I had a brief think about this and it doesn’t make sense. In terms of Lacanian/Zizekian analysis. Hear me out.
Terminator 2 is all about fathers and mothers. Mother has gone insane and mastered the fathers arts, creating a conspiracy where she tries to turn her son into the father.
The real father (semen) is long dead to the point of being a joke.
The foster father is impotent, a shown by the state acting as mother and the foster mother: his role has been stolen by mothers.
In contrast to the State a new name of the father is produced in the T-800 reprogrammed by the “boy as the man” to be a father. His future self has imputed his command over the “phallus.”
Sending a real man back in time won’t work: the name of the father doesn’t have emotions or personality in the way that that guy who fucks your mum, “Derrick” does. There’s that awful moment between 12 and 32 when a boy realises that “Father” is actually just Derrick, and it’s an important part of the boy becoming a man.
In terminator 2 this realisation already happens “your foster parents are dead,” and the T-800 becomes the promise that the boy will one day perfect his guerilla war and sexual skills, enough to command the ludicrousness of men’s technicality in the form of a body building governor.
The fluidity of the t2000 speaks to a femininity. Pretty much any male actor could be feminised against Arnies hyper masculinity. But this works here *because* of the argument about mothers and the state. mummy and the mental hospital and the foster parents and the coppers and the evil robot liquid all represent a female controlled state apparatus: in the cowboy narrative they represent the town and the school marm against the cattle rustling leather wearing sweaty motorcycle riding dark sunglasses…
You get the point.
Arnie can’t have been a human being because human beings make shitty symbols. Robots make better symbols.
Given the robot thing and that this is a lionisation of blue collar work, robot as worker means that the good robot has to be buff and blue collar and hands on. The bad robot needs to be rhyzomatic and fluids and *physically becoming* its weapon. Like office workers obviously. Last time I had to ask HR about my overtime in they developed intrusive silver spikes of administrivium and penetrated me with fluid.
Arnie couldn’t have been a human because Teinator 2: Judgement day is a psychosexual cowboy workplace drama.
So you’d need a fundamentally different plot to a cowboy chase film. Try death sex vengeance (mad max 1) or “one last hard action” by the impotent man (unforgiven) and then you could use an evil blue collar killer robot antagonist.