Film: "Terminator II: Judgement Day" (1991).
Judgement Day occues on August 29th, 1997 - a future date when this film was made - it's the day the world is engulfed by a nuclear holocaust and three billion people die, leaving robots to inherit the earth. James Cameron's sci-fi thriller, a sequel to his earlier film The Terminator (also starring Arnold Schwarzenegger), seems even more relevant now than in 1991 because it has become part of the millennium syndrome. It depicts a world on the brink of momentous change.
The Terminator films are strong on biblical overtones. Though the world is destroyed, a woman (Linda Hamilton) is destined to bear a child who will one day save mankind from the machine culture. In the original Terminator, a robot (Schwarzenegger) was sent back from the future to ensure that the child is never born. He failed, so in the sequel another, more advanced robot (Robert Patrick) is despatched from the year 2029 to finish the job. But the last remaining humans have reprogrammed yet another robot to foil the plan. Played by Big Arnie, he is the good counterpart of the evil robot he portrayed in the first film.
The special effects are awesome - from the H-bomb that fries Los Angeles to the "morphing" techniques that enable the robots to change shape at will. Violent? Yes, but it's directed mostly at machines, not humans, and it's often quite funny as Arnie learns to swap computer-speak for such Nineties slang as "Hasta la vista, baby."
