James Cameron, whose vivid imagination, stylish directing talent and roller-coaster action mentality has already knocked our socks off cinematically with "The Terminator," "Aliens" and "The Abyss," does it again with "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," the sequel to his first film.

"The Terminator," fans will recall, was about a killer cyborg — a robot with a human shell (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) — who came to present-day Los Angeles from the post-apocalyptic future. He was a killing machine with a single-minded task — to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), a seemingly harmless waitress.

Eventually we discovered that after a nuclear holocaust in 1997, computers and robots took over the Earth. But humans started to fight back, led by one John Connor — Sarah's future son. The Terminator's assignment was to kill her before she conceived and gave birth to John.

In "Terminator 2," no less than two Terminator robots come to modern-day Los Angeles from the future. The first, again played by Schwarzenegger, is the same model as the first film's cyborg. The second is an advanced model (Robert Patrick), made of a liquid metal that is apparently impervious to everything.

But their tasks are completely different — one is assigned to kill Sarah's young son John (Edward Furlong), while the other is assigned to protect him.

Meanwhile, John is a troubled street kid living with foster parents in the suburbs while his mother is locked up in an asylum.

It isn't long before the two Terminators are tracking them both down amid all kinds of mayhem, from trucks driving into drainage ditches to helicopters swooping through tunnels to an ultimate Battle of the Terminators.

As with the first film, Cameron freely borrows (steals?) from numerous other sci-fi pictures, from forgotten B-movies to recognized classics — most prominently from "Westworld" and "Futureworld," the "Mad Max" movies and even Cameron's own "The Abyss."

But no matter. "Terminator 2" is such a wild ride you probably won't care.

While this sequel is not quite as violent as the first "Terminator" — and nowhere near last year's Schwarzenegger epic "Total Recall" — it still has enough R-rated material to make any parent leery about sending a child into the theater.

And there are two killings early on — one where someone gets a sharp knife through his mouth and another where someone gets it in the eyes — that seemed like the kind of gore that should remain relegated to trash like the "Friday the 13th" pictures.