Say... That's A Nice Bike

It's the liquid metal T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

T2 (as the in crowd calls it) is one of my all time favorite movies. It's one of the few sequels that's better than the original. It was also on the cutting edge of special effects as it was the one of the first films to feature a completely CGI realistic human character.

I was amazed with the T-1000 and it's morphing abilities-- particularly the scene in which it's thrown against a wall and reverses its position without moving so it's instantly facing the opposite direction. Awesome!

Robert Patrick did an excellent job portraying a cold, calculating futuristic killing machine. He moved with a cat-like agility as he relentlessly pursued his prey.

Rather than cast another hulking brute like Schwarzenegger as a Terminator, the producers chose Patrick specifically because of his slim physique. They wanted the audience to assume that Patrick was a friend of Kyle Reese who had come back in time to save the Conner family. The collective mind of the audience would have then been blown when it realized Patrick was the bad guy and Arnold as the T-800 was the good guy this time around.

That would indeed have been quite a surprise. Too bad the trailers telegraphed the reveal months in advance. Why do they always do that?

One thing I never quite understood about the movie-- how was the T-1000 able to come back in time? For that matter, how was either Terminator able to do so? 

In the first film it's established that Skynet's time machine only works on organic matter. A person can go back in time, but they can't bring any futuristic weapons or technology with them.

The original T-800 Terminator was a robotic endoskeleton covered with living, human skin. I guess we're to believe that that was enough to fool the time machine into transporting it into the past. But the T-1000 is made of liquid metal. How the heck was it able to come back? Whoops! Maybe it was stuffed inside a dead human that was transported and it crawled out while we weren't looking.

Here's a good trivia question you can use to impress your friends: What's the name on the T-1000's name tag? Answer: Austin. The T-1000 can mimic anything that it touches, and seconds after it appeared in 1991, it stabbed a nosy cop whose name was apparently Austin.

The T-1000 is a vector drawing, done in InDesign.

Here's the digital sketch I did of the T-1000. Nothing much changed from sketch to final drawing.

Just for fun here's an alternate pose. Hey, T-1000! Don't you know it's not polite to point!