film

"I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle." By common consent the best of the Terminator movies and an easy win if anyone ever challenges you to name a sequel that's better than the original, Terminator 2 was an achievement in lots of ways, not least in Cameron and his co-writer William Wisher managing to come up with a worthy sequel plot for Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800. They opted to switch his character from evil to good and pit him against a terrifyingly sleek and businesslike-looking Robert Patrick as the advanced liquid-metal android T-1000 out to get Sarah, her future-saviour-of-humanity son John and the T-800.

Cameron's film was the most expensive ever at the time and was made during what turned out to be a sweet spot in CGI history: when computer effects were possible, but when the difficulty and expense of using them meant creative real-world solutions were still worth considering and implementing wherever possible. Cameron excelled at this latter discipline despite the near $100m budget, and some of his more recent films would have benefited greatly from similar constraints.