Listen, and understand! Another Terminator reboot is out
there! It can’t be reasoned with! It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear! And
it absolutely will not stop, ever, until the franchise is dead!
Yes, the second Terminator film to claim a fresh continuity
and real lineage to the instalments universally agreed to be good (all two of
them) is now upon us. I’ll check it out eventually, but in the meantime, I
thought I’d look at a landmark in the Class of ’84 and see why the first movie,
thirty-five years old now, managed to capture its position in pop culture so
well. And, alongside the second movie, hasn’t truly been surpassed despite several
more films and three decades later.
It has to be said that the movie is essentially a B-movie—low
budget and done by an unproven director. A young James Cameron had at that
point mostly been working with schlockmeister Roger Corman, crafting effects on
ripoff movies of Star Wars and Alien in the early eighties, like Battle Beyond the Stars and Galaxy of Terror. Cameron knew his craft, however, and managed to
give even gloriously shitty flicks like those some distinction, like the moody
sets of the latter, and, er, the boob spaceships of the former. Still, working
with everything Corman’s low budgets could give him, down to making futuristic
interiors from McDonald’s cartons, gave the future King of the World what he
needed to work on scifi flicks that would be real classics unto themselves.
It's definitely the look of Terminator that stands out—the brief
glimpses of a future war with neon lasers and robot tanks crushing bones under their
treads were evocative enough that some fans still clamor for an entire movie
like that. Neon lights of Los Angeles clash with the dark halls of nightclubs
and shadowy alleyways—as others have said, the style can be described best by
the name of the aforementioned club: Tech-Noir.
Oh sure, not all of it has aged well in that regard—there’s
eighties fashions aplenty to assault those afraid of acid-washed jeans, with mammoth
mullets taking up entire shots, and while some effects work well, others…don’t.
The fake prosthetic face of the Terminator with its eye shot out are a prime
example, and while some people enjoy the stop-motion robot endoskeleton at the end…it
never worked for me (but I do like the conventional close-up shots of the awesome
looking prop being puppeteered, with special effects maestro Stan Winston crafting
a metallic monster that still outdoes CGI counterparts of latter years).
But the film, like any good low-budget piece that genuinely
rises above its limitations, makes up for it with two things: atmosphere and
detail. It doesn’t revel in schlock—the idea, the terror of a relentless robot
pursuing you to the death, is played absolutely straight, and it’s this sincerity
that makes it all work. The defining scene of the whole thing to me is when the
Terminator slaughters an entire police station where the main character is
hiding—it’s methodical, unstoppable, and the cop secondary characters played by
Lance Henrikson and Paul Winfield, likeable and reasonably developed in their brief
screentime, are killed just like that. There’s no wonky effects to laugh at, no
remorse—as soon as Arnie gives his classic line and begins his rampage, you are
left with no illusions as to what his character can do. It illustrates why this film is more a horror than anything.
And now it’s time to talk about the characters themselves,
isn’t it? You may have heard the story that OJ Simpson was considered for the
role of the Terminator, and chuckle at the notion that back then people thought
it too absurd that he could be a brutal murderer. But the casting of someone
who was then a thick-accented bodybuilder whose main film credit was a musclebound
adventure flick worked out the best. Arnold’s physique means the Terminator
visually dominates every frame it’s in, and while some might chuckle at his thikk
eggzent, he was at least able to convey facial attitudes of absolute control
and machine focus. Likewise, there’s more of that attention to detail I
mentioned—all of Arnold’s handling of guns is authentic, from his brief stint
in the Austrian army. When the Terminator aims, reloads, and chambers with its trademark
efficiency, it’s all real.
Linda Hamilton is a solid enough protagonist—an everyday
struggling person, trapped in a dead-end job, even more relatable now than it
was in ’84. It’s easy to place yourself in her shoes, and thus actually
consider what it would be like to have a time-travelling android on your tail. You
see enough of her friends that you can feel for her when they’re murdered, and
you can feel enough comfort in her momentary sojourn in the police station,
only for it to be shattered when the Terminator slaughters its way in. This is
offset by some of the slightly cheesy monologuing of hers later, and the oft-debated
romance with Kyle Reese—who we’ll now get to.
Michael Biehn as Reese is another area where Cameron’s
attention to detail shows through—he actually looks like someone fighting maniacal
mechanoids in post-atomic wastelands. Grizzled and scarred, but still somewhat
skinny, befitting someone that’s unlikely to have that much protein. Travelling
back to a time when mankind revels in its reliance on technology freaks him
out, with construction vehicles sparking flashbacks (flashforwards?). Compare
this to Jai Courtney in Genisys—who just looks like a buffed model. Indeed, the
future war of that film just looked too shiny alongside its overly well groomed
guerrilla fighter—not so the glimpses of bunker-dwelling survivors in the ’84 flick,
where images of nuclear-ruined wastelands were so much more terrifying and possibly
prescient.
All of this is why the first film is still a classic, and
why indeed it might be one of my favorite scifi films of all time. The components
might be showing their age, but the way they’re assembled and presented, under the
limitations it had, are still masterful. Cameron would showcase this technical attention
to detail all the more with another classic of his, the magnifique Aliens, and
while some of his future films may have been too long (True Lies) or too
indulgent (Titanic), that never really went away. Say what you want about
Avatar, but you can see how the technology and biology was crafted to fit the
world within there too.
Terminator 2 I’ve discussed in the past, so I’ll give a
quick rundown of the rest of the series:
-Terminator 3: A goofy rehash of the prior film, but
watchable for mindless action with a few beers. The ending was actually decent
all things considered, but after Terminator 2, it failed to be the ante-upper
as its predecessor had been.
-Terminator Salvation: A decent flick…almost. I applaud it
for trying something different, and it has its pluses, like the aesthetic and
the detail—the washed out tones of an ozone-deprived nuclear winter, the black
moss and the grime-covered mechas. But the ending was too obviously recut, and
the themes got muddled as a result. I don’t think it’s as bad as some make out,
but it could’ve been better with just a few tweaks.
-Terminator Genisys: Apparently they looked at T3 and
decided that things needed to get even sillier! At this point you shouldn’t even
try to take it seriously, and take it as fanfiction with a budget. It was fun
to have Arnold back, and there are some enjoyable scenes in isolation, but it
was disappointing to see them not even try to go beyond schlock.
-There was also the Sarah Connor TV show, which from the sounds of it experimented with the premise of the series as much as you could, but I never saw enough of it to judge.
-There was also the Sarah Connor TV show, which from the sounds of it experimented with the premise of the series as much as you could, but I never saw enough of it to judge.
And so, the new Dark Fate represents the last chance the
series has, at least for me. But we’ll always have the first two, and their
indelible mark on pop culture and scifi. To this day, the first Terminator, with
its quintessentially eighties but cool looking tech-noir neon, with grim overtones
of nuclear Armageddon and machine domination, resonates with many—even inspiring
genres of music like Synthwave. Even if you’re cynical and find it dated, you
can’t fault the way it was put together. Put on your shades and leather, and
give it another watch before delving into the new stuff.
Not long from now, much like the T-800, I’ll be back
with Dark Fate…
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