Wait! What about Terminator, the first one? This one has better ratings according to other people. IMDB, AFI, and so on. And the first one terrified me as kid so you can forget about it. I Was 9ish and over a neighbor-kids' house and they had HBO. I didn't sleep well for about a week. Also, I was banned from going over there again. However, this movie has a completely different tone to it and I'm no longer 9. By the way this is easily the most violent movie we've watched at movie to date. That includes The Godfather.
Assuming you watched the trailer, if not SPOILER ALERT, there are two Terminators in this movie; one good, one bad. There is this wonderful element of suspense featured through out the first twenty minutes of the film where you are unsure which is good and which is bad. Both are looking for John Connor, son of Sarah Connor who is the protagonist from the first Terminator. Tension mounts and you don't find out who is what until it all goes down a hallway, replete with shotgun blasts.
Ah-nolds' wooden acting lends itself very well to playing a machine with a penchant for popping a cap in people's knees. A stiff, expressionless muscle head is just what the doctor ordered. *Insert joke about Jingle All The Way. **It should also be noted I have seen Jingle All The Way ... more than once. ***Hangs head in shame. ****Googles correct grammatical usage of the * symbol.
The visual effects, for which it won an Oscar, have sadly not held up over the last 19 years. It's hard to CG reflective surfaces to start with, but try doing it two decades ago. Rest assured that those effects were ground breaking back in the day. Of course now they look like something that came out of Dave's School of Computer Animation.
I didn't realize I'd picked up an extended edition until I made it home from the store. This particular version, dubbed the Extreme DVD edition, had an extra 16 minutes of film not seen in the theatrical release. Which makes it a very long, literally, two and half hours!
Overall, it's a great "dog movie", where john finds his own Terminator, befriends it and then tragedy strikes as old age sets in and you have to put it down. It's pretty much just like Marley and Me. But with guns ... and stabbing people in the face. I've never seen Marley and Me, but i've been told that's what happens. There are several wonderful examples of cinematography to be found and enjoyed in this movie. Which gets nod to Cameron and his crew. As a side challenge, see if you can spot the scene where they used mercury instead of CG. It's a great action movie, with a good plot, decent acting and above all, killer robots from a dystopian future. This movie is a Watch. It is however also a screener, where you screen it before you let kids watch it. This movie earns 3.2 blow off knee caps, out of 5.
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