Terminator 2: Judgment Day movie review - Cool new 4K format makes James Cameron's film even better than before

Watching Terminator 2: Judgment Day on the big screen again was a very emotional experience for me. The moment the screen faded into a dark highway with Sarah Connor’s voiceover, I was taken back in time 25 years ago when I watched it for the first time. 1991, a slice of time in history when the world hadn’t turned to complete sh*t, and I was on the verge of knowing that cinema would be my career choice. [caption id=“attachment_4046615” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Still from Terminator 2: Judgment Day[/caption] And that is how powerful this film is — a single image can conjure up a lifetime of emotions. This is a film that created a whole generation of films and film geeks. A quarter of a century worth of memories. To revisit them opens a treasure trove of feelings inside you, and even though the 3D does not add anything meaningful to this feature, watching it on the big screen once again is an absolute necessity. There’s no point getting into plot details considering how deeply this film has embedded itself into pop culture. Watching the film now makes you think about how many other films copied Terminator 2’s visual and narrative formula, and yet not one single other movie managed to replicate what James Cameron did here. It’s astonishing that the visual effects still hold up. The brawl in the shopping mall between T-800 and T-1000 tearing up walls is as realistic as it gets. T-1000’s morphing mercury body still looks like a technological achievement, and the scene where he passes through the prison bars still renders a large grin on our face. But that’s the thing about T2 — it wasn’t just about next level visual effects, it was also about using the next level technology to create memorable sequences. That is the fundamental difference between most of the current CGI-laden blockbusters and T2. If you’re to pick some of the best action set pieces of the last 10 years, you’ll find it difficult to name more than three or four, and most of them would be the ones with scant use of CGI. The current crop of superhero movies deafen you into submission, rather than wow you. When T-800 and John Connor race through the aqua duct on the Harley Davidson with a loaded shotgun pursued by a truck, you remember that for the rest of your life. When T-800 shoots a bullet into a frozen T-100 shattering him into a million pieces, you stick a poster of his tag line ‘Hasta la vista baby’ on your bedroom wall. The film has been remastered into a cool new 4K format which only makes it better than before. The colours of the lava burning in the backdrop of the finale now pop out, the bluish night lighting of the mid-section when the gang goes to find a scientist with a robotic arm now looks like a neo noir. The dream that Sarah has of the apocalypse burning the city still makes your jaw drop. It’s too bad that the release has been packaged with 3D which is not just unnecessary but also undermines the achievement of the colour restoration. We should have good reason to hate James Cameron for unleashing 3D upon all of us, and though he plans to release his Avatar sequels in glass-less 3D, it’s hard not to go back to what Sarah Connor wrote on that table — No Fate.