The Terminator

The Terminator (1984)

Director: James Cameron
Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, Linda Hamilton, Paul Winfield, Lance Henriksen, Rick Rossovich, Bess Motta, Earl Boen
Writer: James Cameron, Gale Anne Hurd

Synopsis:
A cyborg called a Terminator (Schwarzenegger) is sent back in time to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor (Hamilton), whose unborn son will lead humanity in a war against a sentient AI. A young human soldier from the same time named Kyle Reese (Biehn) is also sent back to protect Sarah at all costs. If the Terminator is successful, the future of mankind is doomed.

First Impressions
I was 8 years old when this movie came out, so I didn't get to see it in the theaters, but for kids my age, the movie was almost like a myth. I mean, a killer robot from the future punches a guy through the stomach, how could I not want to see that? Anyway, I was a teenager by the time I finally saw it on home video and I thought it was great. It was dark and violent but with a somewhat wry sense of humor. I've seen it many times since then and it remains one of my favorite sci-fi movies.

Story -

"Come with me if you want to live."

First of all let's get something out of the way, I am aware of the rumors that Cameron based the idea for this movie on one or more stories from Harlan Ellison. I don't know how valid those claims are and they don't matter for this review anyway.

I really like how Cameron starts this movie off with a brief glimpse of what life is like in the dark, post-apocalyptic future. There's very little dialogue in the first act of the movie, which works well and Cameron makes good use of flashback (or flash forwards?) to set up the story. I also liked how Cameron kept Reese's role in the film somewhat ambiguous in the first act and while you can infer from context that Arnold is up to no good, you're not entirely sure who the other guy is and what his intentions are.  I'm a big fan of directors who trust their audience enough to figure out whats going on, rather than hold their hands as they explain every little detail to them, which is a symptom of the overly-pedantic nature of the current internet culture. That's not to say that Cameron doesn't make use of exposition (you can't really make a movie without it), but here it's brief and fits in well with the action.

That's not to say that everything about the story is perfect, though. The love story in it is tacked on and because of it, the movie suffers from the time paradox issues that plague most time travel movies. Overall, though, the story moves along at a brisk pace and keeps the action at the forefront, with a minimal amount of downtime.

Acting:
Well, this is a sci-fi horror/thriller/action movie starring a former body builder, no one expects Citizen Kane levels of acting here. As a whole, the cast does a pretty good job. Biehn is solid as Reese and it's a shame that the movie didn't catapult him into a big action star like a lot of people anticipated. Hamilton plays the role of Sarah very well and as the movie goes along and she bounces from one traumatic experience to another you can see her character develop. The movie does a good job by resisting the temptation to turn her into a badass during the movie's climax but it does just enough to show you the genesis (no pun intended) of the character that Sarah eventually becomes in subsequent movies. Arnold is, well, Arnold. It's almost as if he was born to play a machine with no human emotions.

Side note: I find it amusing that the person originally tapped to play the role of the Terminator was O.J. Simpson, who the production team eventually decided against because he was too likable and nobody would believe him as a remorseless killer. 

Finally, one of the things I love about James Cameron movies is that he puts a lot of effort into developing interesting secondary characters. Whether it's Lt. Traxler (Winfield) or Det. Vukovich (Henriksen) or Sarah's roommate Ginger (Motta) and her boyfriend Matt (Rossovich), these characters aren't just scenery or props to move the story along. They feel like real people with a history and Cameron always does a good job at finding the right actors to inhabit these smaller roles.

Visuals/Special Effects:
Being a movie about a killer robot from the future, you'd expect this movie to have a lot of special effect and it does. The scenes taking place in the future make good use of miniatures and the explosions and laser fire still look pretty good.

The make-up effects are top-notch for the time and the late, great Stan Winston was in charge of creating the cyborg effects for the terminator. Winston is an absolute frigging wizard when it comes to creature effects and he doesn't disappoint in this movie. Yes, in the scene where the Terminator cuts his eyeball out, there's very clearly an animatronic dummy standing in for Arnold (I suppose he asked for too much money to really cut out his own eyeball) but other than that the make-up effects still hold up pretty well 35 years later.

One final note about the visuals. I quite liked how Cameron would occasionally switch into a point of view shot from the perspective of the Terminator. For a character that really has no depth, it's an interesting way to see how it views the world around it.

Score/Music:
I never really thought about it before, but the theme music for The Terminator is pretty iconic. It's certainly a product of its time with a lot of synthesizers and electronic beats but it fits well with the setting and themes of the movie. Even though the movie is set primarily in the late 20th century, I always viewed the Terminator as a cyberpunk movie and the the score fits very well with that aesthetic. Of course, the music also included a number of era-specific pop hits, most of which were unremarkable but still fit the over feel of the movie.

Action
The action is pretty great, with a couple of decent car chases and the massacre at the police station being the notable standouts. Cameron has a knack for shooting action scenes and even in darker lighting conditions, the audience can still clearly see what's going on, which in my mind, is much better than the current trend in movies where action scenes are shot in a herky-jerky, quick cut fashion that makes the audience unable to see whats going on (and also nauseous). The climactic fight against the Terminator was very well done and was more like a cat and mouse chase rather than an all-out, bombastic battle to the death, which I think worked very well.

Final Verdict
The Terminator still holds up and while the special effects are starting to show their age, they still look decent and don't take one out of the movie. Overall, this movie still ranks pretty high for me among the best sci-fi action films of all time.