I'm in a bit of a Terminator phase at the moment.
Somehow, I never saw any of them until a couple years ago, when the lady friend got me to watch the first two movies. I didn't give them as much thought as I would later, but found them to be pretty cool. I think I liked the second one more, not so much because the effects were better but the story seemed more involved and developed and so forth, and it was just plain thrilling to watch. Which is not to say that I didn't like the first, of course, I like them both considerably.
I've never seen the third or fourth movies. From what I've heard, they sound like they're pretty bad, so I'm going to steer clear of them.
Several months ago we started to watch the tv show, The Sarah Connor Chronicles. The fact that it starred Summer Glau played a part in that, because we were already big fans of Firefly. I found myself particularly intrigued by her character, since there was a strange and fascinating disconnect between her nature as a killing machine and her ability to convincingly fake (or not fake?!) real feeling. The show does have some writing problems, namely that whole wretched subplot with Riley and Jesse; and tvtropes accurately describes the show as suffering from "designated protagonist syndrome", meaning that Sarah Connor is ostensibly the main character and yet her part of the story isn't nearly as interesting as Cameron's and others. Still, while there are flaws, as a whole it was a good show that I enjoyed quite a lot, with a lot of really cool ideas (Catherine Weaver and John Henry, especially), and I was sorry to come to the end of it. With the cancellation leaving it on a ridiculously epic cliffhanger, sometimes I drive myself bonkers trying to figure out what the hell was supposed to happen next!
One of the things about the show that I appreciated was that it pretty much ignores the other movies and only follows from the first two. It was kind of like, yeah, that's nice, but we're doing a completely separate thing that overwrites it. Honestly, the idea that a completely different computer system could go on to become exactly the same as the one built by Miles Dyson was ludicrous to the extreme. The show's approach was more along the lines that Skynet was actively aiding the process of its own creation, rather than it being crazy random happenstance, so in that case it makes a lot more sense.
Still, ultimately the first two movies are the essential heart of the Terminator story, more important than anything else, and there are times when I choose to believe that Judgement Day was averted and everything was just dandy after that. ;)
On a tech level, the existing Bluray of the T1 apparently does not have a original mono mix, while the dvd I have does. I haven't done an exhaustive comparison of it with the 5.1 version, but the balance was usually quite different from what I remember. The original is an aesthetically superior mix, but I'd have to go back and listen again to make any more meaningful comments. The thing that really stood out as being objectionable and unnecessary was changing the sound of Arnold's pistol from the .44 Magnum effect to something else entirely. No idea why they did that, but it was an unfortunate change that shouldn't have been made.
My copy of T2 has a 6.1 remix in DTS that sounds fantastic. I haven't heard the original 70mm/CDS version. Does anyone know if there are any significant changes or differences?