The Terminator (1984): Favourite Films Series

The Terminator (1984): Favourite Films Series

 

The first time I saw 1984’s The Terminator was on TV when I was about seven years old. It was near the end, so I tuned in for just a few minutes, but it really stuck with me. It was at the part where the T-800 chases after Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese in the semi-truck, and when it cut to the T-800, I asked my dad why his eye was glowing red. He explained it was a machine disguised as a real human, and I instantly thought it was a cool idea. Studio executives thought it was, too (an idea born out of a fever dream by writer/director James Cameron) and the original film was a hit, as was the even bigger and better (in some ways) sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I asked if we could rent them from the video store and my parents let me watch them, having remembered enjoying them when they came out. I distinctly remember how my mom paused and explained that the characters were changing the timeline of the future in T2 when they sat down at the table with the inventor of Skynet, Miles Dyson, and the concept sparked a fascination in me that has never gone away. When it comes to time travel and fictional futuristic technology, The Terminator remains one of the most influential films of all-time.

The premise for The Terminator was a bold new take on two classic sci-fi concepts: time travel and robots. A cybernetic organism from the future is sent back in time to kill the mother of a resistance leader who will one day threaten the reign of the machines, and the resistance sends back a lone soldier to protect her. The execution of said premise is why it has had such lasting power, despite being dated in a few different ways. The techno soundtrack sounds kind of unintentionally funny at points, but definitely not bad. In some ways, the smaller, more unique score by Brad Fiedel for The Terminator is even better than his bigger, more orchestral score for Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Some of the shots of the T-800 with just its red, glowing eye exposed look like what they are: an animatronic prop made from a cast of Arnold Schwarzenegger. But, these shots are brief, and most of the closer up shots still look good. When the flesh-free endoskeleton of the T-800 pursues Sarah and Kyle into the factory at the end, it’s clearly a stop motion model. Some argue that the jerky movement kind of works for a machine, but the whole point of the T-800 is to mimic the smooth movements of a human, and yes, you could argue that because it’s damaged and without its human skin sack it probably wouldn’t move as smoothly anymore. I still think those shots stand out in a bit of a distracting way, but again, they are brief, and don’t ruin the terror or the excitement of the pursuit, and all the practical effects by Stan Winston still look fantastic today.  

James Cameron had the idea for the liquid metal terminator long before he made T2, but digital effects weren’t really a thing yet, so he could only bring terminators to life through puppetry, animatronics, prosthetics, stop motion, and real-life actors. The lore is rich right from the get-go, with Kyle Reese feeding us glimpses of the post-apocalyptic future throughout the first two acts with expository dialogue. Michael Biehn brought a raw intensity to the role and really sold his lines about what the world would be like a few decades later. The exposition could have been tedious or confusing, but any time Kyle starts talking about the world that we as an audience only ever get a peek at, it feels purposeful. He tells it like it is when he must, and often his words get cut short by the interjection of action, which helps give the film a solid pace. As great as Michael Biehn is, though, he wasn’t Cameron’s original choice for the role. That role was supposed to go to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Cameron envisioned someone more famous than Schwarzenegger in the Terminator role, and a studio exec suggested O.J. Simpson, but Cameron didn’t think he’d be believable as a killer—true story. When he met with Schwarzenegger and heard him talk about how he envisioned the cybernetic organism, Cameron realized he’d be perfect for that role instead, and eventually convinced him to play it. Schwarzenegger, not yet at the celebrity status he would reach in the coming years, felt the movie was low enough in profile that if it turned out bad it wouldn’t hurt his career too much. The reason he felt it was low profile was, well, because it was low profile. Terminator is intrinsically tied to Schwarzenegger today and the word instantly makes people think of the film, but during its production, it was a low budget endeavor from a director and a producer who had not yet proven themselves, filming mostly at night and sometimes without permits—that is to say shooting illegally in L.A. locales.

When the action, drama, and suspense is not concentrated in Los Angeles of 1984, we get to spend a few minutes of the one hour and forty-five-minute runtime forty-five years into the future, where Kyle Reese comes from. What stands out about these flashforwards as being dated the most are the sometimes-obvious miniature effects and backgrounds, but for the most part, the Hunter Killer’s flying through the darkened skies shooting at the resistance soldiers amid rubble and wreckage hold up pretty well, especially for how low the budget was. It’s easy to see why fans craved more and more scenes and even entire movies set during the post-apocalyptic world, and why Cameron became known as a special effects pioneer for filmmaking. The success of The Terminator is what got him the job writing and directing Aliens: he could make a modest budget look big, with effective action in an expansive sci-fi world. But another important aspect of Terminator that got him the Aliens job? Terminator is also a horror movie.

Dated effects aside, there’s something about the base idea of a machine trying to kill you and not stopping no matter what you throw at it that is particularly frightening, and has not stopped being frightening in all these years—if anything, it’s more frightening as technology continues to advance and become part of our everyday lives. I have seen Terminator so many times that it’s kind of like Jurassic Park for me in that I forget certain parts are meant to be frightening because I know they’re coming and know how they were achieved. Sarah Conner is given just enough setup in the first act for the audience to feel invested in her as a protagonist and root for her once Kyle and the T-800 converge on her in the Tech Noir nightclub and her life is turned completely upside down. I don’t particularly like her roommate Ginger or Ginger’s boyfriend Matt, but I still feel bad when they get killed because of how it affects Sarah. The eventual demise of the ill-fated Kyle Reese hits home in the final act, because he’s the only guy who Sarah can trust after all she’s been through, and as most people would have already figured out by that point, he’s the father of future resistance leader John Conner: her unborn son.   

The reason I go back and forth now as an adult about whether I enjoy The Terminator or Terminator 2 more is because of how sound the screenplay is for The Terminator and how gritty the film is. It has that rough-around-the-edges look and feel to it, and yet it was so clearly assembled by the skilled duo of Gale Ann Hurd (producer and co-writer) and James Cameron (director and co-writer) to be a potent, effective techno-horror/thriller. T2 is more polished, more epic, and more of a blockbuster, but there was just no way to duplicate the freshness of the concept and the danger of the T-800, so I understand why James Cameron took T2 in the direction that he did, and I don’t think he should have done it any other way, but that first movie is still just so good! You can’t have the second without the first, but even if there had never been a T2, or if it hadn’t been the T2 we got, the first movie would still hold up as something great on its own. As a kid, I was certain T2 was better because it had everything that made the first one great, only it also had more action that was even bigger and faster and louder, plus had more humour, and more emotion.

I no longer feel the need to say which one is better, because even though T2 is a direct sequel, they are two different movies with two different intentions, and they succeed at both perfectly. It’s like the Alien and Aliens debate, except even harder, because James Cameron wrote and directed both, but he didn’t make Alien. I’m not going to do a Terminator vs. T2 exploration because I like both movies for most of the same reasons, but The Terminator is a quintessential 80’s movie that makes a lot out of a little, and T2 is a quintessential 90’s movie that expands on the premise and the characters and tells a story that is designed to mirror the story of the original movie on a bigger scale. I could watch either movie on its own and enjoy it to the fullest extent, but if I’m more in the mood for an uncompromising, deadly serious, concise version of the story about a cyborg from the future trying to kill someone integral to the future war between humans and machines, I go with The Terminator.

I can never get tired of either film, and even though as a kid I preferred John as the protagonist over Sarah, as well as the flashier visual effects of T2 (and still do prefer the latter aspect of that movie compared to the first), I find both stories compelling enough that I would no longer definitively say one is superior to the other. I’m more nostalgic for T2, but I no longer think it tells the superior story, it just tells its story in a more action-packed, emotional way. I couldn’t understand how people thought the first movie was better than the second when I was a kid, but now as an adult, I get it. The Terminator kicked off a franchise that had no hope of ever truly topping the original, but no matter how many inferior sequels and reboots we get, nothing will ever stop it from being the best movie of its kind. It absolutely will not stop, ever, until cinema is dead!