I stumbled upon this recent question about Terminator 2, in particular about the scene where Miles Dyson dies after having been wounded lethally and trying to buy time for the others by detonating a grenade. He warns the upcoming SWAT team that the grenade will go off shortly and they run away.
This question states that the policemen didn't have enough time to escape the explosion. But I for myself always thought they made it out of the explosion radius in time, but then again, I'm not totally sure about this anymore, since this question says they surely didn't have enough time as judged by the immediate cut to the explosion destroying the building (although I vaguely remember it to only destroy a single floor).
The reason I'm asking this is, that I think the fact of the policemen dying would bring a major inconsistency with the general moral justification of the heroes' actions throughout the movie. There are actually no real human enemies in this movie and the movie more than one time elaborates on the fact, that the heroes (and especially the supposedly good Terminator) don't kill anyone, in order for the viewer to better identify with them on a moral basis. Whereas the previous movie had that touch of sweet immorality, once you decided that it is cool to watch Arnie run around and kill everybody, this one goes to great lengths to show him as a "good guy", especially in the scene more or less immediately before the questioned one. And in the end most action movies where the hero kills multiple bad guys in a row still try not to show him directly killing innocents.
So I see different possibilities for this:
- The SWAT team didn't die and managed to escape in time.
- Their death is to be justified as kind of collateral damage (in line with all the others killed by the T-1000, the "evil Terminator"), since Dyson didn't kill them completely on purpose.
- Their death is merely ignored or justified with a sense of "the end justifies the means" (which IMHO wouldn't be in line with the movie's previous moral elaborations, though).
- It is left open for the viewer to decide (which in turn was a bit too "heavy" an aspect for such a straight-to-the-point action movie).
And my question is, did the SWAT team die from Miles Dyson's grenade, and if yes, how is this supposed to be justified?
(disclaimer: Now it might be that this has been intentionally left open for interpretation which would make this a bit of an open discussion question. But I might also just have overlooked something (or not remebering it that well) or there is even an official statement about this from the writers.)
analysis
tag is justified. Feel free to remove it if you don't think so.