Today on my birthday I decided to throw myself a bone and watch Terminator 2. Got, how I have missed you.

To emphasize just how great this film is I have to go through a checklist in my head of all the ways it has become iconic. It has one of the greatest heroines of all time. It as some of the best death scenes of all time. It has the most famous and most realistic depiction of a nuclear explosion of all time. It is one of the greatest time travel films of all time. it is one of the greatest science fiction films of all time. It is one of the greatest action films of all time. It is one of the greatest sequels of all time. It is the greatest robot film. It is the quintessential Schwarzenegger film. It has the coolest child action hero ever.

The only thing it's missing is John Williams.

When I was little, I watched this without watching the first movie. My mother didn't want me seeing the sex scene and prolific swearing. Yesterday I watched the original movie for the first time. Nothing came as a surprise, since the movie was as blunt as its titular character, and pop cultural osmosis told me the entire story. It felt like I was re-watching the film. After it was done, I woke this morning in a sure mood to watch T2, because it's been forever and goodness was it an exceptional movie.

So now I return to one of the great icons of American cinema. Over twenty years after its release, it looks to have withstood the test of time. Movies and series that are not only good, but great, only come around few years, and it takes a long wait to see for sure just how individual films contribute to the identity of popular culture. The Terminator has earned its canonization into the pop-cultural pantheon, much like Darth Vader and Ridley Scott's Alien. Years after I last saw it, I've put myself through many other action films, but it seems that everything comes back to films like this, the movie that I can watch again and again.

I may be 19 as of today, but I still identify with the 10-year-old John Conner. When I was a kid, I wanted to be like him. Forget Harry Potter, this is the Chosen One. I still drift off and dream about being so special and destined for things so great that villains must send their enemies back in time to assassinate me. I wanted to have larger-than-life icons from my special world to be my best friends. Now that I'm older I think he was a bit bratty, but I take it in stride because when I was 10 that behavior wasn't conspicuous at all. He was a boy I could identify with at his age, because my life was a bit screwed up. I knew I was competent, but I got into a lot of trouble. I didn't get to see my mother when I was ten, and my mother, meanwhile, identified with Sarah Conner. He opens the movie up for children to see, and yet it isn't just some cheap marketing maneuver. It doesn't make the movie childish, nor does it exclude men from hailing John Conner as their action hero, because we were all young once.

Then as an action film it's more than just action. It's a movie, first and foremost, about killing machines and their targets. Much of the action is really just the characters being hardcore. That goes double for Schwarzenegger, who literally has a hard core. Look at those torso muscles. He was the type of character who could enter to "Bad to the Bone" and deserve it without question. The fighting is primarily shooting, people getting thrown through walls, and some fairly blunt car chases, but the menace behind those scenes is what makes them iconic. There was something smart about their timing. They weren't overly complex or too fast, and they were built around creating iconic moments, so that over the years I still remember them. The image of Sarah Conner being stalked in a factory with a shot leg, surrounded by an orange glow with the occasional calm blue light is the type that sticks. That's how you make a good action movie.

Since much of the action is the characters being hardcore, that means that the characters are good. Like I said, I love John Conner, but Sarah Conner still stands as perhaps the best action heroine in the movies. Like the legendary Ellen Ripley, she's not a sex doll. She's a real, genuine model for independent strength. She's not defined by the men around her. She's real enough that women can actually identify with her. I know this because my mother always had a special place in her heart for Sarah Conner, and because of my mother I realize what's so special about Sarah. She's not just an action heroine who happens to be female; she's an action heroine because she's female. More specifically, she's a mother, and she will move Heaven and Earth to protect John and give him a good future. I'm sure that many mothers can relate to that, many women who are not mothers have an innate understanding of the feeling, and many males recognize those qualities in their own beloved mothers.

Then the Terminator completes the family by being a father figure for John. This was by far the best of Schwarzenegger's Terminators. His bond with John was subtle and wasn't played up so much, but it still lasts as what defines this Terminator. It makes it genuinely sad that when Schwarzenegger returns in T3, he's not the same one. Something about the shared experiences between him and John Conner makes him impossible to replace. It was also a tearjerker when he died, but on the flip side it was an iconic death. You'd be hard-pressed to come across a truly perfect death scene in the movies, but this stands out. The image of him slowly being lowered into a molten vat and giving a thumbs up doesn't go away.

Miles Dyson, the scientist that nearly created Skynet, also has to be commended for his death scene. His dying moments were a blast. They really completed the character, too. He's the perfect subversion of the character who doesn't care about ethics because his job doesn't require him to because he not only turns on his job, but he sabotages his entire life's work when he's told that it will hurt others. He suffers and dies taking back his life's work. Talk about a selfless character. And so I was glad to see that the character's last breath was honored. Then there's an explosion. The timing was wonderful.

Laser-guided karma hit just where I wanted to see it. The doctor who used Sarah Conner for fame and told her for years that she was delusional saw the two Terminators fight each other right in front of him and lived to tell the tell...or rather not. People would tell him he was delusional. The T-1000 took hundreds of bullets while acting smooth and smug and sly and inconspicous, thus completing James Cameron's original vision of the Terminator being just a face in the crowd, but when he gets killed off for good we finally get the opportunity to see robot that dared immitate human emotions suffer. The good characters, meanwhile, truly shined bright, and in none of the other Terminator films is there such a wonderful cast. This is the only movie with both Sarah and John Conner. It is the only movie with Miles Dyson. This is the only movie where Sarah Conner is the Sarah Conner, and the only movie where the Terminator is the Terminator.

Terminator 2 is not just a good movie, but a great movie. It makes me want to dig through my movie collection to see what other gems I need to see again.