Some ‘Director's Cuts” of movies are really great. They give you the chance to see the movie as the director wanted you to see it, before it was emasculated by test-screenings or the whims of the studio executive (e.g. Blade Runner). Alternatively, the extended version allows the director to provide a version of the movie that contains worthwhile material that would have made the movie too long for the cinema, but that still works in home viewing (e.g. Fellowship of the Ring)

Some Director's Cuts are a rather sad attempt to rewrite history (e.g. Star W.. er... A New Hope?

Other Director's Cuts are a marketing exercise designed to sell more copies of a video (or now DVD) by adding those bits of the movie that were filmed, but removed from the final cut because they screwed up the pacing, made the movie drag and generally added nothing to the film itself. These are the ones James Cameron tends to produce (The Abyss, Aliens, and now Terminator 2 have all suffered this treatment)

The extended version of Terminator 2 (which was on television tonight) lies firmly in the third category. All of the restored scenes are basically dialogue that was cut from the original release for very good reasons. Their reintroduction detracts from what is pretty much the ultimate early-90's action movie. T2 took the genre as far as it could go with existing technology: no comparable blockbuster effects/action movie came along until The Matrix seven years later.

Annoyingly, if I want to get this movie on DVD with all the additional features, the extended version seems to be my only option. If that's the case, I'm just not going to buy it.