stands the test of time

Rating: 9/10 (25 May 2009)

Having just purchased the Skynet Edition of this film on Blu-ray, I sat down to watch it for the first time in several years. It has held up very well, in fact the clothing you see people wearing in the background dates this film more than any of its technical aspects. Acid washed denim with neon shirts, whoa there I'm instantly in 8th grade again! But I digress.
As many others have mentioned, this film is one of the rare examples of a sequel besting its forerunner. And the original Terminator was an excellent film in its own right, so this is saying a lot. The only other film like this, that I can readily think of, is Aliens, oddly enough another James Cameron film.
Included in the Skynet Edition is the director's cut, containing something like 16 minutes of cut footage. Some of it was superfluous enough to demonstrate why it was "terminated", but the scene where Sarah and John remove the T-800's (Arnold) CPU should have been left in. It brought to bear the paradox of the need to destroy the machines, yet also the need to accept the help of one of those very same machines to do it. It also explained how the T-800 was put into learning-mode which makes some of the subsequent, uncut, dialogue a bit more clear to the viewer.
The ultimate message in the series, as stated by the T-800, is that our species has a tendency to destroy itself. The machines of the future are really just the evolution of our own intelligence, sans the emotion, and serve to starkly demonstrate the destructiveness we've possessed all along. Somehow when it is an emotionless machine intelligence trying to exterminate humanity, we recognize it as the terror that it is, yet we think little of it when we are doing it to ourselves.
An excellent film all the way around. Its special effects were groundbreaking in 1991, and they still look good today. It's rather like Star Wars in that regard. The acting was good, and hey you can't fault Schwarzenegger for turning in a robotic performance either! But all these effects would be for naught without a good story, and we have one here.