"Oppenator" or we still have to worry about them big bombs

“Judgement Day” Double Feature: Oppenheimer and T2, 1991’s high-octane one.

(Spoiler for both movies I suppose. Then again, if foreknowledge can spoil one’s enjoyment of things then I doubt those things are actually good to begin with.)

Despite its rather epic length, Terminator 2 Judgement Day had been part of 3 double feature viewing I’ve done. First one being the theatrical cut after the Terminator in preparation for Terminator Dark Fate. The 2019 one was a mess but watching the only 2 good Terminator movies back-to-back on Blu-ray was nice. Second one being the longest cut before 2002’s Minority Report. I’d imagine the future Washinton DC in the Spielberg flick is the same one T2’s “happiest” ending is set in, likely with Senator John Connar advocating for drugged up psychics against thinking machines. Then there is Oppenator, mainly because both 1991’s Terminator 2 and 2023's Oppenheimer showed the audience harrowing nuclear explosion when there is still about one hour of movie left.

In many places where English is not the first language, there is no such thing as Barbenheimer. Here in the city where miHoYo global headquarter is located, Barbie came out on July, 21^st, while Oppenheimer did not until August, 30^th. It is an oddly fitting day for a movie about the father of atomic bomb to come out because that day was once Judgement Day when Skynet nuked us meat bags to a global wasteland or so Terminator 2 said. Well, technically speaking, that movie said “August, 29^th, 1997”, but if we take different time zones into consideration, somebody must be under attack staring at a daily calendar with “thirtieth of August” printed on it.

So, I said to myself why not walk into the cinema for Oppenheimer by day, watch T2 on Blu-ray by night and name the whole charade Oppenator. Things get nuclear.

Oppenheimer: more exciting than I thought

Through a rather cynical lens, Oppenheimer looks like nothing short of Christopher Nolan taking another shot at that Oscar baiting business. The Academy do like a “well-produced” Biopic or several. So, I went in excepting the worst. 2004’s Aviator was a movie that had bored me to tears, what’s the worst a Nolan pretending to be Martin Scorsese biopic flick can do? Actually bored me to death? Well, apparently it did not. Far from it.

One major difference here is that Aviator was the first Scorsese flick I viewed and it might be one of his slower ones, so I just couldn’t adjust to its pacing. While I had been keeping up with C Nolan’s filmography to find Oppenheimer on the more tightly paced side of things, as in contrast to er say the Dark Knight Rises’ meandering. Nolan was hellbent to put in as many tidbits along with Manhattan Project into the 3 hours he had.

Guess another thing pitched me against Oppenheimer was a viewing of Fat Man and Little Boy, 1989’s Paul Newman vehicle solely about the Manhattan Project. Though I think Nolan learnt to avoid some pit falls of that one. In the 1989 movie, Trinity Test was reduced to Robert J Oppenheimer jumping around as if he shitted his pants.

In the 2023 movie, a few people did laugh, a few people did cry, most of people were silent when the nuclear explosion was shown almost in a fetishy fashion from different angles at the movie’s 2-hour mark. Well, guess this summer blockbuster did meet its quota for explosive money shot. Of course, the titular character reacting to something is in this movie as well. Guess showing Hiroshima radiation victims might “earn” this move a NC-17 from MPAA, so Dr. Oppenheimer’s reaction to those during a slideshow is all this movie would give us. Well, aside from a vision of a girl getting burnt the good doctor had when he was surrounding by a patriotic fever.

However, the 3^rd and final hour of Oppenheimer is when the movie truly steps out of its Oscar bait trap and into the realm of exciting cinema. Like 2006’s Prestige, the so-called non-linear narrative of this one is framed as 2 separate occasions where events can be recalled. Instead of men reading each other’s dairies in Prestige, Oppenheimer has two hearings, with the earlier one being the infamous security hearing that kicked the good doctor out of benefiting more from the military industrial complex. After 2 hours of recounting one’s life, the sinister intention of the hearing was finally revealed in hour three and I was on the edge of my seat resisting a urge to pee.

To say Oppenheimer has an all-star cast is an understatement especially with Garry Oldman being there for a hot minute as President Harry Truman. I remember hearing Dan Carlin talking about how Truman and Oppenheimer met with the only f-bomb he dropped on Hardcore History. And Oldman basically playing his role in Slow Horse with American accent is rather fitting.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day for Naughty Dog

I first saw T2 at too young an age. Six to be precious. The movie was full of terrifying images to that kid already. By the time Sarah Connor was turned into a skeleton in her nuclear nightmare, I begged my dad to turn the movie off and missed out on the final action-packed hour. Maybe that just scared me in the right way. I had gone through the whole movie at the age of 13 by which time I became the weirdo prefer immersive horror experience in literature form.

Looking at the latest 2 Nolan flicks, I found it hard not wanting to watch Terminator 2 Judgement Day again. Dear old Christopher found it fitting to cut that 1991 summer blockbuster in halves and fit into two of his movies: the action flick with time-travel part into Tenet and the “We should not stop worrying about those giant bombs” part into Oppenheimer.

I got to say, setting the fictional and retconned Judgement Day in the year nineteen ninety-seven Common Era is somewhat fitting in hinder sight and regarding my view on James Cameron’s career. Mr. Cameron was likely too eye-ball deep in Titanic’s post-production on August, 29^th, 1997 to think about a movie he made years before.

And boy wasn't that Titanic a threshold for my view of Cameron, before that one he was a good director of science fiction action movies, after that one he just became another “pretentious motherfucker”. And 2009 was an especially ill time for he to put out a movie, with District 9 reminding people of Cameron’s the Terminator and Aliens days, while Avatar sure felt like one came from the director of Titanic, because the word “epic” can only be used ironically on those 2.

Anyway, this was my fifth time to watch Terminator 2 on Blu-ray. The first time I saw this movie on Blu-ray was back in early 2015 and not long after my playthrough of the Last of Us. It was back when I was still on the thumbs-up and “good video game story” side of LOU. Then a viewing of T2 on crisp 1080P had shaken my view on that well-acclaimed. Here it is, one of best science fiction story ever put to film, yet it was snubbed by the Academy for being both sci-fi and action. Still, it got more to say than well-rendered yet vanilla zombie story.

Terminator 2 Judgement Day might be seen as an example of marketing fouled up a plot twist. The theory had its merits but it’s Arnold Schwarzenegger at his peak we are talking about here so we all know his character is the good guy in the movies those days. Sometimes is not just about good and evil.

One year before T2 there was the more farcical Total Recall where everything might just be in Quaid, the Schwarzenegger character’s head. In fact, during audio commentary of the movie, director Paul Verhoeven said that the movie was not subtle at all about its swashbuckling adventure is not real. Down to how both times the plot thickened, someone was there foretelling how the plot would thicken. But since it’s an action flick starring Schwarzenegger, the ending was kept ambiguous enough to have an actually “hero won and got the girl” read in. Hollywood always relies on brand, “starring Arnold Schwarzenegger” is just the one they got protective about back then.

Anyway, this is not like Schwarzenegger as the titular assassin turned bodyguard being the good guy is the whole story, it got out of way before the first act is done. How the Connors viewed them as a better father figure than any potential man Sarah might sleep with and John might call “dad”. It can be seen a paradox, the lack of emotion led to Skynet nuking the whole planet to Kingdom Come, yet lack of emotion would make a re-programmed killing machine a better care-taker than any potentially abusive human being. Funny how this re-programmed killing machine had more sympathy from yours truly than that dead inside Joel Miller.

Well, it might be too late call Linda Hamiliton’s Sarah Connor in T2 a potentially abusive mother. For A her son was already taken to a foster home and B the boy was allowed to reload weapons during the daring escape from the mental hospital implying the prepper childhood he had. Which is my chunky way segway into talking about the action. The short of it is “yeah, those are great”, but it’s more due to the stun work back then, Schwarzenegger and Patrick had to sell punches differently aside. Now it seems like a lost art. Though this movie does add to the tension by showing people reloading their guns. The taped weapon training Linda Hamiliton and Robert Patrick went through was included in almost all the special features this movie’s home release had and it certainly paid off.

Conclusion and comparison

While all movies are products of their respective times, Oppenheimer and Terminator 2 Judgement Day are almost products of polar opposites in a timeline. By 2023, CG fest became such a dirty word that Oppenheimer’s marketing can rely on “we only used practical effect here” plus the all star cast. Back in 1991, T2 did not likely have the best action as it had the most action during its over 2 hours run time. I mean a whole floor of Nakatomi plaza blown up in Die Hard is kind of identical to Cyberdyne System blowing up here. Using CG to have T-1000 move is more of necessaire since other methods like say animation just might undercut the movie’s serious tone.

Yet both movies are about people’s fear of not able to control the technology they have. While the latest time point of Oppenheimer was a flashforward to late 1960s, it ended with a conversion between the titular character and Einstein shortly after World War Two, when the future with more nuclear weapons was bleak and uncertain. Well, as much as I like the fact that the original happy ending of T2 could have nailed the coffin and stopped all the lousy continuation, the certainty of the night road is the better ending.

In short, both movies can be described as powerful, and it’s actually rarer than we would love to think.