The Movie: The early 90's special effects tour-de-force returns in both "special edition" and original theatrical forms on one disc! The "special edition" version includes about 15 minutes of extra footage that was cut out of the original theatrical release version for time reasons.

I'm not really sure what I can say about Terminator 2 that hasn't already been said. When it came out, it was the absolute highest state of the art, as far as special effects go. The last 10 or so years have seen many more advances, and well, I gotta say that by today's standards, some of these effects look kind of cheesy. But if you're looking for a full-bore action movie, it doesn't get any better than classic Arnold! The invasion of the Cyberdine Systems building and subsequent destruction of buildings and police vehicles was in my opinion, the greatest action sequence ever... that is, up until the Matrix lobby scene appeared nearly 10 years later.

The additional scenes in the "special edition" do give some additional insight into the nature of the characters and the story, I'd venture to say that I wouldn't recommend a first time Terminator 2 viewer to watch the long version. The extra scenes would be quite interesting to a person who is already a fan of the movie, but really do make it too long for the uninitiated.

It's the same great movie, with a few additional perks... and the option to see in either the original form, or the longer version.

The DVD: First of all, I want to say that the very coolest thing about this two disc set is the seamless branching -- both the original theatrical version, and the long version of the movie are available on the same disc, with no pauses or skips or any other anomalies in the places where scenes have been added or taken away. The anamorphic widescreen video transfer is stunning in its clarity, but I'd say that in some instances, the colors weren't quite as saturated as they could have been. The new Dolby Digital EX and DTS ES audio mixes are equally spectacular, and quite possibly everything you could ever want in a soundtrack of a movie of this caliber and provides awesome surround effects, and a great workout for your subwoofer too!

Special features, special features, the second disc is chock full of special features. The menu design (on both discs) is pretty slick and original, not just a bunch of lame clips from the movie claiming to be "interactive menus" like you see on a lot of DVD's. There are three featurettes on the second disc: A straight "making of" (30 minutes); T2: More Than Meets the Eye (22 minutes about the omitted scenes); and another on the making of T2:3D the ride (23 minutes). All three of these are old and have been seen on TV before... years ago, and have been included in various other home releases of T2 in the past. But I guess it is kind of nice to have them all together like this.

There are also 60 (yes, sixty) short video segments on various aspects of the filmmaking process. One interesting one (to me anyway) was a little display on how the film was cropped from it's original "Super-35" format for both the widescreen and pan-and-scan editions, with a display that shows exactly what you see in each version, in relation to the original Super-35 print. If you don't know, Super-35 is a format that allows the filmmaker to compose shots for both 4:3 and widescreen aspect ratios, without just simply lopping off the sides of the widescreen version for the 4:3. The widescreen version actually has a little more information on the sides, and the pan-and scan version actually has a little more information on the top and bottom.

On the second disc you'll also find a number of animated storyboard sequences, 4 trailers, and the complete script. On the first disc you will also find quite extensive commentary tracks. And somewhere there's some DVD-ROM content too... quite a whole lot of stuff!

On the whole, I found the special features content to be quite thorough, but I would have enjoyed it if there was some sort of a new, retrospective featurette... but then I guess you'd probably have to shell out some big bucks to get some of the people to come back for that!

I definitely recommend this disc if you're a fan of Terminator 2 -- the two versions of the film alone would be worth it, and all the special features make it just that much more worth the purchase price!