A very entertaining action thriller with a good story and memorable characters

Rating: Null/10 (5 February 2009)

You can take contemporary American action cinema away entirely if you leave me James Cameron and John McTiernan. These guys make movies with enough thought and intelligence in them that you don't feel like an absolute moron watching them, often work with very good screenplays, and when it comes down to what really matters in an action thriller: really goddamn good action scenes, they know exactly how and what to deliver.
Now let's not waste any time on this nonsense about "The Terminator" being a thought-provoking intellectual sci-fi classic. It's not. It's a well-written, moderately intelligent, relatively smart movie, but still predominantly an action thriller which exists almost solely to entertain. What sets it apart and makes it memorable is that it features well-drawn, memorable characters, an interesting mythology, a terrific, gloomy atmosphere, brilliant effects which still hold up to this day, a really good, well though-out story, and, importantly: a lot of things explode, and they do so in an extremely entertaining manner.
The direction and cinematography are really top-notch and combine to create the aforementioned atmosphere which would never really be recaptured in any of the other films in the franchise, and the action scenes are all spectacular. The cast is pretty good too, and Ahnuld's not bad either, mostly because he doesn't really have to act at all. I'll never understand how anyone can suggest he's a better actor than Stallone or even Van Damme, but to his credit he did star in some really good films, and was almost always smart about which roles he picked, early in his career at least.
There are many things that are great about "The Terminator" which are missing in "T2", but a common defense for fans who far prefer the first film has been its relative intelligence. It's a compelling enough as a sci-fi story, but this is all going a bit far with a film which is really just a great action thriller with a good story and characters. It might be damaging to the film's reputation that its fans are now so frequently acting as if it is a classic of intellectual sci-fi cinema, which is most certainly isn't. It's a classic of 80's action cinema, and I'm happy with it just as it is.