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Terminator 2: Judgment Day, filmmaker James Cameron's 1991 follow-up to his 1984 blockbuster The Terminator, remains a classic of both the sci-fi and action genres, with plenty of critics and fans regarding it as superior to its predecessor. Its innovative special effects, intense action sequences, and still-relevant themes about the dangers of our increasing reliance on artifical intelligence all give the film a timeless quality, despite being released over three decades ago.

But, as it turns out, AI wasn't the only social issue that Terminator 2 tried to warn us about. Cameron has made it clear in multiple interviews that it was no accident that the film's frightening antagonist, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), wears an LAPD officer's uniform for most of the film's runtime. Indeed, Cameron intended for this costume choice to be a subtle commentary on the way cops are often trained to become "machines" designed for violence and brutality.

There's a striking moment in 1992, among many, where the lead crook played by Scott Eastwood turns to his younger brother once a robbery opportunity presents itself. "All it took was 12 racist f***s in Simi Valley," he says, now that the city around him has rightfully erupted in protest. The year is 1992, hence the impactful title of the film, and the city is Los Angeles. More specifically, we're in the Watts area of the City of Angels for this new Lionsgate offering from director Ariel Vromen, working off the script he wrote with Sascha Penn.

Eastwood is reliably solid in a leading role, but top billing goes to Tyrese Gibson in perhaps his finest role to date. There are parallel stories that ultimately converge for the latter half of this fictitious tale set against a very once-real backdrop. 1992 sets up an intriguing premise of pitting one father-son duo against another,...

More than 30 years after footage of Rodney King’s brutal assault at the hands of LAPD shocked the country, his daughter watched video released on Friday of Tyre Nichols being fatally beaten by Memphis police. The similarities were heartbreaking.

“It’s sickening. I don’t feel well. It’s not a good feeling. I don’t wish that upon anybody’s family,” Lora Dene King, 38, tells Rolling Stone. “I don’t think anyone should go through something like that. I don’t see how people are okay, because I’m not.

George Holliday, the plumber who in the early morning hours of March 3, 1991, captured on his bulky video camera a group of white L.A.P.D. officers viciously beating Rodney King, has died. He was 61.

According to the Washington Post, he died Sunday of complications of Covid-19 after spending the last month in a Simi Valley hospital.

An early example of citizen journalism, Holliday’s grainy black and white video of the beating would set off a chain of events that would ultimately lead to the deadly L.A. riots in 1992 after the four officers involved were acquitted ...

George Holliday, the plumber who in the early morning hours of March 3, 1991, captured on his bulky video camera a group of white L.A.P.D. officers viciously beating Rodney King, has died. He was 61.

According to the Washington Post, he died Sunday of complications of Covid-19 after spending the last month in a Simi Valley hospital.

An early example of citizen journalism, Holliday’s grainy black and white video of the beating would set off a chain of events that would ultimately lead to the deadly L.A. riots in 1992 after the four officers involved were acquitted ...

In the early morning hours of March 3, 1991, a plumbing salesman named George Holliday would alter the course of U.S. history. He did so by simply pointing a new Sony video camera at the commotion unfolding less than 100 feet from his apartment balcony in the San Fernando Valley. What Holliday filmed was the brutal beating by four LAPD officers of Rodney King.

The subsequent acquittal of those officers on April 29, 1992, sparked the Los Angeles riots, a violent chapter of civil unrest that resulted in 63 deaths and 12,000 arrests. Holliday’s video is up ...

In the early morning hours of March 3, 1991, a plumbing salesman named George Holliday would alter the course of U.S. history. He did so by simply pointing a new Sony video camera at the commotion unfolding less than 100 feet from his apartment balcony in the San Fernando Valley. What Holliday filmed was the brutal beating by four LAPD officers of Rodney King.

The subsequent acquittal of those officers on April 29, 1992, sparked the Los Angeles riots, a violent chapter of civil unrest that resulted in 63 deaths and 12,000 arrests. Holliday’s video is up ...

Twenty-five years after the La riots, Spike Lee has made a film about Rodney King, whose beating by the police triggered the uprising. Does he think things have improved in the Us? ‘Race is always going to be an issue in this country’

Spike Lee can’t recall the first time he saw the grainy video of Rodney King being beaten by Lapd officers in March 1991. Those shaky, now infamous images shot by then 31-year-old plumber George Holliday reverberated first around the United States, and then the world – setting off a chain of events that culminated in an acquittal for the officers involved and five days of protest, violence and looting during which 53 people died. “I don’t remember,” Lee says, “but we used the footage in the opening to Malcolm X.”

Related: Rodney King review – Spike Lee's Netflix special is a bleakly poetic howl of rage

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There’s no question that Rodney King was brutally beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers – video taken of the savage act proves it. Yet the four men seen clubbing King were acquitted by a Simi Valley jury in 1992, lighting a match for one of the deadliest and costliest civil unrests in U.S. history.

Read More: How Spike Lee, John Singleton and John Ridley Left Their Marks on the 25th Anniversary of the Los Angeles Riots

It’s 25 years later, and Los Angeles – and the Lapd – have changed. But has the rest of the country? Regular reports of police brutality, now well-documented in an age of phone cameras, makes it clear that we haven’t come all that far. Several new documentaries explore the L.A. riots, including the underlying reasons, the actual events, what happened next, and how it relates to today. Among the filmmakers putting their own...

Dark Blue dramatizes a procedural tale of corruption and social unrest set explicitly (though diffusely) against the backdrop of a decade prior, the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Part of what's intriguing here is how the film announces this setting immediately. Opening credits begin to roll, then the title card. Next: video footage, with a computer font typing out the location (“Los Angeles, California, 12:47 A.M. March 3, 1991”) in the lower right hand of the screen. Certain other markers give us stray bits of information: the Paxton St. exit, the speed of pursuit. The footage sets up the 1991 Rodney King beating—the acquittal of those Lapd cops in 1992 lighting the fuse for the South Central unrest which frames a lot of the action late in Dark Blue.

The videotaped image is murky, shaky, although the much-replayed footage of the beating itself (taped by George Holliday) is only shown for a few seconds.