answer to everything. And the film ends on the hopeful note that if a machine “can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.”
We learn that the machines chose to wipe out the human race because humans tried to deactivate the machines when they became self-aware. The terminator sent to protect John asks John questions about human emotions.
People talk about fate and changing the future. And, obviously, the film deals with the concept of time travel. Some terminators have glowing red eyes, which may feel demonic to some viewers.
A bumper sticker reads “Praise the Lord.”
Sarah wears tank tops that make it obvious she’s not wearing anything underneath throughout the film. In one scene, we see her exposed, hunched back as John’s terminator stitches up her injured shoulder. Her arm covers her chest from the front.
When the terminators come back in time, they arrive without any clothing, so we see a couple of men’s bare chests and behinds. A couple of women ogle John’s terminator when it first arrives in the buff. Women at a bar wear cleavage-baring tops, and one woman wears an open jacket over a bra.
John says that, when he was growing up, his mom would “shack up” with any guy who could teach John to be a “great military leader.”
Lots and lots and lots of gun violence. And explosions. And deadly vehicle chases. But let’s break it down even more:
The film’s opening narration shows humans fighting against machines in the future. Machines driving tank-like vehicles roll over piles of human skeletons. A metallic terminator robot stomps on a skull.
Sarah describes a recurring dream she has of the franchise’s Judgment Day—which resulted in the deaths of 3 billion people—and we later see that dream depicted onscreen: She’s at a playground with children playing when a nuclear explosion occurs in the background. The children and their parents scream, but they’re pretty much instantly transformed into pillars of ash. Then, when the shockwave from the bomb hits, they’re blown apart. Sarah, for her part, doesn’t die instantly in this vision. She first catches fire, then melts, then is reduced to a skeleton before she wakes from the dream.
While in the psychiatric hospital, Sarah attacks her guards and doctors several times. In one scene, she breaks a man’s arm and then fills a syringe with poison, threatening to kill him if anyone tries to stop her or save him. (We also hear she stabbed her psychiatrist in the knee with a pen.) She’s repeatedly restrained and sedated. In one instance, an orderly, after strapping her to her bed, bends over and licks her face. That’s all he does, but it still feels like assault. And it seems he likes his power since he then goes into the hallway and drags a baton across the doors of several patients in an intimidating manner.
Later on, that orderly perhaps gets his comeuppance. Sarah escapes her room and hits him repeatedly with a broken broom handle, bloodying his nose before knocking him unconscious.
We see several vehicle chases throughout the film. During these scenes, a number of cars crash and flip over. Some explode after their fuel lines catch fire. One helicopter gets flattened when the semi it’s pursuing slams on the brakes. And it’s safe to say that several civilians get injured if not killed.
Pretty much everyone is firing guns of some sort—except John, who’s relegated to reloading weapons for the adults accompanying him. When bullets hit the terminator sent by the machines, they create metallic craters on the robot’s body. But that terminator, made of a liquid metal, is quick to heal those blemishes. When bullets hit John’s terminator, the result is a little messier since he’s made up of living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. (In one scene, bullets tear the skin from his face and body, revealing his metal makeup beneath.) And when humans take bullets—well, they mostly die.
Sarah unleashes a flurry of bullets at the man who would become responsible for creating the deadly machines in the future. She misses, but she terrifies him and his family. The man tells his wife and young son to flee to safety. After Sarah finally does land a shot (in his shoulder), the man’s son leaps in front of him, begging her not to kill his father. The boy’s mother then throws herself on top of her son to protect him. And Sarah relents, unable to kill the man in front of his family.
John’s terminator cuts open his own part-skin, part-metal arm to prove that he is indeed a robot from the future. (He wears a glove over that arm for the rest of the movie since he can’t instantly heal like the other terminator.) Although he follows John’s mandate not to kill, he does kneecap a couple dozen cops and seriously injure several others.
The machine’s terminator isn’t so kind. It kills anyone who hinders its progress, usually taking their form after murdering them. It uses its liquid metal composition to turn its limbs into a variety of bladed weapons, which it then employs to slice, stab and otherwise kill a number of innocent people, usually by impaling their throats or eye sockets.
Several people set up a bomb to blow up the lab where the terminator technology is being developed (an attempt to save humanity by destroying the tech before it can be completed). They’re interrupted by police, though, and one guy gets riddled with bullets. However, rather than blowing the place up, he warns the policemen about the bomb, allowing them to escape before it explodes.
A man blows cigar smoke into the face of John’s terminator and then puts out the cigar on the terminator’s chest. The machine responds by breaking the man’s hand and throwing him onto a hot stove. Someone tries hitting the terminator with a pool stick, but he tosses the guy through a window. Another attempts to stab him, but the robot uses the guy’s blade against him, nailing him to a billiard table.
When he gets angry with his terminator, John screams for help. Two men standing nearby come to his aid, but rather than explain the situation, John lets the guys get beat up by the machine. He only intervenes when he realizes the terminator is prepared to kill both men—but one of the guys still walks away with a broken arm.
Sarah gets stabbed by the machines’ terminator, and John’s terminator later stitches up her wound. She in turn removes the bullets that have perforated his body so he can heal. Later in the film, the bad terminator inserts a blade into Sarah’s still-healing wound to torture her. She also gets shot in the leg, requiring a makeshift tourniquet.
When a robot gets destroyed, it seems to screech in pain. Another machine notes that it cannot “self-terminate.” However, that same machine is able to injure itself in the name of its mission.
A terminator orders a helicopter pilot to “get out” of the vehicle while it’s in midair, and the terrified guy complies. Rattlesnake heads are nailed to someone’s fence. We hear the original terminator sent to kill Sarah in 1984 killed 17 cops. John’s terminator robs a few people of their possessions by force. Sarah, we learn, smuggled guns for a while, and she has a veritable armory hidden in a desert cache. Sarah compares the creation of the terminators to the creation of the hydrogen bomb.
We hear around 17 uses of the f-word (some preceded by “mother”) and 27 of the s-word. God’s name gets abused nine times, more than half of those paired with either “d–n” or “d–mit.” And Jesus’ name gets misused thrice.
Additionally, we hear multiple uses of “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–mit,” “d–n,” “d–k” (or some variation thereof), “douchebag” and “h—.” There’s also a crude term for male genitals.
People drink and smoke at a bar. Sarah smokes cigarettes throughout the film: She sucks one down to the filter. When someone offers her tequila in one scene, she drinks it straight from the bottle.
John has a bit of a juvenile record. When a terminator pulls it up, we see that John’s been arrested for trespassing, shoplifting, disturbing the peace and vandalism. He and a friend steal $300 from an ATM using hacking technology. John’s foster parents are exasperated by his delinquency, and they can be unkind at times because of that. But they aren’t the worst guardians.
Terminators don’t seem to have a problem stealing whatever they need for their missions. For that matter, neither do Sarah or John.
Sarah blames men for creating deadly weapons and machines, noting that they love to take lives because they’ll never know what it’s like to create life, to “feel it growing inside you.” She believes John’s terminator may actually be a better father figure to John than anyone she’s ever dated, essentially because it will never abuse or abandon him.
A man is rude to his wife because she interrupts his TV-viewing time.
We learn that a company called Cyberdyne Systems covered up the Terminator attack in 1984. It collected the remains of the first robot and has been using them to make advancements in technology at an exponential rate—and it’s been lying to the scientists creating that tech about the origins.
The Terminator franchise has long reigned as a sci-fi classic. However, when you take a glance at the itemized receipt of Terminator 2‘s content concerns, you may question whether the “classic” aspect is worth the cost.
Violence, obviously, is the first thing that comes to most folks’ minds. There’s a lot of it here, via guns, grenades, bombs, deadly vehicle pursuits and some robotic blades. Add in the visceral depiction of Sarah’s nuclear bomb nightmare and the film becomes something of a nightmare for parents, too.
Language is next on the list. The number of f-bombs uttered by 10-year-old John Connor alone would have qualified this movie for an R rating.
I can probably leave it there, but suffice it to say that Terminator 2: Judgment Day is as riddled with content issues as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body is with bullets.
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
