This is the Walt Disney Version of Terminator

Rating: 6/10 (29 July 2003)

If you've seen The Terminator, then you've already seen Terminator 2. Same plot line, same scenes, even the same lines crop up - the only difference is that this time there's a cute kid, and the cute kid insists on there being no deaths. Instead of the terminator blasting away at everyone in sight, he shoots them in the leg! The first film was original, shocking, disturbing and carried a powerful emotional charge. The dream of Kyle Reese, the man sent to protect Sarah Connor, is powerfully disturbing - a vision of the future in which mankind is being hunted to extinction, yet manages to just about hold on. In Terminator 2 we have the same scene - this time it is Sarah Connor dreaming, and her dream is a clichéd one: the atom bomb dropping. A vision we long ago became familiar with and so holds no resonance at all. That lack of imagination and originality runs throughout this tired film. The fight in the first film was between a passionate human being (a man who feels pain, fear and love) and a remorseless cyborg. The end, in which a human uses cunning and ingenuity to destroy the machine, and uses another machine to do that, is satisfactory. In this limp re-make it is cyborg versus cyborg, and humans are on the side-lines. We are not engaged - indeed, it is like watching a computer game: empty and meaningless.