James Cameron: Ranking His Films From Worst To Best

3. Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)

Seven years after the lo-fi original, James Cameron reverse-engineered the Terminator franchise to place Arnold Schwarzenegger's T800 as the hero of the sequel. Armed with cinema's first $100m budget, the end result is one of the greatest action movies ever made, and arguably the genesis of the oncoming CGI revolution. Building on the effects work that had seen his last movie, The Abyss, feature a convincing fully-digital character, Cameron and ILM pulled out all of the stops in creating the liquid metal T1000. Although the liquid metal form only appears on-screen for less than five minutes, Robert Patrick's T1000 became instantly iconic and was parodied for the rest of the decade. Besides the villain, Schwarzenegger successfully turns the T800 from the original's ruthless killing machine into a protector and father figure using nothing more than minimal dialogue and buckets of charisma, while Linda Hamilton turned from timid victim into one of the all-time great action heroines. Cameron used his massive budget wisely, and spared no expense when it came to both practical and visual effects. The articulated truck chase remains one of the best vehicular action scenes ever shot, the Cyberdyne assault makes inventive use of the T800's instructions not to kill, and the final showdown in the steel mill ends on a surprisingly emotional note, bringing many a grown man to tears which isn't something you'd usually associate with a Terminator movie.