That’s pretty common. If we were to place bets on whether more directors do this than not, I wouldn’t be confident betting either way.
PT Anderson does this a lot. In fact I think There Will Be Blood is the only movie of his where he didn’t use any of his regulars (at least any of the more well known ones, he may have used some bit players).
Also Judd Apatow. Paul Rudd, Seth Rogan and Jonah Hill seem to be in pretty much everything that has his name attached to it.
I also had the impression (with absolutely no evidence) that since the cop was the first form the T-1000 “imprinted” that it was sort of his native form for this mission. He wanders around as the cop even when he’s no where near the others or doing cop stuff. Changing into some non-cop form seems like a conscious and temporary choice for him.
He actually warps back looking like Robert Patrick before he even kills the cop, doesn’t he? So maybe that’s his factory default.
Another possibility is, just as the Arnie terminator learns compassion for humans over the course of the film, the Robert Patrick model has learned to detest us. He reverts to a recognizable form because it’s not enough for him that the Connors die - he wants them to die in terror and despair.
I was gonna say that. It’s kinda like a savage killer baby duckling that imprints on the first “daddy” it kills.
It’s from running Windows 2029.
You have just killed a police officer! Would you like to:
- Assume his identity
- Take his weapon and vehicle
- Search the LAPD database
The T-X, being a later model had more options.
You have just killed a police officer! Would you like to:
- Assume his identity
- Take his weapon and vehicle
- Search the LAPD database
- Remote control his vehicle
- Deflate your breasts back to normal size
The movie does not show the T-1000 before showing him as the cop.
There’s a brief shot of him walking toward the cop before killing him and then standing naked over him.
And what’s with the naked for the T1000 & TX anyway?
They both fashion clothes from their selves, so any clothing would qualify as “living” for the time machine.
I think everyone came back naked, right? Arnie and Michael in the first movie, Arnie and Patrick in the second. I never saw the third or the one with Christian Bale (I’m guessing the fourth one didn’t have time travel because it was already set in the future).
I’m definitely not an authority, and I haven’t seen the films in years, but I thought going naked was a prerequisite to the time travel thing: it’s why Reese didn’t bring any weapons, “only organic material can go through” or something. Doesn’t solve the “mimetic poly alloy” thing of the T-1000 and why it can go through, but whatever.
Production reason: so we wouldn’t know these new Terminators had any special new abilities right off the bat. When the T-1000 kills the cop we don’t actually see his arm turn into a blade so we assume he did something like what Arnie did in T1- ripped the cop’s heart out perhaps? When the T-X kills the red leather lady, she breaks her neck rather than bust out the plasma cannon.
In-universe reason: the liquid metal T’s can only imitate things they’ve sampled and there aren’t a lot of LAPD officers or women in red leather suits walking around in the future.
Edit: the mimetic polyalloy can approximate whatever it is that allows things to travel back in time. After T2 people asked “Why not just wrap some of that around a crate of futuristic weapons?” And that’s exactly what we got in T3.
I grant that, but I saw the movie recently and don’t recall seeing the T-1k distinctly before he kills the cop.
I’ll pop the DVD in tonight, but IIRC you never see the cop’s face or the T1000’s face, and you don’t actually see the T1000 kill the cop - all you know is that someone wearing a cop’s uniform is now searching for John Connor. They were trying to set up the first 10-15 minutes of the movie so if you had seen the first Terminator, you’d think that Arnie was still trying to kill John Connor and that Robert Patrick was another human sent back to protect him. That’s why there’s the scene in the hallway at the mall where JC is trapped by Arnie, only to have Arnie yell “Get Down!” and shoot the T-1k. Of course, every story about the movie before it was released mentioned that Arnie was going to be a good guy in this one, completely ruining the effect.
I seem to recall in in the commentary on one of the versions I have they mention that a stunt pilot actually did just that for the footage, and he just barely made it.
It’s 100% inarguably true that the T-1000 in no way takes full advantage of its morphing and shapechanging abilities. Certainly it makes no sense for it to retain the same human face. More than that, however, there’s a scene where it’s running on foot through a parking garage chasing John who is on a motorbike. There is certainly some shape it could shapeshift into (robot cheetah?) that would make it much faster than a sprinting human, but it doesn’t. I’m sure there are dozens of other cases where outside-the-box use of shapeshifting would have been advantageous.
I like to blame all these things on:
-deficiencies in its programming (it was, after all, only a prototype)
and/or
-hubris
The state of computer graphics at that time could not produce a photo-realistic helicopter going under a bridge - the silvery T-1000 was the state of the art. Actually, the most impressive bit was the morph from the floor tiles to the security guard.
Anyway, if Cameron wanted a helicopter to fly under a bridge at that time, they had to actually do it.
I thought the T1000 got stupider as it sustained more damage. It’s “brain” had to be distributed throughout the billions of nano-particles making up it’s form. The whole assembly could re-form, but the bits had to sustain some damage.
An argument can be made that the cop was the first form assumed by the T-1000 and thereby became the default to revert to.
Didn’t he have to have physical contact with someone first, before he could morph into said person?