The pay-off at the end of T2 is beautifully played piece of understatement after all the chaos and destruction of the preceding two hours: the T-800 getting smelted with a lone thumb-up, thus ending his emotional expansion and development over the two films, followed by a suitably pensive and moody little shot of a road zipping by at night as Sarah Connor muses on how emotions work. It's neat, it's tidy, there's no flab. In James Camerons directors cut of T2, we get an extra scene in which to revisit all the kids who got comprehensively obliterated in Sarah Connors rather bleak dream-vision of the future in which Skynets gone crackers and started nuking LA, causing a fair amount of upset and hundreds of dollars worth of improvements to the citys architecture. Fortunately, it got nixed: its weirdly schlocky, with a plangent Spanish guitar soundtrack that gives the scene the air of a low-grade European daytime TV drama. Rather than sounding like some bruised, reflective musings in the aftermath of all that trauma, that final line - If a machine can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too - is surrounded by the sounds of children laughing, and ends up feeling like it was written by a particularly melodramatic teenager in an A level drama class.
