Terminator 2 3D...Finally

About The Release

After finally having the pleasure of watching this film in 3D on blu-ray, I have to say not only does it have the best color and contrast of any version of T2 to date, it's one of the best 3D blu-ray presentations I've ever seen - easily on-par with the recent Star Wars releases.  So many of the scenes were shot with such generous focal length that it's difficult to believe that the film wasn't made for 3D in the first place - where some films will include scenes which are exclusively to show off the 3D effect, T2 does this without any added effort.  This is my new favorite version of the film and I could make an argument that it's the definitive one.  With that in mind it's utterly perplexing to me why Studio Canal made it so difficult for me to watch it.  I know 3D has kind of fizzled, but they seem to be actively trying to kill it off despite people like me who still love the format and are willing to pay a little more and work a little harder to enjoy it.

1991 and Before

Terminator 2 has long been one of my favorite films.  When I was about 10, the family was browsing selections at a video rental store and I came across "The Terminator".  When my stepfather saw me looking at it, he told me that it was really cool but really scary and that I should wait until I was older to see it.  Well as luck would have it the next summer it was played on TV one Saturday afternoon and it absolutely captivated me.  It was a dark low-budget sci-fi movie, but the story was actually plausible, and while the stop-motion effects were a little less-than-lifelike, the articulation of the Terminator was enough to convince me.  I totally loved the film.

A year or two later, although I can't remember where, I caught a glimpse of this early teaser, and I knew from the first frame that there was going to be a new Terminator film:

Back then sequels were still somewhat rare, so this was far from expected and I felt sure in my bones that it was going to be even better than the first one.

It felt like two years before anything else was revealed, but I never stopped anticipating it.  By the time the promotional campaign started up and the interviews and previews started rolling I was incredibly psyched.  As I've mentioned before, my family wasn't very well off and it was extremely rare that we ever went to a theater to see a movie.  I was so excited about this one that I saved my birthday and Christmas money for six months so I could treat the whole family to see it on the day it came out.  By the time the credits rolled, I didn't want to go back to the real world.  I wanted to live in a world where Terminators and the battle for the future was real.  There have been better films since then, but this one will always have a special place in my heart as the last one I truly got lost in.

I Can't Stop Buying T2

Over the years I've bought many editions of T2 on many formats - the original VHS release, the Special Edition Laserdisc - the Collector's box Laserdisc, the Ultimate Edition DVD, the Extreme Edition DVD (which came with a Windows DRM copy-crippled 1080p print of the movie 3 years before HD-DVD or Blu-ray!), the Skynet Edition Blu-Ray and the Endoskull Collector's Edition.

The 3D Version

I know 3D is supposed to be dead now, but I absolutely love it and I make a point to buy everything I can in the format.  In 2016 rumors started circulating that James Cameron (the original director) was working on a 3D conversion of Terminator 2.  Freakin' awesome!  Information was spotty but from time to time it would pop up in entertainment news.  There were various progress reports so I had a pretty good idea when the conversion was likely going to be ready to go watch. Unfortunately when showings were finally announced there was nowhere near enough distribution that I could go and see it in a theater. 

Although I missed seeing it in the theater, I figured we'd get a 3D Blu-ray release and I wouldn't have to live in San Fransisco or New York to get the opportunity to see it.  Sure enough in the summer of 2017 the 3D and 4K blu-ray releases were announced.  In fact there were collector's editions which came with both. Much like the time between the first teaser and the original theatrical release, the wait was going to be terrible, but after placing my pre-order for the ridiculously priced "endoarm" collector set, I breathed a little sigh of relief that it was no longer a matter of "if" but when.

I wish it had been that easy.

Why Does Studio Canal Hate America?

First Studio Canal made the incomprehensible decision to remove the 3D version of the film from the North American release.  Annoying, I thought, but it was no problem, I could still order the 3D film from Amazon.co.uk - I already have half a dozen 3D UK titles.  So I pre-ordered from the UK and figured I could just put the import disc in the stand at the base of the life-sized Terminator arm where it should have been all along.  The next thing to happen was that the "endoarm" release was delayed from September to October.  Then it was delayed from October to November...then all of the 3D/4K releases were delayed to December except the "endoarm" edition which was delayed to February.  Toward the end of November the "endoarm" received it's final delay from February to never.  I was really looking forward to putting the arm next to the skull and cracking jokes about how the 8k release was going to come with a foot, and by the time I was ready to retire I could assemble an entire Terminator from the bits of the gift sets.  It was also pretty annoying to have to wait an extra month to get my 3D disc from the UK - if it didn't get delayed again.  Toward the middle of this month (December 2017) I finally got a shipment notification - it was a real thing that was really in the mail, finally!

Region Restrictions, Really?

Then I got a visit from an old enemy I had not had a brush with for some time...region locking.  As I mentioned earlier I have half a dozen 3D Blu-ray releases from the UK which played in my PS3 without any fuss whatsoever, so it never occurred to me to expect Studio Canal to mark the 3D disc exclusive to zone B (UK/Australia).  I still have only speculation to go on as to why they did.

Companies have their list of reasons for trying to prevent consumers from one region from buying and playing media intended for a different region and none of them are in the consumers' interest.  Sometimes it's to honor marketing arrangements, sometimes it's to honor distribution rights, sometimes it's to comply with censorship laws, but mostly it's just to prevent people from shopping for lower priced media from other regions.

As a gamer I've had to deal with the practice of region locking a lot in the past. In the 90's and early 00's, nearly every popular game platform had some kind of region control and every game released for those platforms was region locked.  The exceptions were the handhelds (Gameboy/DS/Gamegear/PSP) which were region-free.  Likewise with the DVD format almost every studio-backed release was region locked.  Over the last decade things have changed significantly.  With the imbecilic exception of Nintendo deciding to region-lock the 3DS and every 3DS game being locked to a specific region, the rest of the industry went the other way.  The platforms still supported locking but it was almost never used. Likewise, Blu-ray video was designed to allow region restrictions but I very seldom come across titles which are actually locked to a given region.

I first ran into this when I imported DVDs from Japan and initially resorted to hacks that would allow me to trick my DVD-ROM drive into changing regions without using up any of the 5 changes that I was allowed, but DVD-ROM playback on PC was pretty horrible and inconvenient back then, so I ended up buying a region-free player - a Panasonic Q, actually.

Not Taking "No" For An Answer

When my long-awaited, highly-anticipated Terminator 2 3D disc arrived this week locked to "zone B" which meant none of my devices would play it, I wasn't just going to take it lying down.  I have run into this only once before and in that case I was able to rip the disc using free tools, remove the zone restriction and write the disc back to a BD-R. It was fairly inconsequential, but Blu-ray ripping is a moving target and there aren't really a lot of free tools that can do this for you anymore.  After trying for nearly two days to rip the disc and write it to a BD-R with no success, I was able to use MakeMKV and this tool to create a 3D MKV that I could actually play with VLC, but it was an academic exercise.  I couldn't stand the idea of watching this in less than the full quality of the Blu-ray disc I had paid for.

Throwing Money At the Problem

There were paid software options like DVDFab and RedFox either of which would probably have allowed me to rip and write a new zone-free disc, but both of them were prohibitively expensive and given the legalities of what they do, those companies could disappear overnight.  In order to rip a Blu-ray, ripping software has have access to AACS title keys for each disc.  While the keys themselves are relatively easy to find, the paid tools each have a proprietary database format for them which they use to enforce licenses - in other words, only paying customers get access to the title key updates.  If either company disappears, no more updates and the $100+ license you just bought becomes worthless.

In the end I concluded that if I was going to throw more money at this, the best option was to buy a zone-free Blu-ray player.  This was a lot simpler than having to sift through malware, risk paying for software that might not work, or might stop working at any time , and likely to be a longer lasting solution.  While it seems silly to pay 2x the cost of a normal blu-ray player to get a modded player just to play one film, my wife adroitly pointed out that with the studios trying to kill 3D in the US,  this was likely just the first of many releases I would have to import.    I've already set my sights on Thor Ragnarok, and the B-only Remo Williams blu-ray.