THE TERMINATOR (1984)

Country: U.S.A.

Genre(s): Action / Sci-Fi

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger / Linda Hamilton / Michael Biehn

Plot

An unstoppable cyborg killer from the future travels back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, a waitress who will one day give birth to the leader of the human resistance against machine rule in the 21^st century.

What I Liked

The first important movie directed by James Cameron, “The Terminator” is an excellent example of the triumph of simplicity and technique over pretention and style.  Some would argue that the plot’s convoluted time-travel backstory is evidence of complexity on the part of Cameron (who was also the screenwriter), while others call the plot clumsy and artless.  The argument is really moot because, despite what some geeks might think, this movie’s impact isn’t in the post-apocalyptic mythology explaining the Terminator’s existence; it’s in the Terminator itself.  The suspense of this film boils down to the fact that a huge, menacing, and well-armed Arnold Schwarzenegger, regardless of his motive, is fixated on killing little innocent Linda Hamilton.  Truth be told, everything else is just incidental, because somehow the film works amazingly well just with that basic premise.

The reason it works is Cameron’s precision at creating mesmerizing action sequences.  The Terminator (Schwarzenegger) may be a machine, but Cameron makes it feel more like a force of nature, a walking natural disaster.  He keeps the hulking cyborg moving at all times, always pressing forward (through walls, shotgun blasts, and fires) like a tornado.  Meanwhile, everyone and everything else has to keep moving with him just to stay out of his way, resulting in one riveting chase scene after another.  Bodies fly through the air, vehicles careen out of control, and explosions erupt everywhere; yet the Terminator keeps on coming.  Cameron brilliantly accentuates this in every scene.  For all of the film’s many special effects, it is the effect of the Terminator’s unrelenting pursuit that is truly behind the palpable tension in this movie.

What I Disliked

That James Cameron considers himself a screenwriter before anything else is just amusing.  Of course, in the strictest sense, he is a screenwriter.  He wrote this and many other classic movies.  But his skill is in doing exactly what he did with "The Terminator": writing pathetically rudimentary stories and dialogue and then using his special effects and directing talents to build surprisingly successful films around them.  In particular, the dialogue in this movie is pathetic, somewhere on the level of the poorest written science fiction comics of the 1950s.  Say all you want about the handful of lines that became part of the popular lexicon (“I’ll be back,” for example); most of those lines are so well remembered because they have so often been parodied for their stupidity and for Schwarzenegger’s heavily accented delivery of them.

Most Memorable Scene

*spoiler alert*

Too often filmmakers try to do the fake-death for the villain at the wrong time, when the audience knows it is happening far too early in the plot for the climax to have happened.  Cameron times his just right and even gets the falling action music playing in the background before pulling the fast one on us.

The reveal of the Terminator in all of its red-eyed, skull-faced metal glory is, for me, what allows this movie to truly transcend the B-movie status the plot deserves and enter the realm of classic action cinema.  Like the shark in “Jaws” finally rearing its big ugly head out of the water for the first time, this scene really drives home what’s at stake for both the characters and the audience.  Once all that inflated muscle is burned away to uncover one of the most wicked looking robots in movie history rising up out of a massive explosion to continue marching straight ahead like nothing happened, the intensity immediately ratchets up a few levels.

My Rating: 3 out of 5