The 5 Best Movies Inspired by Terminator 2 From the Last 35 Years

Before Rian Johnson got caught up in the murder mystery machine of the Knives Out movies, and before his ill-received Star Wars movie, he made Looper. Starring Emily Blunt, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Bruce Willis, Looper piggy-backs off of both of Cameron’s Terminator movies. Looper follows a hitman, Joe, as he goes to war with his older self who has travelled back from the future to eradicate a young boy before he can grow up to become the sinister Rainmaker. 

The time travel aspect and the plot to kill a child are both lifted straight out of Terminator 2. Johnson even named the mother of the targeted child Sarah, with Emily Blunt giving a Linda Hamilton-level badass performance. As in Terminator 2, there are plenty of discussions and theories about the idea of fate and whether or not it can be changed. But, more than all of these elements, it is the relationship between young Joe and Sarah’s son Cid that most aligns with Cameron’s sequel. The pair have a distinct T-800 and John Connor dynamic, and a heart to heart in an underground bunker feels as if it was taken directly from the desert scenes in T2.

In The Terminator, Sarah Connor was a wide-eyed waitress whose life was upended when a machine from the future started trying to kill her. She spends much of that first film as the damsel, before ultimately having to take on the T-800 by herself. The Sarah Connor of the sequel is a very different woman. Now fully proficient with a variety of weapons and muscles that any gym bro would envy, this Sarah Connor kicks ass. As such, along with Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor is seen as the gold standard when it comes to strong female characters, and there’s no denying that she was an influence for Mad Max spin-off, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.

A prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa follows the journey of Charlize Theron’s character from child to hardened warrior. Anya Taylor-Joy takes over the reins and showcases the circumstances that led to Furiosa being on Fury Road. Epic in scale and full of sun-soaked action, Furiosa is an action fan's dream come true, and proof that women are equally capable of leading these sorts of films.

One of the greatest plays that Terminator 2 made was turning the T-800 from villain to hero. In The Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 is sent to murder Sarah Connor, but in the sequel, a different T-800 machine is reprogrammed in the future by adult John Connor to protect his 10 year old self. Audiences were shocked by the move, but with the foe now being the far more advanced T-1000, having a Terminator hero made sense. Since Cameron’s masterful switcheroo, there have been a slew of copycat movies, with M3GAN 2.0 the most recent example. 

The first M3GAN film was a fun AI horror-comedy slasher that saw a newly developed robotic companion go to extreme lengths to look after her best friend, Cady. Eventually M3GAN was stopped and her consciousness trapped offline. In the sequel, M3GAN is upgraded so that she can help save Cady, and the world, from an even bigger AI threat. Reviews for M3GAN 2.0 weren’t kind, mainly because the film not only switched M3GAN from bad to good, but completely dropped its horror components in favour of a Terminator 2 style sci-fi action extravagance.

Although on paper The Matrix doesn’t seem to have a great deal of connectivity to Terminator 2, it does. Firstly both movies are dealing with the aftermath of a machine-led apocalypse that has enslaved humankind. Secondly, The Matrix, like Terminator 2 before it, helped revolutionise the action movie. The Matrix production team even studied the T-1000 liquid metal effects process during the development of the now infamous bullet-time technique. 

A stone-cold classic and a source of cinematic inspiration in its own right, The Matrix joins computer hacker Neo as he learns that the world we live in is merely a construct. Believed to be a prophesied chosen one, much like John Connor, Neo must take down the machines and free humanity. The film also stars another strong action female in the form of Carrie-Anne Moss’ Trinity. Some argue that The Matrix and Terminator 2 share so many thematic crossovers that there is a subset of fans who believe the two movies are directly connected. They argue that The Matrix takes place in an alternate Terminator timeline in which Skynet ultimately won. 

The Redux Redux directors, Kevin and Matthew McManus, have gone on record to acknowledge just how much of an inspiration the Terminator movies had on their film. The story follows Irene as she travels the multiverse killing the man that murdered her daughter. During one of her many executions she discovers one of his victims, Mia, and rescues her. Rather than being happy to be saved, the young woman insists on joining Irene’s quest for vengeance, but when faced with bringing someone else into her mission, Irene’s outlook begins to change. 

Redux Redux might swap time travel for the multiverse, but Terminator 2’s DNA is all over the film. Both are set across California and feature plenty of desert-set sequences, Irene and Mia are dressed in a similar way to Sarah and John Connor, and despite the high concept idea, this is a low-fi sci-fi most concerned with the emotional heft of the story. Due to Redux Redux’s modest budget, the McManus twins can’t quite reach the spectacle of Cameron’s iconic movie, but when it comes to a film that elicits the same emotional response as Terminator 2, Redux Redux is the one.