Although Schwarzenegger had been riding an almost unbroken wave of box-office successes since Conan the Barbarian, T2 still marked a milestone: at the time the most highly-budgeted film ever made, it became an enormous, worldwide box-office hit, and its unprecedentedly sophisticated use of computer effects fundamentally changed the way films would be made. Schwarzenegger reprises his role as the killer cyborg from the future, who has had his switch flipped from "Evil" to "Good" and is now sent back in time to protect the young John Connor (Edward Furlong) and his mother Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) from the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), a more advanced Terminator whose "liquid metal" constitution allows him to take on different forms. Equipped with a budget fourteen times that of the original Terminator, writer/director James Cameron turns Los Angeles into a war zone and wreaks all manner of inventive carnage on buildings, vehicles and human beings.