Skynet loses the war in the future, so it takes the war into the past.

A Terminator arrives in 1995 with one assignment: find John Connor while he is still a boy, and the human resistance never gets a leader. The resistance answers with a machine of its own, an older and less advanced model, reprogrammed and sent after him. Ten years have passed since the first attempt. John's mother Sarah has spent every one of them preparing for a nuclear morning that nobody around her believes is coming.

James Cameron, writing with William Wisher, builds the sequel at a scale the 1984 original could only imply. The pursuit runs wider and louder, with a boy to guard and a nuclear countdown ticking under every mile of it. Robert Patrick's T-1000 changes shape at will, so no crowd is cover and no locked door is a plan. Linda Hamilton gives Sarah a wiry, sleepless hardness, a woman treated as a lunatic for knowing exactly what is coming. Edward Furlong plays John as a kid nobody has looked after properly. Arnold Schwarzenegger returns from the original and holds the film's stillness.

The furniture of a blockbuster is all in place, and Cameron points it at an argument about fate, a future that has already happened and a handful of people who refuse to accept the date stamped on it. Good company for anyone who wants chase cinema with real weight under the metal, or time travel used as leverage rather than decoration.