My wife has never seen The Terminator and I finally convinced her to watch it last night. Sadly, though, Netflix didn't have the original. I suppose we could have rented it, but before we got that far, I saw they did have Terminator 2. So I figured why not start her off with that?

Terminator 2 is a badass movie! I'm so pumped from watching the half I did watch that I may be coming to an entirely new understanding of AI and how it fits into our lives. This was probably obvious to most of you, but...I mean, can there be a better lens through which to view humanity's ongoing relationship with AI?

Right off the bat, there's just like this awesome opening where the Terminator is back -- indestructible, ruthless machine-power with a pistol-grip pump -- and he's clearly going to wreck everyone's shit and then oh shit: he's on the human side now! This is storytelling at it's finest: know your most engaging character and make the story about them (no matter who they are).

But it gets better: Sarah Conner, the heroine of the first Terminator, is stuck in an asylum and nobody believes her story about the Terminator...not even her kid. Typically, you'd expect a mom in her shoes to be desperate to save her son and reunite with him...oh you sweet summer child: this is not that story.

Sarah is a cold-hearted, calculating bitch who's willing to embrace all kinds of carnage in order to save humanity. She's seemingly only interested in her son because he's destined to lead the resistance against the machines. She needs him to stay alive and she needs a lot of other people to die. This lady is a badass! (At least in the first half of the movie. I suspect her "human" side emerges in the second half, but the tension between her ruthlessness and the Terminator's blossoming emotional intelligence is gold. Have there ever been such perfect foils? Feminine aggressor vs masculine protector, human ruthlessness vs machine emotional wisdom -- James Cameron was channeling some Shakespeare-level literary abilities here.)

Sadly, we started the movie pretty late and my wife fell asleep after the first 40 minutes leaving me with a dilemma: keep watching this ground-breaking artifact of cinematic glory...or stop the film and watch the rest of it with her on another night. I stopped the film...but we'll be back.