Which do you feel is the better film?

I pick Terminator 1. It is a leaner, meaner, more taut film which is much less preachy than the sequel. Arnold I feel is much scarier and more fitting as the bad guy than Robert Patrick. The film is essentially a Halloween-style slasher movie but with a killer robot in place of Michael Myers. The film juxtaposes this dark vision of the future which Reese lives in, with the general peace of 1984. Sarah Connor undergoes a journey in the film from a shy, meek waitress to a woman you can honestly believe would birth and raise a man who would be the savior of mankind. It's unrelenting, uncompromising, dark, gritty and a frenzied race against death.

T2 to me while a great action film feels a bit overloaded, a bit too cheesy, a bit too comedic, a little too preachy, and doesn't really have the same urgency the original film does. The original is a scrawny guy and a meek girl versus a literal death machine. The sequel is one death machine versus another. I can understand the subplot of the Terminator learning the value of human life, but to me that is much less powerful than Sarah Connor's arc - hers is more important because she goes from being a damsel in distress to savior in her own right. Much more empowering.

Also, from a pop culture standpoint, T1 is much more nostalgic than T2. T2 doesn't really capture 1991's pop culture in the way T1 captures 1984. The one aspect of '91 pop culture T2 captures is having the Guns N' Roses song in it.

Number 1, good

Number 2, made for fun, and was an enjoyable sequel.

Rotten Tomatoes:
Terminator, the review aggregator website reported a 100% approval rating with an average rating of 8.7/10 based on 50 reviews.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day received widespread critical acclaim. Reviewed on the Web in 1998 – retroactively reports that the film earned 93% positive reviews

1 looks the best (Analogue)
2 is ok
3 is crappier.........