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Toshiba’s HD DVD format lasted less than two years in the battle for the crown of next-gen optical media format. Toshiba threw in the towel in mid-February and placed a number of publishers in a rather difficult situation: what to do with titles that are already in the pipeline? German publisher Kinowelt had been working on a definitive high-def edition of Terminator 2 for ages and had obviously spent a bundle of cash on it already, so they had little choice in the matter.

This Ultimate HD Edition of James Cameron’s seminal action blockbuster was designed and authored by Imagion AG, a German company responsible for Elephant’s Dream, officially the first European HD DVD release. Imagion has pioneered a number of HD DVD (and Blu-ray) related technologies and innovations, created their own authoring tools and applications, and are without a doubt one of the top authoring shops on the planet. T2UE takes advantage of Imagion’s DynamicHD which uses the internet connection of your HD DVD player to add content to the title at any time over the intarwebs. The server for T2UE’s internet features is not activated before March 20th (T2UE’s official release date) which very effectively stopped me from testing the connectivity features.

So, in goes the disc to my Toshiba HD-XE1. First up, Kinowelt’s logo with DTS-HD HR audio, followed by Imagion’s logo accompanied by a rather bombastic DTS-HD MA soundtrack. An announcement flashes by, something to do with “accessing Skynet”, but Skynet is still down. Then… 30 seconds of black screen. No warnings, announcements, zip, nada, and the player looks like it’s doing nothing. Turns out the time was spent moving a bunch of code to player’s memory for the rendering of quite an elaborate main menu. It looks very nice indeed; metallic gray, high definition, with video and audio playing in the background. And menus are in English - which is nice. Unfortunately Kinowelt’s goodwill towards (remaining) HD DVD enthusiasts around the world runs out quite soon after that: most of the text within the special features is in German. One nice little touch is the info box which tells you which audio and subtitle is currently selected, and which chapter of the movie you’re viewing at the moment.

Some tech specs, then. The movie happens to be the Director’s Cut, with a runtime of approx. 153 minutes. It’s got four soundtracks, two of which are dubbed in German. The primary English audio is encoded in DTS-HD High Resolution. I haven’t been able to play the disc on a PC yet, so I haven’t a clue about its bitrate, but hunch says it’s somewhere around 2mbps. Secondary English audio is specially encoded to create some sort of a surround feel when listened to on headphones.

The DTS-HD HR track… well, Terminator 2 has never, ever, before sounded this good. The 7.1 (oh, indeed!) channel mix has oodles of dynamics, it’s crisp and crystal clear, with well defined surrounds and a nicely enveloping sound field. The sound mix during the first brief battle actually made me laugh out loud. It’s like the sound (re)mixer wanted to draw attention to the fact that this is a real 7.1 channel mix by pumping a massive explosion into the two rear surrounds. Well, he succeeded admirably, I can tell you that much.

There are two commentary tracks. First one is a compiled from almost 100 separate interviews, featuring James Cameron and the cast and crew. Second commentary was recorded in 2003 for the DVD release of Director’s Cut. Cameron is accompanied by William Wisher, who co-wrote the screenplay.

Oh yeah, picture quality. It looks better than ever, certainly, but let’s face it, T2 has never been a slick, ultra-sharp movie when it comes to picture quality. It was shot on Super35 and contains a large number of very grainy shots. One can’t expect a razor sharp transfer when the original footage was never nowhere near that. This Ultimate Edition looks better than any of the earlier releases, HD or SD, but don’t expect reference PQ.

In addition to regular viewing mode there’s a selection of four special viewing modes. Quiz mode asks the viewer 76 multiple-choice questions during the movie, ranging from incredibly easy to simply easy. A scoreboard on top of the screen keeps tally of how many you got correct or incorrect. Inside T2 mode is the equivalent of U-Control and In-Movie Experience. Windows pop up every now and then, displaying production photos and video interviews. Spy mode is quite amusing, as it points out the numerous mistakes and blunders that found their way into the final movie. First we get a text description of the error (in German, meh), after which playback pauses for a moment while the offending detail is pointed out by cropping the image to highlight it. There’s also an Interactive mode, but that relies on DynamicHD so I couldn’t test it yet.

You can also view the movie in script form (in English), in storyboards only, and as a combination of script, storyboard and the finished film. There’s also a number of deleted scenes for your viewing pleasure and most of them offer optional commentary. Luckily for the non-Germans among us, Kinowelt has not gone through the trouble of dubbing commentary tracks in German.

There’s a huge amount of content under the main menu heading Departments. If you happen to own some or all of the previously released Laserdisc and DVD Special Editions, you’ve already seen all this content in one form or another. The presentation of it deserves a mention, though. Imagion has created a very slick and easy-to-use menu system, and also done one hell of a job assembling it all into a pleasing whole. Like I mentioned, most of the text within this section is in German, but there are lots and lots of photos and undubbed videos to view. According to Imagion, the disc contains also a number of Easter Eggs but I haven’t had time to search for them yet.

Time for a wrap party, then. This is most definitely the definitive HiDef release of Terminator 2 - and I say this before seeing any of the internet-enabled special features. It’s got good picture quality, absolutely smashing audio, cool menus and more bonus features than you can shake a stick at. Granted, some of it is in German, and you can’t switch to English audio in some of the special viewing modes which can diminish the fun quite a lot… but this is a German release, after all. And at this stage of HD DVD’s lifecycle beggars really can’t be choosers, now can they?

Terminator 2: Ultimate HD Edition (HD DVD)
Video: 1080/24P (VC-1), AR 2.35:1
Audio: German DTS-HD HR 7.1 & Headphone-Surround, English DTS-HD HR 7.1 & Headphone-Surround
Subtitles: German and Turkish