How about the decision to take the villain from the first film and make him the hero of the second film? That took balls. One of my favorite scenes is when Arnold walks naked into the biker bar and asks the Hell's Angel dude for his clothes, boots and bike.

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churnage, I was just thinking this last night. And Cameron did something similar when he took a horror movie (Alien) and turned it into an action movie (Aliens). I predict big things from young Mr. Cameron!

I believe the movie also conforms to the five act structure, but it's been a little while since I've seen it. Intro: Terminators in the real world, and one's after John Conner... but not the one we expect! Conceit: John Conner and the T-800 break Sarah Conner out of the hospital and away from the murderous T-1000, eventually escaping to the desert. Now, they could be safe out there, BUT... Turn: Sarah Conner goes after Miles Dyson, to stop him from developing the tech that will lead to the Terminators. She almost kills him, but her son stops her and... Spiral: ...Dyson teams up with them to destroy the tech. Unfortunately, this draws the attention of the police AND the T-1000, and after the LAPD lays siege to Cyberdyne, the Conners escape... Climax: ...to that iron melting factory, where the T-1000 and the T-800 fight to the death. All these sequences have clear rising and falling action AND they each have their own unique action sequence attached. The mechanics of the script are just so wonderfully stark, simple, and elegant. Like a watch.

Good analysis, Chris. How would assess any sort of metamorphosis going on with the Protagonist?

I would have to rewatch the movie to track exactly where everyone changes, but I think all three of them go through a big change: The T-800 starts learning about humanity through the course of the movie (there's a deleted scene that I KEEP thinking is actually in the movie, where the Conners turn on this chip in his head). He starts injuring and killing people indiscriminately until Conner tells him "you can't just go around killing people!" "Why?" "You just can't." He starts this journey from just being a smart weapon to being an actual protector, there's a part in the desert where Sarah Conner says the Terminator is the father John never had (or something along those lines). The ultimate way of protecting John and Sarah is destroying himself at the end. I don't know if the T-800 would have done that in the start of the film. And by then he KNOWS he has to do it, and he disobeys John's sobbing order to stay, because he's gone on this emotional journey, he sees the worth of humanity and all that jazz. Remember what he says? "Now I know why you cry." Sarah Conner undergoes a tremendous arc, at first she's crazy and scarred. She has nightmares about Judgement Day every time she closes her eyes. She's living under a mushroom cloud of a nightmare. When we meet her, she's been locked up for trying to blow up a computer chip factory, and when she gets out, what does she do? She slips away to try and kill Dyson. BUT what happens? She sees the fear in his eyes and what she just put his family through, and she starts to regain her humanity a bit. She starts on this arc to becoming a mother again, because for so long she's been a commando and a warrior. What she did to their lives is almost exactly what the old T-800 and Kyle Reese (I'm blanking on his characters' name) did to her. So it's the first time she realizes maybe she has to try a different approach. She's practically like a Terminator herself, single-mindedly focused on a mission of complete eradication (no doubt amplified by being stuck in an asylum). John seems like the least obvious change, but throughout the movie we're seeing why John Conner is John Conner. You wonder "well, what makes HIM the saviour of mankind?" He's not the strongest, maybe not the smartest, he's no tactical genius, but he's real curious and he's the only one in the movie who really questions why things are why they are. He's a computer hacker! What does he do when he finds out he has his own Terminator? He plays with him, sees what he can get him to do! He turns on that chip in the head to see what else the robot is capable of. He teaches the T-800 things like to look for a key in the visor of the car to expressions like "hasta la vista, baby." And he builds off of that. He changes the Terminator, and because he can do that, he changes Sarah. John's arc is sort of a classic "boy learns responsibility taking care of a dog" story, he doesn't really think much of the world at the start (he's a real "screw the rules" type of punk) but gets a crash course in consequences and the brutality of war throughout the course of the flick. And there's also that arc with Sarah, where he doesn't really care about anyone, even his mom who loves him more fiercely than any mom ever loved her kid, and at the end he loves her and he's emotionally broken up about the T-800 melting, so he's gotten in touch with that part of himself. Ironically, I think the T-1000 is the only main character not to go through some sort of metamorphosis. Although he does seem particularly curious about death, which was a nice little touch. It wasn't quite humanity, but it gave him a little something for the audience to identify with. It felt like every time he killed someone, his head would tilt and he had this sort of "huh" reaction to it.