Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Watch the trailer On 29 August 1997, an artificial intelligence called Skynet starts the Third World War. The survivors' resistance will be led by John Connor — so the machines send a new killing machine back through time to destroy him while he is still a teenager. The humans send someone back too: an earlier, obsolete model, whose job this time is to protect him. Sarah Connor, meanwhile, is locked in a psychiatric institution, because nobody believes her. The film begins where both Terminators land in the present at once.
Cameron's sequel was the most expensive film ever made when it opened in 1991, and the highest-grossing of that year. The breakthrough was the T-1000: the liquid-metal assassin was the first computer-generated figure to work on screen as a character rather than an effect, and Industrial Light & Magic proved here that a digital image could carry a leading role. Stan Winston's shop, meanwhile, was still building mechanical puppets and masks, and the friction between the two is where the film's power comes from. It also changed genre along the way: the first film's horror-adjacent chase thriller opens out here into a father-and-son story and a chronicle of Sarah Connor's (Linda Hamilton) transformation.
This print is StudioCanal's 2017 4K restoration and 3D conversion. Cameron did the work with part of the original crew — including the cinematographer and the effects team — reusing the raw CGI files and the negative, with technology developed for the Avatar films. He insisted on keeping the theatrical cut, but digitally corrected a few long-irritating continuity errors: in the truck chase, among other things, the shot where the stunt rider is plainly visible instead of Schwarzenegger is now gone. The 2D version has the same 4K resolution and the same fixes.
The film won four Academy Awards out of six nominations — effectively everything it was nominated for in the technical categories. The anniversary restoration opens worldwide from 27 August, timed around 29 August, Judgment Day itself in the film's chronology.