As a story, yes. But Terminator failed on a basic premise: Skynet becoming self-aware.
The future seems more like Blindsight [1]: hyper-intelligent, completely unconscious systems outperform, out-manipulate, and out-compete human beings purely through automated efficiency.
I don't have much of a problem with becoming self aware. More questionable is hooking up AI to launch nukes - you wouldn't want to do that with Claude. There's also the time travel thing.
Skynet becomes self aware. From T2:
"The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th."
"No, nobody forced me to get the rewire. I could have just let them cut out my brain and pack it into Heaven, couldn't I? That's the choice we have. We can be utterly useless, or we can try and compete against the vampires and the constructs and the AIs. And perhaps you could tell me how to do that without turning into a—an utter freak."
We are in "the future" relative to both works. The current intelligence threatening our planet is an unconscious token predictor, much more like the hostile non-entity in Blindsight (which even speaks to humans via token prediction) than the mechanical persons in Terminator 2.
Careful! Some of the scenes you would think as CGI are actually using practical effects. Even a couple of scenes with liquid metal on screen were using models.
T2 and Abyss were trailblazers. I remember on the T2 director’s commentary how they were so amazed when they got the effects back months later because they’d never seen anything so good.
There was a lot of cartoon animation done by hand in the 1930. Frame by frame drawn, far superior to modern animation. However the styles are different, and some prefer one style of animation over another.
I've just noticed in the 'full version' linked to in the reddit comments, it's a poorly done 480i -> 480p, and the interlace fields are reversed.
If you watch the panning in the original star-scape at the start of the video, you'll see it jittering back and forth as it pans. Sad. If properly converted to 480p, that scene would be super-smooth too.
(It's less apparent elsewhere, unless there is side-scrolling)
The future seems more like Blindsight [1]: hyper-intelligent, completely unconscious systems outperform, out-manipulate, and out-compete human beings purely through automated efficiency.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)