Terminator 2 Had One Moment Scientists Called “Exactly Right,” and It Terrified James Cameron

Terminator 2: Judgement Day remains not only one of the best movie sequels ever made, but a defining film in science fiction. James Cameron’s 1991 follow-up broke all the rules of what fans expected from a sequel to his 1984 hit, flipping the script on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s deadly robot and pushing the narrative into surprising new ways that have essentially made the franchise impenetrable for future sequels (not that they’ve stopped trying). With its stylised, perfectly paced action sequences and new ideas about characters, Terminator 2 set not only a high bar for the series itself but for movie sequels on the whole. In truth, there may only be a few sequels in the time since then that can even match it.

There are major sci-fi elements at work in Terminator 2: Judgement Day that are cornerstones of the genre and a major foundation for the movie itself. Obviously, a cybernetic organism designed only for killing is one of these, but it comes from a desolate future where man and machine are engaged in a never-ending war, utilising time travel to get here, which are huge sci-fi motifs. All that in mind, one wouldn’t be out of pocket for not really considering the realism of a movie like Terminator 2. Unfortunately, though, there’s one scene in the film that was apparnetly 100% accurate, and it’s the one you don’t want to think about.

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Speaking in a nearly hour-long video with Vanity Fair about his entire career, Cameron broke down all of his feature films, including, of course, Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Most of his time talking about the sequel was how he approached the characters of Sarah and John Connor, knowing that Linda Hamilton had specific ideas she wanted to explore with her character, and that, as the filmmaker, he needed to protect the young actor Edward Furlong throughout the entire process. Cameron also broke down one of the scariest moments in the movie, Sarah’s dream of a nuclear warhead exploding over Los Angeles, and made it even more terrifying by revealing how accurate it really is.

“I had done a lot of research on nuclear weapon effects and what would happen if you actually set one off over a city or what the experience of that would be like, however briefly. And it’s very accurate. In fact, I got a letter from what they call the ‘Blast Gurus’ at Sandia Lab, which had emerged out of Los Alamos as one of the main nuclear centers in the US. And they were highly complimentary about how I got it exactly right.”

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“‘Yes, it will flash burn all your flesh to ash, and then the blast wave will knock all
the ash off your bones.’ Wow, that’s great, guys, thanks for the props. But it’s sobering to realize the world that we were living in. And when that film was written in 1990, we were just past the peak of nuclear weapons deployment in the world. There were something like 70 or 80,000 nuclear warheads, any one of which would’ve done what we showed in that movie. We’re currently down to a nice and cozy 12,000 warheads worldwide. And we’re in an even more precarious geopolitical situation today. So it’s as relevant now as it was then.”

Thanks for that, James. Now we’ll always know that the scariest sequence in Terminator 2: Judgement Day is closer to a documentary than fiction.