The bigger budget, but less gripping follow-up to the classic. It softens the original film’s Cold War edge for the post-Cold War 90s, which makes sense, but it also steps on the perfection of the earlier film’s ending. In the apocalypse-fixated year of 1984, The Terminator was another film with a big dark radioactive cloud over it. Even when the good guys win, everyone’s still doomed. It was bleak stuff for the time, but also exciting and mean like an action movie should be. Then comes this sequel that drops some uncomfortable optimism into the brew. Meanwhile, this is pretty much the same story as the first, but with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a good (and more talkative) robot this time, Linda Hamilton all serious and muscular and some kiddie comic relief. Hamilton defeated the killer robot from the future in the first movie, but all that means is that is that the bad guys are just gonna send another, more advanced one (Robert Patrick) to finish the job. Their goal: kill her 10 year old son (Edward Furlong) before he grows up to lead the post-World War III resistance movement when self-aware machines take over the world. Also, earn Schwarzenegger and James Cameron fifty zillion more dollars along the way. Still, it’s a half-decent blow-’em-up flick and a showcase for groundbreaking computer-generated special effects that still look contemporary almost twenty-five years later.