The Terminator (1984)

 

The Terminator

“Come with me if you wanna live”.

One night in 1984, two characters appear in Los Angeles amid burst of static electricity. One is a cyborg with superhuman strength and durability, and the other is a comparatively frail looking soldier with the objective of preventing the cyborg in it nefarious purpose. Both are from the future (2029, so it is soon) and both are very interested in a particular woman, supposedly the future mother of a future leader.

Seriously, if I must explain the plot of “The Terminator”, you probably ended up on the wrong website. Also, there really is not that much to tell. Plotwise, “The Terminator” is as thin as plots go and follow the template for action movies of the eighties down to the comma. It is not really that logical either or endowed with some secondary, deeper meaning that makes the apparent plot irrelevant. By these accounts “The Terminator” is one of many action B-movies from the eighties.

None of that, however, explains why this is such an enjoyable movie to watch.

The academic explanation would be that it is a movie that plays with the genre and through that uses the template form to get to another level, but I am not certain that explanation covers it. Rather, I think it is a combination of enthusiasm, a vision, a balance between ironic distance and taking itself serious and brilliant casting.

James Cameron is a visionary man. It is the one denominator in his impressive and quite wide-ranging filmography. His filmmaking is always driven by a visual imagination, of what the movie should look and feel like. According to Cameron lore, he got the idea for “The Terminator” in a dream in a hotel room in Rome and it was the enthusiasm for this vision that he channelled into the movie. You can feel it when you watch it, there is a deeper world of thought behind what we see. His background in visual effects is also evident.

The Terminator itself is of course Arnold Schwarzenegger, a role that became iconic for him. His superhuman appearance, mechanic acting style, lack of facial expression and heavily accented delivery IS the cyborg. Today it is impossible to imagine that a lethal battle cyborg can look like anything else than Arnie and even the later high-tech versions of death machines of the franchise are not half as compelling as he is. But more importantly, his delivery of the role gives it BOTH its menacing terror and its deadpan distance. Do I need to say “I’ll be back”?

This balance is not restricted to the cyborg but is pervading the movie. The dialogue on the police station is my own favourite element. Paul Winfield, Lance Henriksen and Earl Boen are all dead serious and funny at the same time, talking about “the weird ones” and refusing to take Kyle Reese, the soldier from the future serious. Pretty much like normally thinking people would and yet with our outside knowledge, it makes them the laughingstock.

Michael Bien and Linda Hamilton as Kyle Reese and the target girl, Sarah Connor are almost the dullest part of the movie and their role is simply to drive the thin plot forward, but they are serious enough about it that they are not hampering it. They fit the vision so to speak, acting as prügelknappe for the Austrian killing machine.

In this vision of Cameron there are so many details worth mentioning. The dystopian future (which is truly horrible) matched up with the almost exclusive use of night scenes in contemporary Los Angeles. The tech noir night club (which I always wanted to visit), the trashy, rain glinsing backstreets, reminiscent of “Bladerunner” and the freakish maintenance the cyborg performs on itself. There is a fantastic eye for details here.

I watched “The Terminator” for the umpteenth time last night with my wife and son and asked them afterwards what their impression was? How should I frame my review? Their response was that it should be overwhelmingly positive, and I think that is also how generations since its release have, sometimes grudgingly, viewed it.

On paper, this is at best an action B-movie, while in actuality this is one of the true Hollywood classics. Later instalments in the franchise may have overmatched it in effects and action, but never in vision and that is where it counts.