It’s interesting to me that people thought/think this was a good effect. I saw t2 in the theaters when it was released and I thought this was the phoniest effect of the movie. It was extremely cheesy, so clearly sitting on top of the actor. They literally looked like aluminum flowers taped on to his shirt.
Believe it or not, there is 6
minutes of onscreen CGI in T2 and only 6 minutes of onscreen CGI in Jurassic Park. The 80s and 90s were magical with practical effects. So many things were difficult to imagine how they were pulled off.
In the last 20 years, everything’s just CGI. Movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and Fall Guy are few and far between.
My friend, there are over 2000 VFX shots in Fury Road, and at least 600 in The Fall Guy.
I get that people are tired of CGI, but it’s a tool that is used in virtually every film that reaches theaters, for reasons as prosaic as matching skies between shots.
In the last 20 years, everything’s just CGI. Movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and Fall Guy are few and far between.
There is no world where naming a random longer movie with more effects makes mad max an example of a movie that doesn't use cgi. Something completely unrelated doesn't make a false statement true. There was some marketing that got people to believe this and it's an outright lie.
Miller repeatedly stressed that the MM: Fury Road stunts were real and the physics was real world - that got turned into a false "quote" about less than 10% CGI .. and that became mythical when the MM: Furiosa trailer had obvious in your face digitally artificial characters, etc.
( oops, my bad, I put the second link in not realising you had already referenced that up thread )
The distinction, for now I guess, would be "movies with real actors really moving on real props" versus "movies that are damn near fully generated including much of the actors (eg: lead actor speaks and provided body capture, doesn't actually appear "raw" at any point).
I'm not sure that anyone under the age of 45-50 can truly appreciate just how big of a deal Terminator 2 was and how big movie releases can be. Like, nothing in the MCU era or the Star Wars prequels and sequels comes remotely close. Yes, they gross a lot of money but in terms of cultural significance, I've seen nothing close.
At the time I lived in a city when the local movie theaters would typically run major releases on 1, maybe 2 screens. Session times were like 11am, 2pm, 5pm, 8pm 6 days a week and I think 1 less on Sundays. This was before the age of smaller theaters in the large multiplexes so a big movie theater might only have 4-8 screens.
3 weeks after T2 was released, it was still showing on screens in my local movie theater for 12-15 sessions a day, even on Sunday, from 8am til midnight. I actually waited a couple of weeks for the hype to die down and went on an 8am Sunday session knowing basically nothing (because that's how things worked then) and the movie theater was still full.
The CGI was a big part of it. It has some fan service to it. My movie theater cheered when Arnie came out of the bar wearing the leathers and hopped on the bike. But it's not overboard. It's actually a really great story, which is kinda unusual for a sequel. Like, James Cameron really has to be commended for that.
But there was another aspect too and that was Linda Hamilton. This was one of the first mainstream big-budget movies that changed the way women were portrayed in film. Lots of people had posters of her wearing the sunglasses, carrying weapons, etc. It was actually a really big deal.
The 90s really was a golden era for movies. Like I used to go 1-2 times a week and just watch whatever was on, basically. I don't think I've been to a movie theater since Avengers End Game and even in the 2010s it was a 2-3 times a year thing max.
But it is amazing how much they did with CGI in the early 1990s for T2.
My initiation was the first Alien movie on VCR. I watched it maybe in 1990 or 1991, but definitely before I reach 10 years old. It was also the first movie that I watched. The movie scared the shit out of me for months afterwards.
When looking back, all these movies (Alien, Terminator 2, and Jurassic park) were very well done. They never tried to achieve anything that was out of reach back then, and story-wise they were simply very entertaining. They didn't rely on, say, pornography (some movies clearly had too many naked men/women) to appease to their customers. The characters felt like real human-being who can hate and love strongly. They were done so well that it felt like nature. Movies nowadays couldn't do that anymore, somehow.
What I’m impressed by of late is that a lot of contemporary horror films (thinking of Weapons, Backrooms, Obsession) rely much more on a creepy mood than on gore to do their thing (which is not to say that they lack gore, but they don’t rely on it to the extent that horror films of the ’80s through '10s did (the Saw films probably being the apex of the splattercore aesthetic).
> But there was another aspect too and that was Linda Hamilton. This was one of the first mainstream big-budget movies that changed the way women were portrayed in film. Lots of people had posters of her wearing the sunglasses, carrying weapons, etc. It was actually a really big deal.
Yes, a strong female character in big budget movies wasn't a common theme. Aliens 2 also had a strong female protagonist played by Sigourney Weaver. The movie was also directed by James Cameron.
Terminator 2 was a huge cultural phenomenon. I remember going to the movie theater with my Dad to see it. I think it was the first R rated movie I saw in the theater, so it was something that we bonded over. Many of my friends had a similar experience.
I wouldn't say she was always wrong. I get her methodology wasn't always right or appealing, but she did inspire a lot of girls, which is a good thing.
> how big of a deal Terminator 2 was and how big movie releases can be. Like, nothing in the MCU era or the Star Wars prequels and sequels comes remotely close
I'm in that age range and I lived through T2 and Endgame and I'll have to disagree.
T2 is one of my favorite movies of all time but experiencing the Endgame premiere, as a hardcore fan, with the other hardcore fans, was something else, it had the whole teather howling during the climax.
I also get that T2 is "easier" to enjoy in the sense that you need to watch like 22 movies to really get into Endgame.
Endgame is basically "camp" (though large as camps go) at this point, and I mean that in a nice way, like how Rocky Horror Picture Show evoke similar audience reactions.
But T2 references were everywhere and people not in to movies or action or sci-fi or pop culture knew and know them.
It’s not in Endgame, it’s actually in Infinity War, but everyone knows The Snap. It’s a generationally iconic movie moment that seeped into the entire U.S. culture. I had 65 year old lawyers referencing it in work meetings, and these were not MCU people at all. Sort of like how everyone knows who Darth Vader is even if they know nothing else about Star Wars.
It doesn't. MCU is slop that caters to Redditor man-child Funko-Pop people. No one will remember it in 10 years, and I've never heard anyone reference it outside.
> I'm not sure that anyone under the age of 45-50 can truly appreciate just how big of a deal Terminator 2 was and how big movie releases can be.
100% agreed. Really was a magical time.
For me what "infinite CGI" has done is completely dull the wow factor of literally any movie. Decades ago the effects of T2 and others blew everyone's minds in a way people who weren't around can't comprehend. CGI was brand new and special effects really felt like you were witnessing elaborate magic tricks (since that's what they were).
Now we've seen movies do basically everything and the answer to "how'd they do that???" is just "yeah they used CGI." And CGI still doesn't feel grounded in reality like practical effects do.
This is true, it was a big cultural moment, but the level to which they sold the absolute heck out of that film should not be understated. It was one of the first times I can clearly remember where a film came along at roughly the same time as all the secondary IP like games and merch, and seemingly more and more kept coming. Another film from around that time which had a similar media blitz was Alien 3, released the year after.
In an age where cabinet video games and arcades were passé and a dying breed, Terminator 2 introduced an absolutely epic pinball game that started a renaissance of these machines all over again.
i would like to see a plot of the population of paleontologists starting from about 6-10 years after Jurassic Park was released. I suspect we'd see a bump starting around the time all the kids who saw Jurassic Park when it came out started graduating college.
We had Denver and Barney and The Land Before Time but kids suddenly memorizing all the latin names of each species was not a thing before Jurassic Park. (I think.)
I saw it in theaters, but was too young to be tuned in to the cultural significance. As someone who has watched it 6-7 times (including on laserdisc and as recently as 3 weeks ago), I can attest that it is a perfect movie. Frame for frame, everything is done with a purpose.
What’s interesting to me is how today, something like Avatar 3 has seemingly no traction or notable impact.
Perhaps it’s generational. It clearly did well in the box office, so somebody went out and saw it. But nobody I know directly, indirectly, or remotely has seen it.
It got zero chatter in any of the places that I frequent, and that includes some SF themed communities.
Big picture. Lots of tech, very expensive, Cameron, the whole kit. But whatever impact it had, clearly I was out of its blast radius.
If that's the same 4K remaster that was released on UHD Blu-Ray then I'd skip it - that one is de-noised to hell making it significantly worse looking than the previous 1080p master used for home media.
I was in high school when the movie came out, and we were on a 6 week road trip all over the USA that summer, so I couldn't see the movie. Those days they also published books for a lot of the popular movies (sold at gas stations), so I bought and read the book. I only got to see the movie a month or 2 after release when we were back home in Baton Rouge. The book was the director's cut, and to this day I seem to remember that the version of the movie I saw also had that ending (my brain playing tricks on me). There's also the scene where they cut open his skull to put his cpu in learning mode in the gas station. I don't know why they cut that, it works so well with John asking "are we learning yet" in a next scene.
My understanding is that it's not so much that the novelisation is of the director's cut, but that the people writing them are typically working from (at best) the shooting script (and at worst, an earlier version of the script). The book needs to come out at around the same time as the movie, and there simply isn't enough time to re-edit it and print it after the final editing decisions are made. You'll frequently find sections in the book version that only end up on-screen as a director's cut or in deleted scenes, and sometimes just never at all.
There's disliking film grain and then there's preferring awful inhuman wax figure faces. Cameron is definitely in the latter camp for some reason. GP isn't exaggerating - they 4K remasters are significantly worse looking than previous 1080p home media releases and T2 is a particularly badly affected example.
The nuking of Los Angeles was a combination of physical models and 3D rendered shots. This close integration between physical models and 3D as well as using procedural techniques for the detonation was quite novel at the time. It was enabled by a new feature called "Mr. Nitro" written by Mark Granger, co-founder of Electric Image. The requirements of that groundbreaking sequence very much drove the features of Mr. Nitro, which was later released as part of Electric Image. EI 3D went on to render many shots for Star Wars: Phantom Menace, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Titanic, Men In Black, etc.
More info and images of both the physical and Mac rendered 3D models of Los Angeles being nuked: https://nccasymposium.bournemouth.ac.uk/2005/mscca/DIGGINS_h... While SGI's PR teams and ability to loan pricey workstations dominated the "3D in Hollywood" narrative for much of the 90s, in reality a lot of amazing work was being done on Macs and Video Toaster-equipped Amigas throughout the 90s. ILM's "Rebel Unit" initially started using Macs for 3D pre-visualization on Star Wars, but the renderings were so good literally hundreds of Mac rendered shots were used in Phantom Menace (although a contract ensured only SGI was credited at the end of the film).
Recommend "Jurassic Punk" (2022) - the documentary about Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams who is featured in this interview. It covers T2 as well as Jurassic park and goes into the politics inside ILM,
> Steve 'Spaz' Williams is a pioneer in computer animation. His digital dinosaurs of JURASSIC PARK transformed Hollywood in 1993, but an appetite for anarchy and reckless disregard for authority may have cost him the recognition he deserved.
Directed by Scott Leberecht
This was a fantastic read. I had no idea how much of Terminator 2 had to be invented from scratch. It's amazing to think that a lot of the tools and ideas that shaped modern VFX started with engineers just trying to solve one impossible problem after another.
Some films really do stand the test of time, I'm not really sure that contemporary CGI will really age as well.
> I'm not really sure that contemporary CGI will really age as well.
Because today the film is subordinate to the CGI. In the early days, as is apparent in this oral history, CGI usage was deliberate and each shot received unusual scrutiny, time, and senior talent. And the technology simply wasn't used when the illusion didn't work; the imagery really had to blend with the physical footage. Today, obviously, the same considerations don't apply.
Not the disaster of a print they have for the 4k masters. It's upscaled using 2010 tech and amazing deficient, but to Cameron, I'm the problem, so it actually looks better on DVD
True Lies as well!
I noticed last week the print on AppleTV in 4k had a lot of GenAI artifacts in it (things being optically impossibly sharp, skin detail).
I looked and yes, it was processed around 2022. I’m sure if they tried again with better models it would be better. Is that the future of film preservation?
The source I read also said that the fucking DVD remains the best available copy of True Lies.
Can anyone confirm that the helicopter flying over the underpass was actual flying and not VFX or a chopper on a trailer?
There are claims that the stunt pilot flew under (twice!), but it seems like no amount of skill could avoid weird uncontrollable effects from rotor wash.
It's interesting the bridge blocking the rotors didn't make it fall... maybe it's like a pressurized zone of air/ground effect... it's not a perfect vacuum
I’m pretty sure the PPV feature the back in 1992 said it was real, and if not that, one of the documentaries on the Laserdiscs or DVDs. Nearly everything, besides the T-1000 morphing was practical. They blew up the front face of a building, jumped a motorcycles (with rigging), jumped through candy glass, and much more.
The link in this thread says the camera team refused to participate so the shot in the film was just James Cameron holding a camera in the back of a truck. Nobody else around to film BTS footage.
And speaking of technology, it would have been great to see the Phase Plasma Rifle at a 40 watt range make an appearance, if only by mention of name again.
Disappointed this only focuses on the contemporary technology used in making the (admittedly amazing) visual effects for the film, which has been addressed multiple times across various formats. When I first watched T2 as a kid the thing which grabbed me more was that gadget John Connor uses to hack the ATM and all the cool stuff in the Cyberdyne offices. It would be nice if someone wrote an article discussing that aspect of the film, for the record and posterity's sake.
My favorite movie of all time. It's incredible how much of the technology had to be invented just to make Terminator 2 possible.
More than 30 years later, the VFX still hold up-and with today's AI revolution, the film feels even more relevant than ever.
Amazing writeup! I'll add that the custom squibs they made for the liquid metal bullet impacts are still one of the best practical effects ever.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/v6qjaj/bu...
They also used a practical effect for the scenes where the T-1000 needed to appear on screen at the same time as a character it had shapeshifted into.
They cast identical twins for the roles.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/h9rzry/in_ter...
I was expecting Linda Hamilton, but apparently more than one set of twins were in there.
It’s interesting to me that people thought/think this was a good effect. I saw t2 in the theaters when it was released and I thought this was the phoniest effect of the movie. It was extremely cheesy, so clearly sitting on top of the actor. They literally looked like aluminum flowers taped on to his shirt.
Holy shit. I thought the bullet splashes were CGI. I'm even more impressed that they were real practical effects, that is indeed nextfuckinglevel
Believe it or not, there is 6 minutes of onscreen CGI in T2 and only 6 minutes of onscreen CGI in Jurassic Park. The 80s and 90s were magical with practical effects. So many things were difficult to imagine how they were pulled off.
In the last 20 years, everything’s just CGI. Movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and Fall Guy are few and far between.
My friend, there are over 2000 VFX shots in Fury Road, and at least 600 in The Fall Guy.
I get that people are tired of CGI, but it’s a tool that is used in virtually every film that reaches theaters, for reasons as prosaic as matching skies between shots.
These days it is mostly just Directors, Producers, and Investors that don't respect the medium. They just see a film as more Brand management issues.
It has little to do with "how the hotdogs are made". Most good CGI isn't noticeable.
Yet everyone is there to make a story look great, even when faced with a re-heated dog-turd of a script. =3
The question is for what is the tool used.
To mach colors and hide cables or the complete content of a scene
I don't know where you are getting that idea. The entire movie is soaked with cg from every angle.
https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/a-graphic-tale-the-visual...
And now compare to an Marvel or Transformers movie where many shots don't have a single real thing in it
What the person up to said:
In the last 20 years, everything’s just CGI. Movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and Fall Guy are few and far between.
There is no world where naming a random longer movie with more effects makes mad max an example of a movie that doesn't use cgi. Something completely unrelated doesn't make a false statement true. There was some marketing that got people to believe this and it's an outright lie.
Miller repeatedly stressed that the MM: Fury Road stunts were real and the physics was real world - that got turned into a false "quote" about less than 10% CGI .. and that became mythical when the MM: Furiosa trailer had obvious in your face digitally artificial characters, etc.
Of interest, perhaps:
* The 'Fury Road' Practical Effects Myth Is Hurting 'Furiosa' - https://textualvariations.substack.com/p/fury-fx-furiosa
[ * The visual effects of Mad Max: Fury Road - https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/a-graphic-tale-the-visual... ]
( oops, my bad, I put the second link in not realising you had already referenced that up thread )
The distinction, for now I guess, would be "movies with real actors really moving on real props" versus "movies that are damn near fully generated including much of the actors (eg: lead actor speaks and provided body capture, doesn't actually appear "raw" at any point).
Mad Max: Fury Road
Mad Max: Fury Road is wall to wall CG, compositing and everything in between.
https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/a-graphic-tale-the-visual...
I'm not sure that anyone under the age of 45-50 can truly appreciate just how big of a deal Terminator 2 was and how big movie releases can be. Like, nothing in the MCU era or the Star Wars prequels and sequels comes remotely close. Yes, they gross a lot of money but in terms of cultural significance, I've seen nothing close.
At the time I lived in a city when the local movie theaters would typically run major releases on 1, maybe 2 screens. Session times were like 11am, 2pm, 5pm, 8pm 6 days a week and I think 1 less on Sundays. This was before the age of smaller theaters in the large multiplexes so a big movie theater might only have 4-8 screens.
3 weeks after T2 was released, it was still showing on screens in my local movie theater for 12-15 sessions a day, even on Sunday, from 8am til midnight. I actually waited a couple of weeks for the hype to die down and went on an 8am Sunday session knowing basically nothing (because that's how things worked then) and the movie theater was still full.
The CGI was a big part of it. It has some fan service to it. My movie theater cheered when Arnie came out of the bar wearing the leathers and hopped on the bike. But it's not overboard. It's actually a really great story, which is kinda unusual for a sequel. Like, James Cameron really has to be commended for that.
But there was another aspect too and that was Linda Hamilton. This was one of the first mainstream big-budget movies that changed the way women were portrayed in film. Lots of people had posters of her wearing the sunglasses, carrying weapons, etc. It was actually a really big deal.
The 90s really was a golden era for movies. Like I used to go 1-2 times a week and just watch whatever was on, basically. I don't think I've been to a movie theater since Avengers End Game and even in the 2010s it was a 2-3 times a year thing max.
But it is amazing how much they did with CGI in the early 1990s for T2.
My initiation was the first Alien movie on VCR. I watched it maybe in 1990 or 1991, but definitely before I reach 10 years old. It was also the first movie that I watched. The movie scared the shit out of me for months afterwards.
When looking back, all these movies (Alien, Terminator 2, and Jurassic park) were very well done. They never tried to achieve anything that was out of reach back then, and story-wise they were simply very entertaining. They didn't rely on, say, pornography (some movies clearly had too many naked men/women) to appease to their customers. The characters felt like real human-being who can hate and love strongly. They were done so well that it felt like nature. Movies nowadays couldn't do that anymore, somehow.
What I’m impressed by of late is that a lot of contemporary horror films (thinking of Weapons, Backrooms, Obsession) rely much more on a creepy mood than on gore to do their thing (which is not to say that they lack gore, but they don’t rely on it to the extent that horror films of the ’80s through '10s did (the Saw films probably being the apex of the splattercore aesthetic).
[dead]
> But there was another aspect too and that was Linda Hamilton. This was one of the first mainstream big-budget movies that changed the way women were portrayed in film. Lots of people had posters of her wearing the sunglasses, carrying weapons, etc. It was actually a really big deal.
Yes, a strong female character in big budget movies wasn't a common theme. Aliens 2 also had a strong female protagonist played by Sigourney Weaver. The movie was also directed by James Cameron.
Terminator 2 was a huge cultural phenomenon. I remember going to the movie theater with my Dad to see it. I think it was the first R rated movie I saw in the theater, so it was something that we bonded over. Many of my friends had a similar experience.
I think Scully in the X-Files also inspired a lot of girls to study STEM.
Scully was always wrong, though. Is that really who people wanted to become?
I wouldn't say she was always wrong. I get her methodology wasn't always right or appealing, but she did inspire a lot of girls, which is a good thing.
We knew she'd be right in the real world though.
> how big of a deal Terminator 2 was and how big movie releases can be. Like, nothing in the MCU era or the Star Wars prequels and sequels comes remotely close
I'm in that age range and I lived through T2 and Endgame and I'll have to disagree.
T2 is one of my favorite movies of all time but experiencing the Endgame premiere, as a hardcore fan, with the other hardcore fans, was something else, it had the whole teather howling during the climax.
I also get that T2 is "easier" to enjoy in the sense that you need to watch like 22 movies to really get into Endgame.
Endgame is basically "camp" (though large as camps go) at this point, and I mean that in a nice way, like how Rocky Horror Picture Show evoke similar audience reactions.
But T2 references were everywhere and people not in to movies or action or sci-fi or pop culture knew and know them.
It’s not in Endgame, it’s actually in Infinity War, but everyone knows The Snap. It’s a generationally iconic movie moment that seeped into the entire U.S. culture. I had 65 year old lawyers referencing it in work meetings, and these were not MCU people at all. Sort of like how everyone knows who Darth Vader is even if they know nothing else about Star Wars.
That's impressive, from my vantage point "The Snap" or anything MCU doesn't come anywhere near Darth Vader or the Terminator in notoriety.
It doesn't. MCU is slop that caters to Redditor man-child Funko-Pop people. No one will remember it in 10 years, and I've never heard anyone reference it outside.
> I'm not sure that anyone under the age of 45-50 can truly appreciate just how big of a deal Terminator 2 was and how big movie releases can be.
100% agreed. Really was a magical time.
For me what "infinite CGI" has done is completely dull the wow factor of literally any movie. Decades ago the effects of T2 and others blew everyone's minds in a way people who weren't around can't comprehend. CGI was brand new and special effects really felt like you were witnessing elaborate magic tricks (since that's what they were).
Now we've seen movies do basically everything and the answer to "how'd they do that???" is just "yeah they used CGI." And CGI still doesn't feel grounded in reality like practical effects do.
> I'm not sure that anyone under the age of 45-50 can truly appreciate
Another possibility that fits these facts is that everyone is impressionable at 10-15 years old.
This is true, it was a big cultural moment, but the level to which they sold the absolute heck out of that film should not be understated. It was one of the first times I can clearly remember where a film came along at roughly the same time as all the secondary IP like games and merch, and seemingly more and more kept coming. Another film from around that time which had a similar media blitz was Alien 3, released the year after.
In an age where cabinet video games and arcades were passé and a dying breed, Terminator 2 introduced an absolutely epic pinball game that started a renaissance of these machines all over again.
They don’t call the designer Steve “The King” Ritchie for nothing!
Yes, I remember that table with the T800 skull. It was indeed epic.
I think Jurassic Park was pretty similar craziness. Definitely pushing the CGI aspect, and super super popular.
Like T2, Jurassic Park is a blend of CGI with practical effects and animatronics. JP only had 63 CGI scenes with many more practical effects.
https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/20027-why-jurassic-park-s-s...
i would like to see a plot of the population of paleontologists starting from about 6-10 years after Jurassic Park was released. I suspect we'd see a bump starting around the time all the kids who saw Jurassic Park when it came out started graduating college.
We had Denver and Barney and The Land Before Time but kids suddenly memorizing all the latin names of each species was not a thing before Jurassic Park. (I think.)
Jurassic Park really is a great example of “movie magic.”
I saw it in theaters, but was too young to be tuned in to the cultural significance. As someone who has watched it 6-7 times (including on laserdisc and as recently as 3 weeks ago), I can attest that it is a perfect movie. Frame for frame, everything is done with a purpose.
What’s interesting to me is how today, something like Avatar 3 has seemingly no traction or notable impact.
Perhaps it’s generational. It clearly did well in the box office, so somebody went out and saw it. But nobody I know directly, indirectly, or remotely has seen it.
It got zero chatter in any of the places that I frequent, and that includes some SF themed communities.
Big picture. Lots of tech, very expensive, Cameron, the whole kit. But whatever impact it had, clearly I was out of its blast radius.
Mostly becasue the plot of avatar 2 and 3 were trash, recycling the same cliches over and over not only between films but within them.
45yo here, pretty much just testifying that this is exactly what I remember, and I was young at the time.
I still listen to Guns'n Roses "You should be mine" frequently mostly due to that movie.
Also, Robert Patrick is the best terminator.
Robert Patrick in T2 locations: https://youtu.be/g_weC1AnDYU?is=BCovDJI83JzV2Zlj
39 there; T2 was several times in TV reruns in my childhood. Before that, well... the best SFX I could see were in BTTF and the like.
T2 and Robocop.
The 4K remaster of this is back in theatres next month for “Judgment Day” and the 35th anniversary.
https://www.fathomentertainment.com/news/fathom-entertainmen...
If that's the same 4K remaster that was released on UHD Blu-Ray then I'd skip it - that one is de-noised to hell making it significantly worse looking than the previous 1080p master used for home media.
I wonder if they'll show the director's cut?
I was in high school when the movie came out, and we were on a 6 week road trip all over the USA that summer, so I couldn't see the movie. Those days they also published books for a lot of the popular movies (sold at gas stations), so I bought and read the book. I only got to see the movie a month or 2 after release when we were back home in Baton Rouge. The book was the director's cut, and to this day I seem to remember that the version of the movie I saw also had that ending (my brain playing tricks on me). There's also the scene where they cut open his skull to put his cpu in learning mode in the gas station. I don't know why they cut that, it works so well with John asking "are we learning yet" in a next scene.
My understanding is that it's not so much that the novelisation is of the director's cut, but that the people writing them are typically working from (at best) the shooting script (and at worst, an earlier version of the script). The book needs to come out at around the same time as the movie, and there simply isn't enough time to re-edit it and print it after the final editing decisions are made. You'll frequently find sections in the book version that only end up on-screen as a director's cut or in deleted scenes, and sometimes just never at all.
That makes sense yes, thanks!
The preview they released is so smudged though, like they tried to denoize it.
The 4k remasters of the classic Cameron films look awful. It's like someone cranked the denoise filter up to 200 and left it there.
Cameron himself doesn't like film grain, and he did indeed sign off on the excessive denoising.
There's disliking film grain and then there's preferring awful inhuman wax figure faces. Cameron is definitely in the latter camp for some reason. GP isn't exaggerating - they 4K remasters are significantly worse looking than previous 1080p home media releases and T2 is a particularly badly affected example.
That would be the 29th anniversary, because the in-universe Judgement Day was in 1997.
It's worth mentionning that Softimage was used for Terminator 2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softimage_(company)
https://www.fxguide.com/quicktakes/remembering-softimage/
The T2 nuclear destruction of LA was done by Electric Image. Small software house doing 3D rendering on the Mac.
The nuking of Los Angeles was a combination of physical models and 3D rendered shots. This close integration between physical models and 3D as well as using procedural techniques for the detonation was quite novel at the time. It was enabled by a new feature called "Mr. Nitro" written by Mark Granger, co-founder of Electric Image. The requirements of that groundbreaking sequence very much drove the features of Mr. Nitro, which was later released as part of Electric Image. EI 3D went on to render many shots for Star Wars: Phantom Menace, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Titanic, Men In Black, etc.
More info and images of both the physical and Mac rendered 3D models of Los Angeles being nuked: https://nccasymposium.bournemouth.ac.uk/2005/mscca/DIGGINS_h... While SGI's PR teams and ability to loan pricey workstations dominated the "3D in Hollywood" narrative for much of the 90s, in reality a lot of amazing work was being done on Macs and Video Toaster-equipped Amigas throughout the 90s. ILM's "Rebel Unit" initially started using Macs for 3D pre-visualization on Star Wars, but the renderings were so good literally hundreds of Mac rendered shots were used in Phantom Menace (although a contract ensured only SGI was credited at the end of the film).
Recommend "Jurassic Punk" (2022) - the documentary about Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams who is featured in this interview. It covers T2 as well as Jurassic park and goes into the politics inside ILM,
Apparently it's available to stream for free:
> Steve 'Spaz' Williams is a pioneer in computer animation. His digital dinosaurs of JURASSIC PARK transformed Hollywood in 1993, but an appetite for anarchy and reckless disregard for authority may have cost him the recognition he deserved. Directed by Scott Leberecht
Jurassic Punk (2022) 80mins
https://watch.plex.tv/movie/jurassic-punk-2022
Nextlander (former Giant Bomb NYC crew) did a fun episode on this documentary.
This was a fantastic read. I had no idea how much of Terminator 2 had to be invented from scratch. It's amazing to think that a lot of the tools and ideas that shaped modern VFX started with engineers just trying to solve one impossible problem after another.
Some films really do stand the test of time, I'm not really sure that contemporary CGI will really age as well.
> I'm not really sure that contemporary CGI will really age as well.
Because today the film is subordinate to the CGI. In the early days, as is apparent in this oral history, CGI usage was deliberate and each shot received unusual scrutiny, time, and senior talent. And the technology simply wasn't used when the illusion didn't work; the imagery really had to blend with the physical footage. Today, obviously, the same considerations don't apply.
Not the disaster of a print they have for the 4k masters. It's upscaled using 2010 tech and amazing deficient, but to Cameron, I'm the problem, so it actually looks better on DVD
True Lies as well! I noticed last week the print on AppleTV in 4k had a lot of GenAI artifacts in it (things being optically impossibly sharp, skin detail).
I looked and yes, it was processed around 2022. I’m sure if they tried again with better models it would be better. Is that the future of film preservation?
The source I read also said that the fucking DVD remains the best available copy of True Lies.
Can anyone confirm that the helicopter flying over the underpass was actual flying and not VFX or a chopper on a trailer?
There are claims that the stunt pilot flew under (twice!), but it seems like no amount of skill could avoid weird uncontrollable effects from rotor wash.
https://nedhardy.com/2023/02/12/terminator-2-helicopter/
It's interesting the bridge blocking the rotors didn't make it fall... maybe it's like a pressurized zone of air/ground effect... it's not a perfect vacuum
It's confirmed in the DVD commentary. The stunt pilot had to do it at a high enough speed that it would "outrun" the rotor wash.
I’m pretty sure the PPV feature the back in 1992 said it was real, and if not that, one of the documentaries on the Laserdiscs or DVDs. Nearly everything, besides the T-1000 morphing was practical. They blew up the front face of a building, jumped a motorcycles (with rigging), jumped through candy glass, and much more.
I saw claims for that in multiple sources. I think they initially wanted to do CG but it was too hard back then so the pilot did it anyway.
It seems so weird that there's no "behind the scenes" type footage.
The link in this thread says the camera team refused to participate so the shot in the film was just James Cameron holding a camera in the back of a truck. Nobody else around to film BTS footage.
After the Twilight Zone tragedy, I wouldn’t get involved in such shenanigans either!
James Cameron claims it’s real. But I think that doesn’t exclude filming slow and speeding up later.
And speaking of technology, it would have been great to see the Phase Plasma Rifle at a 40 watt range make an appearance, if only by mention of name again.
Hey, just what you see, pal.
Is that not what both humans and terminators are firing “lasers” in the future war scenes in both T1 and T2?
There was a behind-the-scenes some years ago, in which they showed: A lot of effects werent GFX, but actual scene/scenerie building
And back in theatres this year for the 35th anniversary, in time for Judgement Day (August 29).
Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZgIESxakso
"The 4K and 3D presentation uses STUDIOCANAL’s acclaimed 2017 restoration and 3D conversion."
Also I think we are pretty close to the year 2027 which was supposed to be the year that humans defeat Skynet.
Time flies.
Who knows, maybe Trump can help.
But who exactly will he be helping?
Tweeting, yelling and with bribes
Amazing. Photoshop wasn't even a year old when they were doing this.
T2 is the best movie ever made and got praise from nuclear physicists.
As a T-1000 nerd, i thought this was pretty cool.
Disappointed this only focuses on the contemporary technology used in making the (admittedly amazing) visual effects for the film, which has been addressed multiple times across various formats. When I first watched T2 as a kid the thing which grabbed me more was that gadget John Connor uses to hack the ATM and all the cool stuff in the Cyberdyne offices. It would be nice if someone wrote an article discussing that aspect of the film, for the record and posterity's sake.
It's not from the VFX team but someone wrote a clone of the ATM hacking program
https://bert.org/2021/01/04/t2-pin-cracking/
Easy Money!
Super cool, thank you!
I thought that's an ZX-81 Spectrum but I watched it again and found out that it was not!
Edit: Watched again and it is an ATARI laptop because the brand showed up in a few frames. This is probably the one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio
A screenshot I just made: https://imgur.com/6I34YyN
You are correct, sir. See the link bluedino posted!
Thanks, yeah that's the laptop.
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My favorite movie of all time. It's incredible how much of the technology had to be invented just to make Terminator 2 possible. More than 30 years later, the VFX still hold up-and with today's AI revolution, the film feels even more relevant than ever.