One of the great Sci Fi movies

Rating: 10/10 (2 November 2004)

The first time I saw this was on VHS and my eyes were riveted to the screen from the opening scene to the end credits. Some of the best films I've ever seen have been directed by unproven newbies on small budgets but with big ideas. This was John Cameron's big idea and of course the whole movie production was tense and always pressed for money, but the end result was one the best ever Sci Fi movies. 20 years later and its still fun to watch. I still say "I'll be back" sometimes in my deepest voice when I'm leaving the office.
Today I just saw it in glorious commercial-free HD from HDNet. It looked exquisite of course but I've been reading about remastering, compression and digitizing movies so I always wonder just what it is I'm seeing. Was it a digital transfer like the new Star Wars remasters? Probably not. It looked pretty good but I'm betting that Dish does some compression on HD signals, especially when they're on the Basic HD package list like HDNet is. Even so, it'd be hard to watch that smeary old VHS Terminator tape after seeing Ahnuld etal in High Definition!