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binson Mejia-Portes
2/12/2015
ENC3375
T2 Judgment Day: An apocalyptic rhetorical analysis
The movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day is a great example of a post-apocalyptic event
because it demonstrates to the viewers the fear of giving all the military power to the machines.
In this movie Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the Terminator, who was reprogrammed by the older
John Conner in order to protect a young John Connor (Edward Furlong) from the evil forces of
Skynet Systems, a military supercomputer that humans lost control over and began selfgenerating different types of terminator machines. The main focus of the terminator was to kill
all of the members of the human resistance before Judgment Day. This movies message implies
that if we let computerized creatures govern the whole world, Armageddon will come. This film
is apocalyptic because it has a fearful tone, implying that if we give too much control to robots
that act like humans they will eventually turn on us.
In fact, the audience of this movie loved technology and action/adventure films but was
also scared of what would happen if humans give too much control to machines. Technology is
advancing so rapidly that there are more machines working than humans. For example, toll
booths used to have people collecting the tolls and now tolls are automatically collected. Another
example of fear, red light cameras nowadays are ticketing better than actual police officers
because the cameras have better accuracy.

As a matter of fact, this movie had so much success that Universal Studios theme parks in
Orlando, Florida and Hollywood, California made an attraction named T2 3D: Battle Across
time. The attraction added significance to the film because it reinstates its intention of letting
the people know not to rely on machines too much because the end of times will come as a
result. The attraction leaves the audience to feel that there is hope because the humanity will
actually survive.
Furthermore, the film is an empty narrative because, it leaves the audience to fill in the
blank if the government has been hiding secrets from its citizens, which would be a supercomputer system like Skynet. For instance, toward the middle of the film Sarah Connor (Linda
Hamilton) finds out the artillery that Skynet has hidden in the dessert. The actors make this postapocalyptic movie a success by all of the realistic action packed scenes that it had. For example,
when the Terminator is on the motorcycle with John Connor and the T-1000 (Robert Patrick) is
chasing them through the flood control drainage in Los Angeles the audience could actually
envision themselves living in the world with the machines controlling their every move.
Indeed, a percentage of the Terminator 2 audience come from diverse religious
ideologies. People of the Christian belief said that the movie had a lot of resemblance to the Holy
Bible. For example, they say that, James Cameron, the director of Terminator 2 was working as
the almighty by using his popular imagination as God and ongoing activities of His Church
in the bible. (Lee, The Biblical Terminator: Hetroglossic Discourse and Poetic Authority in
Terminator 2: Judgment Day) Another analysis that Christians imply of this movie having a lot
of comparisons to the bible is the scene where young John Conner gets the T-800 to plead not to
kill human beings as one of the ten commandments says, Thou shall not terminate. (Exodus
20:13)

Moreover, Muslims believe that the subtext that Terminator 2 expresses is a biblical one.
They perceive Sarah Connor as the Virgin Mary, the T1000 that came to kill John Connor as the
Devil that it can imitate anything that it touches, anything it samples by physical contact. John
Connor is seen as the Redeemer, and the T800 is the lone warrior that needs to protect the
Redeemer from danger. (Sardar, Terminator 2: Modernity, Posmoderism, and the other) This
film gets the Muslim audiences to believe that this movie used a great amount of feminism when
Sarah Connor is one the fighters for the salvation of humanity.
This movie became so popular in 1991 because, the United States had just come out from
a tense and technological era of the Cold War. The movie was first shown in theatres on the
Fourth of July weekend of 1991. The fear of nuclear wars was still in the mind of the people of
the time. The directors intention in making this movie was to get the audience to believe in the
Isaac Asimov view on the rules of behavior for robots with human-like features. The Artificial
Intelligence will always be in the mind of people that have seen the Terminator movies.
Let alone, This movie made a phenomenal job of being defined as an apocalyptic movie
because it used the sense of a transition from this world, era, or state of being to another one
(Brummet 9) For example the movie starts in the year 2029AD where the robots are one by one
destroying the world and the human resistance. The movies way of envisioning the future (after
Judgment Day) is that there will not be a happier tomorrow but a tomorrow of suffering and
eternal war.
Actually, Terminator 2 is still and always will be remembered as the movie that
unknowingly answered the question to the people that ask themselves, what would happen if all
of a sudden all of the machines and computer turn on us? The movement Convention on
Conventional Weapon spoke to United Nations so the making of human killing robots could

come to a halt. The movement imagines times like in Terminator 2, in which computers achieve
consciousness and set about killing off the human race with heavily armed robots. (Gover,
Terminator 2: UN Talks Focus on Killer Robot) Their fear of Artificial Intelligence is completely
understandable because of the many new technologies there are out there like; the drones that
have killed may innocent lives.
To conclude, the Terminator sequels showed that if we give all of our military power to
the machines we will be set to kill our own species. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a lot of phrases
from his post-apocalyptic movies for his candidacy for California governor like; Hasta la vista,
baby, Come with me if you want to live. Whenever there is a post-apocalyptic conversation in
my house having to do with machine ruling the world Ill always refer back to the Terminator
movie.

Work Cited
Gover, Dominic. Terminator 2: UN Talks Focus on Killer Robots. International Business
Times RSS. N.p., 15 Nov. 2013. Web. 27 Feb. 2015
Kapell, Matthew W. The Films of James Cameron. Google Books. McFarland, n.d. Web. 27
Feb 2015.
Lee, Mark. The Biblical Terminator: Heteroglossic Discourse and Poetic Authority in
Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Overthinking It. N.p., 27 Feb. 2012. Web. 27 Feb. 2015
Sardar, Ziauddin. Terminator 2: Modernity, Posmodernism and the Other. Ziauddin Sardar.
Future 24, n.d. Web. 27 February 2015
Barry Brummett-Praeger-1991