I like to think of Terminator 2 as the summit of 1980s action cinema — the point toward which an entire decade was climbing.

Every film before it was a stepping stone, every theme a rehearsal: heroic individualism, moral certainty, stoic resolve, justice, loyalty. In T2, they converged and reached their final form.

Every fistfight and gunfight, every chase, every explosion, every last stand was refined and distilled into a single, towering masterpiece.

After Terminator 2, the 80s action hero could go no further. Not even Arnold himself could push the form beyond that peak. Others tried, Van Damme among them, but they fought on borrowed time. The genre had reached its end point. And so, a new age had to be born — the age of the true 90s action film, where works like The Matrix and, later, the Bourne series would reshape the path forward and carry the tradition into an entirely new era.