Time is a strange thing. Scientists say a watch travelling in a jet will experience time more slowly than the same watch in a tug boat. It won't slow the watch down – it literally experiences time differently. Speed affects time, basically. Which probably explains why Terminator 2: Judgment Day is one of those very rare films that feels long, but is never boring. Time slows down for it because it moves so fast.

It's also very much a product of its time. Terminator 2 is a violent film, made in a violent period of history. According to James Cameron, the Rodney King beating didn't just take place near the biker bar they shot Arnie's opening scenes in, it happened on a night Terminator 2 was filming.

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There's something too eerie about that story for it not to be true. After all, what was more prescient in 1991 than the sight of an evil cop in full uniform beating the crap out of everyone he encounters? It was almost as if James Cameron, when writing the script, was able to peer into the future.

The film is also timeless. Famed for its CGI shots, it's actually a benchmark film in terms of practical effects. While you could argue some moments have aged - the T-1000 following a tyre out of the flames doesn't look great - most haven't. Compare, for example, Arnold's battle-damaged face make-up of T2 to similar scarring seen in the trailers for Genisys. One looks like it was created in the early '90s, and it isn't T2.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger's daughter first saw her dad's face with robotics showing under skin tissue in 1991, she screamed because it looked so realistic. When we first saw modern-day Arnie with the same effect created in a computer, we screamed too, but with laughter. Time might heal all wounds, but the techniques used to apply Arnold's face-scrapes would look as good if they were identically applied today, as they did then.

Speaking of time healing all wounds, we can't help but feel sorry for those professional critics who, when the film was released, described it as "unexciting" (Stanley Kauffman, The New Republic) and "tirelessly violent, ultimately exhausting" (Janet Maslin, The New York Times).

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T2 is the first sequel to win Oscars without the first film even having been nominated, which is clearly an incredible feat. The Academy Awards can be many things, but at least they understood the inherent coolness of a couple of robots fighting over the right to kill a child.

It's also a film that contains the single greatest action heroine of all time. Ask any woman who saw T2 as a kid and they'll all agree - they didn't just like Sarah Connor back then, they wanted to be Sarah Connor.

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Of course, Emilia Clarke's wishes come true (like her Game of Thrones co-star Lena Headey's did when she headlined The Sarah Connor Chronicles) this summer, and she'll play the latest incarnation of Sarah Connor in a film that promises to rewrite everything that came before it. The trouble is, we don't want Terminator 2 rewritten or retconned - it's perfect.

And the (rumoured) high concept of multiple alternate timelines converging and resetting somewhat misses the point of what was so great about originals. Despite the time travel stuff, they were actually pretty simple concepts. Terminator: Good soldier travels back in time to protect waitress from bad robot from the future; Terminator 2: Good robot travels back in time to protect kid from more advanced bad robot from the future. That's pretty much it.

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We'll have to wait and see whether 'Good soldier travels back in time to protect waitress who isn't a waitress because she's already being protected by a good robot because the person who sent the soldier back in time is actually a bad robot but there's also another robot who's also bad and it probably won't matter anyway because by the end of the film everything will be reset because we've got a franchise to launch, guys' is as fun.

Because if there's one thing Terminator 2 definitely is, it's fun. Fun, and, almost impossibly, profoundly moving. If there's a moment in cinema more tear-jerking than the bit where the robot tells his surrogate son that, through their friendship, he's learned how to experience grief (followed by the most heartbreaking thumbs-up in recorded history) we'd like you to show it to us.

And we can't wrap this up without a brief word for Robert Patrick. Cameron reportedly wanted to go with a rock star for the T-1000 - WASP lead singer Blackie Lawless was considered, but dismissed for being too tall. Billy Idol was the original choice for the role, but had to pull out after a motorcycle accident.

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We should thank the maker that Patrick ended up playing the part. His dedication to the role is a huge element of what makes the movie work so well. Patrick modelled himself after a shark for the character, and it shows.

James Cameron had planned to speed up the frame rate in every scene featuring the T-1000 running, to alter time in order to give an appearance of superhuman movement, but was so awed by Patrick's performance he left it untouched. It's yet another example of real-life speed having the ability to slow down potentially quicker moments.

Terminator 2 can't be reasoned with, it can't be bargained with. It doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you've had a great time.

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