Terminator 2 3-D (performance)

Terminator 2 3-D (performance). Live action theatre plus 3-D film attraction at Universal Studios, Orlando, FL, starting 1996. James Cameron, auteur.

An important work, described by Dan Persons as "a mini-sequel to the blockbuster hit" TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (q.v.) "that literally places its audience smack in the middle of the Future War" ([112]) between humans and the Terminators and other killer machines of Cyberdyne Systems's Skynet. Covered in some depth in the Persons articles in Cinefantastique 28.4/5 (Nov. 1996): [112]-21. In addition to the usual Terminators, see for "flying mini-hunters"—metal, cybernetic Frisbees with serious attitude—and T-Meg (T-1,000,000). According to Adam Bezark, dir. of the live-action portion of the show, we meet T-Meg at the heart of the Skynet beast: "There's Terminator [T-800] and John [Connor] standing on the stage . . . as if they've just walked . . . into the inside of Skynet . . . . John says, 'Where are we?' and Terminator says, 'Home.' And as he says that . . . there's . . . a big motor sound that starts up, and we realize that they're standing on this massive elevator platform. The whole theater is sinking . . . as if you're going down on an elevator . . . sliding down into the basement." The elevator effect takes the audience deep "into the bowels of Skynet" until they "arrive at the bottom where there's this big chrome pyramid, which is Skynet's brain-pan, the CPU." John intends to blow up the CPU and asks about security systems, "And Arnold [T-800] says, 'There's only one, but it's a really good one.' And as he says that, out of the floor, a chrome fence that surrounds the CPU morphs into the biggest chrome morphing critter you've ever see," the "arachnid-like" T-1,000,000 (Persons 118). Note variations on the archetypal descent of the hero to encounter the ultimate monster in the belly of the beast: "Home" for a Terminator = a Central Processing Unit of a kind of brain, guarded by a morphing giant that combines the mechanical, cybernetic, unformed, and exoskelletoned: the T-Meg spider. If Schwarzenegger's T-800 is postmodern scruffy, Robert Patrick's T-1000 usually appears Modernist smooth and metallic (in TERMINATOR 2), if postmodern in morphing into different shapes. And T-Meg may combine both Modernist and postmodern horrors in a cybernetic hell that surrounds the audience and is imposed on the actors.