Way back in 2011, a study out of UC San Diego and published in the Psychological Science journal found that exposing people to spoilers prior to reading a story actually tended to make them report enjoying said stories more. On average, those people who knew what was coming tended to describe gleaning more pleasure from the stories than the participants who hadn’t had them spoiled.
Subjects consistently reported spoiled stories were less fun, less moving, and less enjoyable in general.
Just a few years later, however, a 2014 study out of VU University Amsterdam found the opposite. In this study subjects consistently reported spoiled stories were less fun, less moving, and less enjoyable in general.
If I had to choose a camp, it’d probably be the latter – though I’m not especially precious about spoilers. Not these days. They can be a lot of work to avoid for anyone who spends the bulk of their day on the internet. Social media is lousy with this stuff.
But you don’t always need social media to stumble across a doozy of a spoiler, nor do you need throngs of enthusiastic, loose-lipped fans. Back in 1991 Terminator 2: Judgment Day was given a big, spoilerific slapping for all the world to see, before it was even released. The culprit? The studio itself.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day is back in cinemas this week and I heartily recommend going to check it out, especially if you’ve never seen it on the big screen. The new 3D conversion I can take or leave, and it certainly feels a few years too late, but it’s largely subtle for the most part. The picture quality, however, is absolutely immense. Time has already been kind to this pioneering sci-fi classic, but the 4K remaster makes it look like it was shot yesterday. After a lifetime of watching it on VHS and then DVD, I can’t really overstate how good this new version looks.
There’s little left to say about T2, which is regarded as one of the greatest action films of all time, but there is one thing I rarely see discussed. No matter how many times I watch T2 I’m always fascinated by just how cleverly the film obscures the true motivations of both Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 and Robert Patrick’s initially unidentified character until 30 minutes into the movie.
The subterfuge begins immediately, with Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor refreshing the audience with Skynet’s first attempt to kill her in 1984 during the events of the original film (which famously features Schwarzenegger’s T-800 as the bad guy) and outlining the events about to occur.
“The computer which controlled the machines, Skynet, sent two Terminators back through time,” explains Connor. “Their mission: to destroy the leader of the human resistance, John Connor, my son. The first Terminator was programmed to strike at me in the year 1984, before John was born. It failed. The second was set to strike at John himself when he was still a child.”
Connor then goes on to explain that each time the resistance was able to send “a lone warrior; a protector for John.”
The first such lone warrior was Kyle Reese, John’s father, but Connor never implies the second was a machine rather than a man. She simply signs off by saying, “It was just a question of which one of them would reach him first.”
We then see the T-800 – and the Terminator we eventually learn is the T-1000 – arrive from the future, nude and in need of clothing and equipment. The T-800 acquires his via a brief but bloody brawl in a biker bar, but the T-1000 seems more restrained. The cop he ambushes is struck in the torso, below screen; it’s not clear that he killed him, and we’re left to assume he stole his clothes. At this stage we don’t know that he’s actually shapeshifted into the police uniform off screen.
The deception continues. When the T-1000 visits John’s foster parents, he says please, he says thanks, and he even cracks a slight hint of a smile after learning about the presence of another individual interested in John’s whereabouts.
The next time we see the grim face of the T-800 he’s just spotted John on his bike, and through the T-800’s machine vision the discovery of John triggers a threatening TARGET ACQUIRED message in his display.
Until the T-800 commands John to get down and subsequently shields him from the T-1000’s gunfire, everything we’ve seen is engineered to trick us into believing a new T-800 has been sent back by Skynet to finish the job its predecessor could not, and that the second time traveller is the resistance’s human protector.
Well, almost everything we’d seen. The movie may have gone to painstaking lengths to pull the rug out from under viewers, but the trailer ruined it before the movie even had a chance.
After really focusing on the first half hour of T2 it actually becomes incredibly baffling just how much of a hurry the T2 trailer was in to spoil the movie’s big, fun twist. The unmistakable Don LaFontaine’s initial narration is nebulous enough – “Same make, same model, new mission” – but the trailer itself, along with LaFontaine’s sign-off quip (“This time, he’s back – for good”), spells it all out.
Perhaps T2’s reputation as an adored and virtually peerless action great is indeed evidence that spoilers may not ruin our enjoyment of stories after all. You don’t earn the sort of status T2 has by accident. But, man, I’d have loved a chance to watch T2’s big bait-and-switch as it was clearly intended.
Luke is Games Editor at IGN's Sydney office. You can chill out with him on Twitter @MrLukeReilly; it's no problemo.
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