My main problem with T2 at this point is that it just doesn't have any ball.s It wanted to be a preachy summer popcorn movie and Cameron chose to contrive a lot of crap to make it so.
Why didn't the T800 kill any bikers in the bar? Because Cameron didn't want to create a "moral quandry" in having the good guy murder people. Who cares! He's a terminator! AND he "dies" at the end so any bad deeds committed beforehand wouldn't have gone unchecked. Any idiot in the audience already knew that a terminator terminates. If he was really that concerned about Arnold's lethality he should have had the bikers be a bunch of murderous thugs that were in the process of accosting someone when the T800 appeared. Then he could have still dispatched them "justifiably" if that's what Cameron was going for and it wouldn't have made people faint on a second viewing because *gasp* he turned out to be the "good" guy.
What if he blew the black guy's head off after John told him to grab the other guy's hair? Imagine the horror on John's face that would have haunted him the rest of the film and that would have actually driven organically his desire to see no one else killed. But no John is just some magical saint who is unphased by violence but doesn't tolerate it just the same.
Look at Peter Jackson's King Kong. Kong kills dozens of people, most of them innocent. But he was still a sympathetic figure in a PG-13 movie no less. What the hell was Cameron thinking? Make the Terminator into an after school special, complete with a "He-Man cartoon" ending where Linda Hamilton turns to the audience and reminds the kids what they learned that episode? Good grief.
Soooooo.....
T1 didn't really have any ball.s either. There were no moral quandries in that film. The most questionable thing Reese did was steal the pants off a homeless man. And Arnie as the T-800? He just did what its expected villains will do, he killed people (as the T-1000 did in T2, the villains job, not the hero). My point here is
should one have expected T2 to have been more ballsy than T1 was? Certainly if things transpired as you detail it
would have been more hardcore than T1.
The T-800 not killing people has always seemed to be a big issue for T2 detractors but its not like the film totally fails to address it. Its quite clear he was going to kill the jock douchbags. And the guys in the bar he just doesn't happen to kill - in the same way the T1 version didn't happen to kill the guy he kicks out of the phone box or the William Fisher cop that he commandeers the police car from or the bouncer who tries to stop him going into Tech Noir. It can be rationalised as mere happenstance that the T2 T-800 didn't kill anyone. He was willing to and was about to.
Now perhaps you can accept that but you still would rather him actually kill someone and see what the repercussions of that would be for John and Sarah. Fair enough. Ultimately you would never see me saying 'yeah I wish they would have done it
this way or
that way' because I enjoy it exactly as it is. Having said that, I would be intrigued if we could have gotten an ''alternate'' T2 that played out your way. If the T-800 had killed people they couldn't just gloss over that and it could have been a very different film. Undeniably that'd be interesting and there'd be no doubting that this was the same cold killer as in the first film. I'd love to see if, ala King Kong, the T-800 could still be sympathetic despite killing innocent bystanders. Remake anyone?
On a related note T3 pissed me off over a missed opportunity for a harder edge and a potential bit of T1 nostalgia factor - before seeing the film I had read about the TX's ability to control other machines. I thought 'great! Clearly thats going to be used on the T-800 and we're going to see Arnie in villain-mode again and hopefully a recreation of his T1 performance'.......instead all that happened was the T-800 briefly became a Terminator-Zombie and all John Connor had to do was talk him out of it. Wow.
On the preachiness at the end of T2, I get your He-Man cartoon analogy, I do. But again maybe I was just at the age where it affected me. I didn't look at it objectively and over the years I've indoctrinated myself to accept it without any adult cynicism. I mean 'I know now why you cry' is still one of my favorite parts
