This week’s movie was Terminator 2: Judgment Day, to continue with my Terminator binge 🙂

“A cyborg, identical to the one who failed to kill Sarah Connor, must now protect her ten year old son John from an even more advanced and powerful cyborg.”

My version of this movie is the “eXtreme DVD” director’s cut version with 16 minutes of additional scenes not found in the theatrical release. And I can tell you right now that those 16 minutes were cut for good reason before Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released in theaters and I think the next time I’m at a used movie store, I’ll see if I can find a “normal” version of this on dvd so I can buy that and maybe switch out this one.

Some of the extra scenes include:
-Extra time of Sarah hallucinating in the psychiatric facility, which I did not feel were helpful to her character development.
-Extra time with Miles Dyson and his family, which were interesting to show how dedicated he was to the project but not overly relevant to the plot.
-Extra time with Sarah and John in the abandoned garage. This scene showed how the T-101 taught John how to disable and reprogram it, which helps with questions about how he knows stuff in the future, but John’s little outburst about how he’s supposed to be the leader of the future and Sarah should do what he says just really pissed me off.
-No one needed or wanted to see the dog, Max, brutally murdered by the T-1000 after it kills Janelle and Todd. Like. Seriously. No one needs that. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you’re watching the extended director’s cut, skip the part where the T-1000 goes outside.
-Tons of little extra bits, like the T-1000 after the big rig explosion, and the T-1000 shaking off its shapeshifting.

Even though this is the director’s cut (which I do not enjoy), this movie is still one of my top favorites. The story is fascinating, the effects are a great mixture between computer and real effects, the characters are well-developed and consistent, and this movie does what the Terminator didn’t – it ends at a point of hope for the future of humanity. Sarah, John, Miles Dyson, and T-101 were able to change the future. They saved the world. And now two are dead and Sarah and John are on the run and can’t ever return to the United States. They can never tell anyone what they did because no one would believe them and they have no proof that their actions will actually change anything. But there’s that hope that they did, in fact, save the world.

Overall, this movie is easily a four on my rating scale. I’m happy I own it (but I’ll be happier once I own a theatrical release and not the director’s cut) and I rewatch it constantly.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Directed by James Cameron, performances by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, and Robert Patrick, Artisan Home Entertainment, 1991.