Arnold Schwarzenegger in TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY (1991)
Why do people keep ruining James Cameron’s perfectly good endings? First, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley goes through hell to save poor little Newt in Aliens, only to have friggin’ David Fincher whack them both in Alien3 (because, of course, it’s much cooler to kill off beloved, memorable characters than, say, to create interesting new ones). Then, in T2, Cameron finished off the story he began in the original Terminator with a scene of noble, sacrificial self-immolation by the villain-turned-hero/father figure Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 (a.k.a. Arnold Schwarzenegger) that clearly implies the threat of a future evil robot dystopia has been averted...and a decade later, we’re right back where we started with Terminator 3, Terminator Salvation and The Sarah Connor Chronicles. As it turns out, Arnie didn’t have to lower himself into that vat of molten lead after all (a scene I could only illustrate with the clip above, since every other version and parody on YouTube has embedding mysteriously disabled, possibly by Skynet). But the scene nevertheless makes my list of great deaths (even though cyborgs can't technically die) because, even more than the hyper-stylized imagery of 300 or Sin City, the fiery shot of the doomed cyborg descending towards oblivion captures the operatic melodrama at the heart of the modern comic book ethos as well as any Mexican standoff in the days when epic grand finales were Sergio Leone’s stock-in-trade. (AO)
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