Question: One of the taglines for this film is "It's nothing personal". I have no idea what that has to do with the film and was hoping someone could explain it.
Question: Does anyone know what game John Connor was playing in the arcade when the T-1000 found him?
Chosen answer: He's initially playing Missile Command, then he goes to play After Burner.
Question: If John is so concerned about how the Terminator kill humans, why he didn't add "don't kill anyone" to its directives before sending it back in time?
Answer: Because only young John Connor is concerned about that, not the future John Connor that sent the terminator back. Future John Connor wants the terminator to do everything it can to protect his younger self.
Answer: Older John Connor lives in a universe where most of humanity is dead but the survivors are all united against Skynet. He likely knew that humans in the past might even side against the Terminator, so he did not reprogram it not to kill, as saving his past self is priority. The T-1000 was also a human infiltrator so the T-800 had to get ready to kill something that looked human. Also, according to side canon the T-800 was sent back immediately after the T-1000 was sent as Tech Com finally defeated Skynet, so there might not have been time to fully reprogram the T-800 beyond its mission.
Question: Why did the T-1000 kill the officer in the beginning and steal his clothes? Later we see the uniform heal so we know he can create clothing.
Answer: He didn't steal his clothes, but copied them. He can only copy things that he physically touches. He had to touch the cop to take on his look. Also since the cop was a witness to this ruthless killing machine, it needed to kill him to protect itself from being discovered too soon. The Terminator is an infiltration unit on an assassination mission to kill John Connor. As advanced as it is, it needs as little attention drawn to it as possible. Having the entire police force chasing him down would not be ideal for his goal to get Connor and would inevitably slow him down and risk allowing Connor a better chance of escape. The T 1000 also is an emotionless machine programmed by other machines that are intent on killing off all humans in the future. It doesn't value human life, and if anything has been programmed to regard them as a pest to be dealt with. The cop was a means to an ends and an obstacle to take out. As well, the cop did also posses a weapon, and was the T-1000's quickest way to get his hands on a gun.
Answer: While the T-1000 did kill the officer at the beginning (which is pretty much standard behavior for Terminators), it didn't steal the officer's clothes. It merely sampled the officer's appearance as soon as it touched him. However, it did steal the officer's firearm, because the T-1000 could not mimic complex mechanical objects or weapons (it could only mimic stabbing and cutting weapons).
Question: How does Sarah know the precise date when Judgment Day will occur? Kyle never told her that in the first film.
Chosen answer: There's always the possibility that Kyle told Sarah the date of Judgment Day offscreen.
Question: The 3 of them escape the T-1000 after the mental hospital and end up in the desert. Arnold explains the history of Skynet to Sarah and one line of dialogue that has confused me for so many years is me is that he says Skynet became self aware at 2:14am Eastern time. That would be 11:14pm in Los Angeles. Why does the film imply the bombs were dropped during the late morning or early afternoon?
Answer: Skynet became self-aware at that time, but didn't launch the attack until the humans got scared and tried to pull the plug on Skynet.
Answer: The only indication of the time of the bombing was Sarah's nightmare, which was based on the story told to her by Kyle Reese. Despite this, even with Skynet becoming self-aware in the late evening / night, it doesn't mean it launched the missiles instantly. It may have chosen to wait before attacking.
Answer: As the T-800 explains, Skynet attacked Russia first, and the Russian counterattack is what hit LA.
Question: Something I've always wondered about T2 since I was a child, why does the T-1000 stick to the appearance of the first person that he killed throughout the whole movie? Any time he kills and takes the form of a person he always changes back to the first policeman he killed, why?
Chosen answer: Robert Patrick is not actually the first guy he killed. That is his default form that he came back through time as. He does kill a cop moments after time travel and dons his uniform. That is what you see him revert to, clothing wise, presumably because appearing to be a police officer has more advantages than regular civilians.
Those are fine answers since they fit the scenario, but the real answer is because the filmmakers know that if the T-1000 keeps changing appearance they could confuse some of the audience which would decrease the movie's appeal. A consistent form lets people immediately identify him.
Answer: Because there are lots of things a cop can do and places they can go that others can't, so it's an ideal form to keep. For example, nobody questions why a cop is carrying a gun in public.
Question: Arnold said that when the T-1000 took the form of someone he would likely terminate the person being copied. Why didn't the T-1000 kill Sarah? He had been in physical contact and could mimic her voice. There was no reason to get her to call John at the end, he could have killed her immediately.
Answer: In addition, another deleted scene shows that the T-1000 was damaged by being frozen and thawed and was having difficulty maintaining form. He wanted to be sure he wouldn't mess it up.
What's especially odd about the scene is that both examples we gave to help answer this question were actually deleted from the original release. When I first saw this movie in the theater when it was released I had the exact same question, it wasn't until I saw the Special Edition with the deleted scenes reinserted that it made sense.
Answer: It comes down to the difficulty in impersonating someone John actually knows. The T-1000 had failed impersonating someone close to John when he got the name of the dog incorrect. A deleted scene (re-incorporated into the film in the Director's Cut) shows him checking the dog's tag afterwards, so he is aware exactly how he was outsmarted. Keeping Sarah alive is a way to avoid this sort of mistake. She is more useful to him at this point alive. He is not expecting her to endure his torture and he certainly isn't expecting her to be able to fight him afterwards.
Question: How did the T-800 figure out that John's foster parents were dead?
Answer: He tested the T-1000 by asking him about the barking dog. The dog's actual name is Max, so the T-800 asks "What's wrong with Wolfie? I can hear him barking." When the T-1000 answers that "Wolfie is just fine", The T-800 knows that the T-1000 has killed Todd and Janelle. There's actually a deleted scene (reincorporated into the Director's Cut) where the T-1000 then goes outside, kills the dog, and checks the tag to find out if he was duped.
Question: In the Extended Edition, John Connor is depicted as a senator whilst Sarah observes happily nearby. After all the deadly shootouts and chases, how did two of the most wanted individuals in the whole country (based on sheer destruction, especially against police) manage to get off free, and even get involved in politics? Sarah would've surely gone back to the secure hospital, and John put back into foster care. Or did they somehow convince everyone the Terminator existed after all?
Answer: These questions and more are the reason the ending was changed to one where the future is left uncertain.
Question: In the hospital scene when Terminator and John rescue Sarah. The T-1000 goes through the bars and then the pistol gets caught in the bars. I don't get it. Could someone explains this to me?
Answer: He is made out of liquid metal, so he can just "walk through" the bars while feeding himself around them (by turning sections of him liquid), most likely to intimidate the people he's after. However, the gun is just a normal gun he'd picked up, and so at the angle he was holding it at, it couldn't get through the bars so it got stuck.
Question: Instead of fighting the T-1000, why don't John, Sarah and the Terminator lay low for a while, hire a plane and go abroad?
Chosen answer: Because it would be a really dull film. Anyway, they'd know that it's always out there, trying to find them, never sleeping, always searching, relentless. No matter how long it took, it would ultimately locate them. Best to face it now in a proactive fashion than lie low and risk being caught by surprise when it finally catches up with them.
Answer: That's what they were going to do, when Sarah decided to kill the scientist who was working on the robotic arm from the first Terminator.
Answer: Consider a quote from the original Terminator about how terminators work: "It doesn't feel remorse, or pity, or fear, and it absolutely will not stop, until you are dead." Given that, running would be a temporary measure at best.
Question: Why did the SWAT team start shooting when they enter the room? Shouldn't they just hold for a second to see if everyone is unarmed before they start firing?
Answer: At this point they believe they are dealing with a team of mass murderers, possibly terrorists. It is perfectly reasonable they would shoot on sight to stop the threat. This particular group (at least based on what they know) has no problem gunning down an entire police station.
Question: In the scene when John is telling the Terminator all about his mother (just after he finds out about his foster parents) he says she "was with this crazy ex-green beret guy, running guns." Is he talking about Enrique, the guy the three of them go to who gives them the truck? I've always wondered who he was to Sarah.
Chosen answer: It cold have been him or someone else. He did say "She'd shack up with anybody she could learn from so she could teach me how to be this great military leader." Enrique seems to be more interested in having the guns than selling them.
Answer: In one scene that was never filmed, Sarah, Terminator, and John went to see this guy named Gant at his ranch, and that was the Green Beret. It was never filmed, only storyboarded. The T-1000 did catch up and killed Gant posing as his wife with a spike to the gut in a later scene.
Question: At the end of the movie where they lower The Terminator to its death, how come it has stopped obeying John's orders? John orders it not to go, yet it only replies that it now knows why humans cry. It also actually gave John an order, telling him to run earlier in the movie. How can it be able to do these things if it's programmed to listen to John's command?
Chosen answer: There are a couple of possibilities. One, he has "a neural net processor, a learning computer" He become able to resist that programming (a feature he demonstrates again in T3 when he shuts down rather than kill John). Also, his overriding mission is to protect John's past self. Telling John to run while he delays the T1000 and destroying himself to avert Judgment Day both fall under this.
Another possibility: Doing whatever John says is one of his mission parameters. Once the T-100 was destroyed, the mission was complete so all mission parameters would be moot.
Question: There is a scene where Sarah Connor is pulling out bullets from the back of the T800. My question is how did they achieve this effect? Rubber pliers was my first thought, but you cannot see any bending at all as they are forced in and twisted, plus as the pliers go in, you can see quite a depression in the skin of the T800, it looks rather rubbery and flexible. So the body looks like a fake, but it's Arnie's head on top, but it's difficult to tell. I would love an answer or opinion on this as it has got me stumped.
Chosen answer: They've artificially built out Arnold's back. This allows them to press the pliers into holes the prosthetic and have plenty of room before hitting his back. If you look carefully at the base of his neck and around his shoulders, you can see where they've blended the prosthetic into his normal skin. A good job, but not 100% perfect.
Question: This is about the poker game on the coffee cup the cop gets. Was this an actual contest or something back in the early 90s? Would the cop have actually won something for the "full-house" or were those cups printed just for fun?
Question: What was the point of the piece of robot that stuck to the back of the security car? It never served any major purpose in the movie.
Chosen answer: It was just to show that, being composed of a polymimetic alloy (liquid metal), all pieces could be recombined into the whole terminator.
Question: How did the police officers questioning Sarah know about the foster parents' murder so quickly? First answer is the deleted scene of T-1000 searching John's room (extends time passed). But that won't explain how the police discovered the murder and then told the two officers so fast. In the special edition cut, the police talk to Sarah in between T-800 explaining the T-1000 and when John learns the T-800 does what John says. Not a lot of time, because those two guys the T-800 beats up also have to hang around (they pull up in a car before T-800 & John make the phone call). All I could think of was the T-1000 could have reported it. This might make the police look for John and the T-800, making the T-1000's job easier. He also might have anticipated the police talking to Sarah, he just didn't arrive in time to interview her. However, I'm not sure if the machine is that creative. Anyone else want to take a crack at this?
Answer: The best explanation is that the time passed between scenes isn't minute by minute. In the scene between the detectives and Sarah the detective says "Look I've just sat here and told you that you son is missing..", which would suggest that the scene was taking place a little while after John and T-800 made the phone call. Being that the scenes don't make mention of the time between scenes it could have been any length of time after the phone call that they interviewed Sarah. As for how the police found out, neighbours could have heard the commotion from the dog and reported it to the police and upon inspection of the property found the dead parents. This could have happened pretty quickly if a patrol car was in the area.
Answer: Since John is in the foster system and is a known troublemaker with an arrest record, we could assume that he and the foster parents have pretty regular contact with a social worker or probation officer, or someone of that nature. Could be that the social worker stopped by for a check after not hearing from anyone and found the dead foster parents.
Chosen answer: Two possibilities. 1: The Terminator is emotionless, so the killing isn't personal, but rather what it's programmed to do. 2: Sarah Connor's plan to kill Miles Dyson to stop Skynet's creation.
Captain Defenestrator
It's also a sly nod to another famous tagline, Jaws: The Revenge. "This time it's personal."
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