Ushering in a revolution: how ‘Terminator 2’ forced the industry to sit up and take notice of CGI
Doing things nobody has ever done before has been a key part of James Cameron‘s approach to filmmaking for over 30 years, and it can all be traced right back to Terminator 2: Judgement Day, which kickstarted a revolution that would change the industry forever.
As well as being one of the greatest movies ever made in both the action and sci-fi genres, Cameron’s follow-up to his 1984 classic is among the finest sequels in Hollywood history. It set a record as the highest-grossing R-rated release of all time and was the most expensive production the industry had ever seen. All remarkable accomplishments, but they each paled in comparison to the game-changing CGI.
Cameron had envisioned a liquid metal Terminator capable of shapeshifting into various forms as far back as the original, but the technology simply didn’t exist to make it a realistic proposition. It technically didn’t when he began work on Judgement Day, either, but that didn’t stop him from enlisting George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic to help blaze a new trail.
The effects house had already been responsible for cinema’s first completely computer-generated sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, as well as the first-ever computer-generated character in an episode of Young Sherlock Holmes. The company had also worked closely with Cameron on The Abyss to introduce the industry’s first 3D computer-created character to display emotion.
The breakthroughs were a gradual inclement, but Terminator 2 forced them to leap several bounds at once. Whereas a team of six were responsible for The Abyss‘ ground-breaking CGI creation, Judgement Day required 35 people and millions of dollars invested in bespoke equipment, with an estimated $17million in total being spent on creating the digital sequences that only amounted to roughly five minutes of screentime.
In a typically bullish fashion, Cameron didn’t have a backup plan in case his vision couldn’t be realised, which forced everyone involved to come up with solutions. It took months of painstaking work, but in the long run, Terminator 2 left the door ajar for the incoming CGI revolution to take it clear off the hinges.
The movie’s digitally rendered sequences were so impressive, realistic, and jaw-dropping that it convinced the industry at large that CGI was no longer a novel technique that could be used in small doses to enhance a certain scene. Instead, it was a viable method of making the impossible possible on a scale that had previously seemed unimaginable to even the most ambitious of filmmakers.
It is easy to illustrate just how rapidly Hollywood sat up and took notice of what Terminator 2 had achieved. Just nine years prior to Cameron’s showstopping second instalment, the peak of CGI technology had evolved from the crude and rudimentary stylings of Tron to the unconvincing eyesore of Willow‘s morphing sequence.
Nine years after Judgement Day, and CGI had become an accepted staple of every major blockbuster, with new advancements being developed on a near-annual basis. Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park took things to the next level before 1995’s Casper debuted the first computer-generated character with a main speaking role, and Jumanji deployed photorealistic hair and fur on animals for the first time. The following year’s Dragonheart introduced a fully digital protagonist before Lucas himself took the next step when he integrated motion capture into Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.
Just like that, CGI was everywhere, and it wouldn’t have happened the way that it did as quickly as it did without Terminator 2.
