2025-07-14 - T2 intro

tomeisenbraun

T2 intro

Hey everyone, I’m Tom Eisenbraun. I’m apparently still on staff here at the Belcourt which was a pleasant surprise to me, because it means I get to intro the greatest summer blockbuster of all time. Has anyone here not seen this movie yet? Yeah, let’s get those hands raised, way up there. Okay, do me a big favor and slowly make that into a thumbs up… okay, and now just lower that slowly. Wow, thank you.

Okay, who here’s parents got divorced in 1993 and you thought your dad was awesome but you didn’t get to see him all the time because you lived with your mom and he went out and bought a divorce Harley because you thought T2 was awesome and then he started hanging out with a bunch of southern white dudes who also owned Harleys and turns out he was actually just like a shitty racist white dude in the south who thought the Harley made him look tough and fuckable in his 30s while also increasing his street cred with his only son? Too specific?

Up until researching this intro, I thought my parents let me see this movie way too young and that they were outliers for doing so. But I have a picture of 5-year-old me at my costume birthday party on Halloween 1992 in a T-800 costume they bought at Walmart, my hair gelled up into a flat-top, fake black raybans on, and I’m missing a front tooth. That costume was made to fit a 5-year-old. And my parents bought it from Walmart for me because I thought that T2 was the coolest thing ever.

The appeal of this movie was basically universal, as was the marketing surrounding it, and when it hit theaters July 4 weekend 1991, it had the best opening weekend of any movie ever. It was also the most expensive movie ever made, and still they managed to net 20% of the production cost. You can read all the numbers on wikipedia, but the long and short of it is that this was it. The biggest movie ever, the most expensive CGI, the biggest stunts, the sound of the T-800 reloading his M79 with smoke grenades that you’ll recall for yourself to help you drift off to sleep at night…

So this screening is part of the Action Distraction summer series here at the Belcourt, which I hope all of you here have bought five-film passes for. But it gets me asking the question: distraction from what?

In my intro to the first Terminator movie back in November, I was pretty focused on Reagan’s policy that “the only way to end the Cold War is to win it” and how the first Terminator film played into and off of the latent fear of nuclear war in that moment. In 1984, when T1 dropped, Reagan withdrew the US from the pending nuclear arms control treaty with the USSR and the Journal of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 3 minutes to midnight, the closest it’d been since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

At the same time, the optics of western wealth were a part of the wider propaganda of the time, projecting images of western prosperity to Americans in media meant to overspill our borders and clue the rest of the world in on what they were missing. As much as the Soviet tactics of demoralization would attempt to sabotage the western mindset and dismay them in the wanton waste of western capitalism, our return volley was to broadcast how big and loud and totally awesome all that wanton waste was and get the message across that the only reason that the East didnt have Ferarri Testarossas was because the communist leadership wasn’t letting it in. Turns out the American middle-class weren’t really the ultimate target of trickle-down economics after all.

Let’s go ahead and get to 1991 so we can see the debut of the biggest summer blockbuster of all time. On the way we get Schwarzenggar in Commando in 1985, the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, John McTiernan’s Predator in June 1987, the rescue of Baby Jessica from a well in in Midland TX in October 1987, the election of George HW Bush in November 1988, and Schwarzeneggar’s comedy teamup Twins with Danny DeVito the following month.

Bush takes office in January 1989. That summer waves of protests ripple across the USSR’s eastern bloc as countries push for democratic elections. The Berlin Wall falls in November ’89, and Germany begins to reunify. In March 1990 the USSR holds its first presidential election, and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moves the Doomsday Clock all the way back to 10 minutes to midnight, signaling that the end of the cold war is in sight.

In the first of week of June 1990, Paul Verhoeven’s Schwarzeneggar-fronted Philip K Dick adaptation, Total Recall hits theaters and CNN the first 24-hour cable news network, turns ten years old. Meanwhile in the middle east, Iraq under Saddam Hussein annexes Kuwait over its oil drilling practices in early August and George Bush responds by getting on the TV and giving his famous line in the sand speech: “this aggression will not stand.”

The oil price shock kicks off a recession, and the US builds up troops in Kuwait through the end of the year in anticipation of Schwarzeneggar’s Kindergarten Cop, his first foray into the family action film, which debuts at Christmas. In late January, Bush says “go” and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney bombs the shit out of Iraq. After a month-long campaign, Iraq capitulates and Bush announces a ceasefire and drawdown at the end of February. The next week, a guy with a camcorder films from his balcony as Rodney King is beaten while on the ground in police custody in Los Angeles.

Two weeks later a referendum is voted on across the USSR that effectively begins its dissolution. First they rebrand as the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and then on June 12, Boris Yeltsin is elected its first president. The next week, South Africa ends apartheid, and I can only imagine that the ads for Terminator 2 must be really ramping up by now. The next week, Germany votes to move the capital back to Berlin. And finally, July 1. The Warsaw Pact between Poland and the USSR is officially dissolved, the world’s first GSM band cell phone call is made at the same time that a software bug downs landline phone service for 12 million people in DC, Pittsburgh, LA and San Francisco,

and Terminator 2: Judgment Day debuts at Cineplex Odeon in Century City, Los Angeles and hits theaters nationwide on the Wednesday the 4th, regularly selling out through the end of the weekend. Literally everyone in America goes to see it. The R-rating goes more-or-less ignored at the box office, one industry professional claiming that he saw kids skateboard up to the box office to see if a pre-teen punk could save the world with his own Terminator.

If the first Terminator couldn’t put a time traveling end to the possible future AI-headed nuclear apocalypse, this one sure promised to. While the 24-hour news cycle was covered up with the protracted end of a war that in a lot of ways never even properly got started, T2 gives us a narrative we can handle, clear good guys and bad guys, and a conclusion bigger than anything anybody’d ever seen before.

Before I finish I have to tell you guys to make sure to come see the rest of our Action Distraction programming. I know I’ll be here for RRR on Sunday July 27.

You guys ready to get distracted??