Post by moviebuffbrad on Aug 8, 2020 22:09:02 GMT
Hindsight is 20/20. We don't even know he's a Terminator yet at that point. He acts friendly and outgoing, even makes small talk.
Here's a video where Ahnod calls it a twist and James Cameron says the audience "will never see it coming". www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUU43v197_g I'm sure there's more out there.
It'd be basically impossible to do a trailer for the movie without spoiling it, unless the trailer was comprised of footage from just the first 30 minutes. But those 30 minutes are clearly designed to be vague, ie when Ahnold sees John for the first time and his Terminator vision says "Target Acquired". If Patrick is so obviously the bad guy, why is the scene with the T-1000 and the cop the way it is? We don't hear a slash, see a drop of blood, nothing.
I said I would admit I was wrong if you posted a source. So there is that. I definitely don't think James Cameron and co. thought this through very well at all on any front though.
You are right in that I can't say for sure what I would have thought the first time I watched the movie. I think I would have come to the same conclusion though and how would people even know it was even suppose to be a secret in the movie itself? I would have only possibly come to that conclusion after I watched the movie and the movie itself does a very bad job of being a twist imo. T-1000 is clearly a Terminator from the get go and of the 2 arrival scenes he is the only one between him and Arnold that even possibly kills someone. He doesn't even hit him in the face. It has always looks like he did something to the cop's stomach or chest area to me. The scene in directed like a horror movie. The T-800 scene is not directed that way.
It seems then that they painted themselves in a corner if they wanted it to be a twist, because it would have been very difficult to keep that a secret without keeping the trailers extremely vague.
You have to admit that the trailers for T2 are doing the opposite of trying to keep it a secret. With TG it seems much more like a fuck up, because they could have easily kept it a secret. This is why I still have a hard time believing what even Arnold and Cameron say. James Cameron seriously had no say in the marketing for the movie and they studio or whatever just said "we are going to not only spoil the twist, but we are going to use it as the main selling point? This just doesn't add up in my head.
I am not just arguing to argue. I am willing to admit that there just might be a mental block that I can't get past in this case.
Consider the fact that all the Terminators up to that point have been giant bodybuilders, and Patrick is this normal looking blonde dude like Reese. He smiles when T-800s don't even know how to (re: the scene where John has to teach Ahnold). The only clue really is that you can hear Max the dog barking when he comes a knocking. Otherwise you'd have to figure he's a human if you didn't know any better.
The arrival scenes actually parallel the first one. Ahnold comes and runs into some tough guys he roughs up. Again, he hasn't been ordered not to kill yet, so hindsight is applying that rule to this scene. There are plenty of scenes in T1 where he just injures people (Paxton, the bouncer, 1L-19) or spares them entirely (the "Get out" guy). One might assume Ahnold is being pragmatic - it's a bar full of witnesses so he either has to kill all of them or none of them lest he instantly get id'd before even acquiring his target.
Then Patrick arrives in some dark area and runs into LAPD like Reese did. There's even a scene in the first one where Reese knocks a cop out with a stomach hit.
I'm not gonna argue it's perfectly done. JC still needed the audience to root for Ahnie and buy Patrick as menacing later. But you can see a concentrated effort to keep it vague, with the general assumption after T1 being that Ahnie must be bad. I mean, bad guys don't come back as good guys in sequels every day. I also wouldn't see the point of Ahnie and JC making up a twist that didn't really work anyway.