The Terminator

When I rewatch some of my favorite films for the first time in years, I tend to write lengthier reviews than usual, but by god it is worth it. I love using this site to champion classic films, more recent films, and overlooked gems alike. When lockdown started, I swore off rewatching films so I could catch up to my blind spots; I’ve gotten more laissez-faire about that recently, as many film rewatches have been so satisfying. I wanted to rewatch many films that have inspired me as a filmmaker through the latter half of this year. And since James Cameron has finally come back to the screen with his sequel to Avatar, I thought I’d look at his first movie. No, not *Piranha II: The Spawning: his first real movie, the iconic, seminal, highly influential, pop culture icon that is The Terminator. I’m not sure what can be said about the first Terminator that hasn’t been said already: it’s a classic of 80s cinema, a masterful combination of genres from film noir, sci-fi, and action to horror, and the film that shot both its star and its director, Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron, into superstardom.  So I decided to put in my Special Edition DVD copy (for some reason, a definitive, good Blu-Ray edition hasn’t come out), with the original mono audio (if you have a physical copy of the film, do this if you want to see the film as it was seen theatrically) and relive the immortal The Terminator*. I first heard about the franchise thanks to the Universal Studios attraction Terminator 2 3D, which was a really impressive hybrid 3D movie/stunt show that I wish were still open. When I was 8 years old, either before or after my first or second trip to Universal Studios in Florida, my sister and I first saw the first Terminator. This was the first ever R-rated film I was allowed to watch with my parents, and it left such an impression on me. It scared me a bit when I was younger, but from what I remember, I thought the T-800 endoskeleton looked awesome. I actually noticed the mix of animatronics and stop-motion to bring the Terminator to life, and I was just as creeped out as I was mesmerized. My parents let my sister and I see *T2* shortly after, and it made just as big of an impact on me. I had not seen such intense action, extreme violence, and chilling post-apocalyptic imagery like that before, and I loved every second of those films.(I’ve joked that The Terminator is the real-life equivalent of the “scary robot movie” from that one SpongeBob episode) It goes without saying that both Terminator films (at least the only ones I want to admit exist, I eventually saw the third and fourth films, thought they were kind of stupid and unnecessary, and don’t plan on seeing Genisys or Dark Fate) have been a big inspiration for my love of cinema and filmmaking. I couldn’t help but be inspired when I read about how Jim Cameron made the first Terminator on such a low budget, based it on a nightmare he had, took this seemingly silly action picture about a killer robot who looked like a hulking Austrian bodybuilder, and made it into a cultural phenomenon, while still being a great movie from a confident young filmmaker. I couldn’t believe that this was the guy who went from this $6 million sci-fi horror movie to freaking *Titanic and Avatar, the two most expensive and highest-grossing films in Hollywood history at the time, both pioneers of special effects and escapist blockbuster filmmaking. This guy started off as a truck driver, then saw Star Wars* and got a job at Roger Corman’s special effects unit at New World Pictures, made and got fired and re-hired from a bad B horror film, then had a fever dream of a cyborg endoskeleton rising from the ashes, and the rest would be cinema history. The solid cast of characters further elevates the story to transcend its genre. The lead here is Sarah Connor, as portrayed by Linda Hamilton in one of her first roles. This is not the badass, gun-toting Sarah Connor we see in T2, but somewhat of a blank slate, a sometimes-clumsy waitress at a burger joint, suddenly thrust into this complex sci-fi murder plot. She’s such a relatable and vulnerable character from her very first scene, and Linda Hamilton is great in the role. She should’ve become a much bigger star after this and *T2, since she can be both naturalistic in earlier scenes, and strong and intense later on. She’s up there with Ellen Ripley in Alien (what a coincidence, since its sequel Aliens was Cameron’s next film) as one of the greatest female characters in science fiction. Michael Biehn is Kyle Reese, the future resistance fighter sent in to protect Sarah Connor and hunt down the T-800, another fantastic character. You aren’t sure whether or not to trust him, since he appears to be following Sarah Connor and gets unhinged when she first meets him, adding to the tense atmosphere. Biehn is phenomenal in the role, pulling off both intense and quiet scenes, and you believe his fear for Sarah’s life and for the future under the tyranny of the machines, as well as his frustration with authority figures who don’t believe him.(such as the scummy psychiatrist Dr. Silberman, who comes back in T2). The cops and authority figures around the characters are unreliable and often untrustworthy, giving the audience few people to trust. It’s easy to see why Cameron would cast him in Aliens, The Abyss, and an eventurally-cut dream sequence in T2*. On the side are two somewhat naïve but not dumb cops portrayed by Paul Winfield (a very underrated actor, probably the most respected actor in the cast at the time) and the great Lance Henriksen.(you may know him as Bishop from Aliens, another genre icon). But who obviously stands out is Ah-nuld Schwarzenegger as the titular mechanical villain. He wasn’t known much as an actor at the time outside the Conan movies, and this is the role that made him the pop culture icon he is today. It’s funny that he became known as this badass leading man action hero-type when his most iconic role is as a bad guy.(and he never played a villain since, regrettably until Mr. Freeze in Batman and Robin). Just imagine what a massive risk it would be in 2022 for a movie to let its marketable leading man annihilate an entire police station.(and eventually become the governor of California) He is beyond menacing and creepy as the T-800. You can tell just how inhuman the Terminator really is from just one cold, dead-eyed look from him. He has only a few actual lines of dialogue in the film, most coming from the scene between him and Dick Miller as the gun salesman (between getting killed by Arnold and his house mowed in by Gremlins, Dick Miller did not have a great 1984), and his lack of dialogue makes him all the more terrifying, and the very few lines he has memorable.(on a side note, what makes the “I’ll be back” scene so good is that you don’t know how he will “be back” when you first see the film, and it leads to the shocking payoff of the car going through the police station). One brilliant, subtle detail of his performance is how whenever he slowly turns his head, his eyes move with it: it looks so robotic and inhuman, and all the more chilling. Arnold gets mocked for his acting style and thick accent, but this is easily his best, most iconic film role. And at least it was a better potential casting choice than OJ Simpson.(I kid you not, Cameron initially considered him “unconvincing as a killer”… how ironic). The story is simple at first, but so effective: a killer cyborg travels to the present day to kill the mother of the unborn child who will be humanity’s final hope against the machine. This is a high-concept film in every sense of the term. The pacing is quick and relentless, a rollercoaster ride of emotions, horror scenes and action scenes. But Cameron’s script and direction elevate this from what could have been a campy B action flick to a more human, more layered story that transcends all of its genres. He manages to make a story about a muscle-bound cyborg traveling through time believable in every scene. This is how you write a smart science fiction story. He adds in a love story between Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese, which wouldn’t work under a lesser writer. It could have felt so forced and so tacked-on and made it obvious that a man wrote it, but it works here due to the connection between the two. We know that Sarah Connor will be the mother of the savior John Connor, and thus it makes sense that Kyle Reese would bond with her. If anything, the romance between them makes the story so much more touching and human.(in addition, the love scene between them is actually shot quite tastefully; between this and *Titanic*, Cameron actually knows how to shoot nudity candidly but without a distracting gaze). One scene in which Kyle Reese professes his love for Sarah Connor, while she asks him about his life in the future, both tearing up in the hotel room before they make love, is so moving and easily my favorite scene in the film. It’s so beautifully acted and written. Visually, The Terminator is just as impressive. As soon as it opens you get such a sense of the gritty, bleak dystopian setting. It’s LA in the year 2029, and the world has been destroyed by a nuclear fallout caused by SkyNet. There are skulls and destroyed buildings everywhere. Most of the human population is gone. The only signs of intelligent life on this planet are the machines, more intelligent than us humans and ready to kill anyone they see. At first it’s hard to believe that such vivid, uniquely unsettling post-apocalyptic imagery was created on a small B movie budget, with just some miniature models, but it was, and it’s so immersive. Later on in the flashback scenes, we see more of the wasteland that is LA in a certain future, in which the entire population hide underground; starving, crying, puking, freezing, in ragged clothes, staring at fireplaces, patrolled by resistance fighters, waiting to be killed. Jim Cameron researched the Warsaw Ghetto in WWII while writing the script, and it shows, since the bleak wasteland feels right out of the Holocaust. To add to the Holocaust subtext, Kyle Reese is revealed to be a slave (even getting markings on his arm), only for John Connor to free him in a revolt against the machines. This subtext makes the themes of technology taking over all the more prescient. A lot of people think the special effects in the film look bad today, but I disagree. If anything, the robotic look to the T-800 in some scenes make him even creepier. Arnold is replaced by a sometimes obvious-looking animatronic in some scenes, such as the incredibly grotesque body horror scene of him removing his human eye, and when he repairs his shot-up arm, and to such chilling effect. The late great Stan Winston did a fantastic job on the makeup effects for the film, somehow making a robot with human skin look creepily convincing. The highlight of the visual effects for me has to be the finale, in which after being burned alive after the truck explosion (the T-800’s skin burning off has to be one of the more chilling body horror scenes I’ve seen), the T-800’s endoskeleton rises from the ash, in the form of a great animatronic puppet for close-ups, and a stop-motion model for wide shots. Not only is the endoskeleton design so iconic and unsettling (fun fact: the T-800’s red eyes are an homage to 2001, another piece of media warning about the dangers of trusting modern technology), but so are the effects that went into it. Many think stop motion looks bad due to the jerky motion, but here it adds so much to the creepiness factor. The scene in which the top half of the T-800 crawls after Sarah Connor is genuinely terrifying. Even with the heavy special effects, the action sequences are still intense and exciting. All the practical car chases and stunts still hold up today, and looked like they were life-threatening to perform. They are all shot and directed for real, with an intensity that could not be achieved with modern CGI. But I think the reason why this works as an action movie is not necessarily for the action itself. Hear me out, The Terminator is a horror film. The T-800 is essentially a slasher villain who stalks and kills his victims one-by-one, complete with slasher-movie POV shots. Cameron cited the first Halloween as a heavy influence on the film, and that influence can be felt throughout. You may as well put a Michael Myers mask on the T-800 and that’s the only way the Terminator would be even more terrifying. The scene where he kills Sarah’s friend Ginger is a flat-out chilling slasher movie kill, where he shoots her 8 or 9 times in cold blood offscreen, and gazes at her cold, dead-eyed corpse. And as mentioned before, the eye-slitting scene is an almost Cronenbergian moment of body horror, and the factory finale is actually pretty damn scary. Brad Fidel’s pulsating synth-heavy soundtrack for the film is one of the most iconic film scores in cinema, and for damn good reason. He composed it entirely on electronic instruments and samplers not just as a cost-cutting measure, but to make the score sound all the more mechanical, cold, and distant. I saw a behind-the-scenes interview where he described the fantastic opening title theme as “the heartbeat of a machine”, which tracks. The Terminator would not feel this imposing and heartless if his scenes were scored with a lush orchestra, with the low-budget horror movie synth soundtrack working so well in its favor. The film starts to lean even more into the horror genre with this cold, disturbing-sounding score, used to such chilling effect. He mixes musical synth sounds with sampled noises put through synthesizers, such as a clanging pot and human screams, making each scene all the more intense. When the film calms down, and becomes either suspenseful or romantic, piano motifs take over and are just as effective as the intense electronic cues. In terms of style, The Terminator is neon-noir at its finest. Taking place in the urban decay of downtown LA, with neon lights blaring all through the streets, almost entirely at night, makes the film feel so gritty and realistic. It uses the late 70s/early 80s neon aesthetic for such an effective, immersive atmosphere. The low-budget grainy cinematography is gritty and unpolished, mixed with a gorgeous soft glow that accentuates the beaming city lights. This style is especially evident in the set piece where Sarah Connor goes to the seedy Tech-Noir disco (tech-noir was coined by this film to liken film noir with the dark side of technology), with hard neon lights everywhere while nightclubbers dance badly in the background. It is pure 80s in the best way possible, but also kind of timeless. Clearly modern films like Drive, Upgrade, Baby Driver, among many others adopted the 80s neon-noir style to great effect. On rewatching The Terminator, I further appreciated and understood what made it such a phenomenon. Not only is it an entertaining sci-fi action horror with spectacular special effects, bound to be a hit with audiences, but it’s a smart story with layered human characters, and a prescient warning about the dominance of technology over human civilization. It is a low-budget film that no one thought would be a hit, but was, and both transcended and redefined its genres, and inspired too many sequels, homages and parodies to name. There’s a reason The Terminator has endured as a classic and an important work in American cinema: it’s just such a great, rewatchable movie that is as fresh, fun, cool, thrilling and relevant today as it was in 1984. 1984 was a great year for cinema, giving us A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Karate Kid, Gremlins, This Is Spinal Tap, Amadeus, Blood Simple, among countless other all-time classics. But for me, The Terminator is the most influential on my love of filmmaking from that year, and one of my favorites of all time, one of the best sci-fi, action, and horror films of all time, which will not be forgotten.