One of the major challenges facing an action movie is how it will distinguish itself from the car detonations, building collapses, and gunfire saturation of its rivals in the genre.Often, the answer is the use of breakthrough special effects as well as bigger detonations, higher collapses, and louder gunfire.The creators of Terminator 2: Judgement Dayfollow this precedent dutifully, but not before deciding to make their movie truly unique by reexamining the established gender roles of an action movie.In the film, we see that Sarah Connor, played by Linda Hamilton, is no longer the helpless heroine she was in The Terminator.In Terminator 2, Sarah wields shotguns, suffers hideous wounds,and exhibits feminine savagery that is unprecedented in action movie heroines.In contrast to Sarah’s new role is Arnold Schwarzenhager’s reprogrammed T-800 character who has stopped being a well-muscled, ultra-masculine killing machine in order to assume the maternal role of a well-muscled, ultra-masculine protector of the young John Connor.Terminator 2 delivers an interesting depiction of how women are fully capable of adopting aggressive, violent, and capable personalities while men can become more caring, perceptive, and affectionate without losing their masculinity.
 

        Sarah Connor is the biggest jolt to the precedent of how female heroines are depicted in movies.As mentioned before, in The Terminator, Sarah was a strong, but typical heroine.She was very attractive, very frightened, and very helpless throughout the entire movie.Granted, many of us would be in a similar predicament if we were being hunted down by an unstoppable, 21st century killing-machine.Sarah must be protected by a male warrior from the future, allowing her to fall into the customary damsel-in-distress role of most action movies.

 

        This is the role that Terminator 2 shatters as we find the new Sarah Connor thirteen years later doing chin-ups in a mental hospital gym, flexing her sinewy, intimidating arms.Considered insane for her stories about killing machines and time travel, Sarah is now a strong, independent, and dangerous woman, haunted by her knowledge of the future apocalypse and jaded over her separation from her son.As we see this new, powerful Sarah argue with the male psychiatrist about her sanity and struggle against the grip of looming male orderlies, a symbolic parallel arises between Sarah’s struggle against her captors and the general female struggle to be recognized as equals by a male dominated world.The mental hospital that Sarah is in is heavily depicted as a masculine entity that considers her to be insane.In truth, she’s cursed with the knowledge of the coming apocalypse and, like Cassandra in The Agamemnon, is unable to act upon her knowledge or make anyone believe her, largely due to her imprisonment in the hospital.This is not unlike the predicament that the unfortunate doctor’s wife finds herself in Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper”.There too, a woman’s doctors become her captors as they consider her to be hysterical when in fact she is perfectly sane.Sarah’s plight is a subtle commentary on the struggle against constraining, masculine forces that all emerging women must face to one degree or another in order to pursue their goals.

 

        Sarah’s escape from the hospital allows her to pursue her goals, and the methods that she resorts to reveal exactly what kind of woman she has become.We soon see that not all of her new characteristics are redeeming.True, we do see her take an active roll in the defense of her son as we watch her firing off rounds alongside Arnold, and she is now tough enough to withstand a blade through her shoulder without screaming, but along with this new strength comes a dark brutality.When she learns that the apocalypse can be stopped by killing the man whose work creates the technology that eventually makes the killing machines possible, she immediately drives off to kill him.She ignores the fact that this man has a family and is completely ignorant of the disaster he will unleash.It takes the combined effort of the Terminator and her son John to stop her and talk her down from her rage.This scene is an excellent portrayal of how women can cross the gender boundary to embody the typically masculine traits of strength as well as visciousness and cruelty.

 

        This scene is a culmination of the gender role reversal being developed throughout the movie as two men stop a woman from committing an act of premeditated violence.Prior to Sarah Connor’s liberation, we see the T-800 becoming gentler and more responsive through its interaction with its new master John Connor.John teaches the curious machine catch phrases, slang expressions, and most importantly, he orders it not to kill anyone.Slowly, the T-800 stops being a 1-dimensional, insensitive killing machine and begins to adopt human qualities such as mercy and affection.This new behavior of this masculine machine protector is an interesting contrast to Sarah Connor’s dark, brooding hatred.We begin to wonder who is more human; a caring, learning robot or a murderous woman?Even Sarah privately observes that this machine treats her son better than any man ever has.It will never hit him, yell at him, or get angry with him.The transformation of the T-800 is so great that its self-destruction at the end of the movie is a poignant moment for the characters and us.