I'm not talking about Terminator 2, which seems to be more 'popular.' Whenever I ask people why they liked it even more than the original, they always say it's because of all the amazing special effects. Special effects. Not the story, not the acting, but what they were able to do with computers.A far superior movie is the original.
You probably know the basic story, since this movie has spawned 3 sequels as well as a TV series: in the future, an military artificial intelligence called Skynet causes a nuclear war, which kills most of mankind. Those who survive are hunted down and exterminated by 'cybernetic organisos,' sophisticated androids that look and smell human (except to dogs). One man rises to lead mankind to take back the planet: John Conner. He was so successful in this rebellion that ultimately Skynet was on the verge of defeat, its defense grid destroyed. In a last ditch effort, Skynet resorted to the one weapon it had left: sending a terminator back in time to blot out the problem before it even gets started.
This leads to a naked Arnold Schwarzenegger, in all of his Mr. Universal flexing glory, walking up to a group of punks and demanding, "Your clothes. Give them to me. Now." It's kinda awesome when he flings the 'Punk Leader' (Bill Paxton, center, who has been in several Cameron films) into that wall or when he marches into that bar to steal a page from the phone book. It's only after he knocks on a random woman's door and coldly shoves his way into her house to shoot her dead (after simply asking "Sarah Connor?") that we get how hard core and cold this person is. At this point we don't even know who (or what) he is, just that he is a cold blooded killer. 
