10 Movie Scenes You Won't Believe Didn't Use CGI

This one will come as a surprise to fans of Titanic/ Pirahna 2: The Spawning director James Cameron (he may want to forget, but we’re never letting him), who seems to have never seen a CGI effect he didn’t love. Whether it’s The Abyss, Titanic itself, or his most infamous offering Avatar, Cameron’s later career has essentially become an advertisement for the effectiveness of modern CGI technology, and so it’s unusual to hear that Terminator 2 Judgement Day didn’t use the then-nascent technique as much as audiences could reasonably expect.

Then again, it wouldn’t be easy for anyone to resist a cheat as handy as this one.

In a scene which never made it to the film’s final cut, Sarah Connor pops open Arnie’s skull to reboot his CPU, a procedure which involves dipping a hand into a hole in his head. So how’d they do it without CGI?

Easily enough—the mirror that Arnie is sitting in front of is actually a window, with him and Hamilton playing out the scene a few feet away while, in the foreground, Linda Hamilton’s identical twin sister mirrors her every move as she digs around inside a fake Arnie head.

Textbook.