James Cameron month: The Terminator

 A review by Forrest Humphrey

So I commented on how “Alien” was a film that intimidated me due to its influence and pop culture icon status. I'm reviewing another film like it for James Cameron Month, right down to being preserved in the Library of Congress as a culturally significant film. This time, I'm covering 1984's “The Terminator”, a blend of science fiction and horror that launched several careers. 

Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn, with smaller roles played by stars such as Lance Henriksen and a very young Bill Paxton,“The Terminator” stands as one of the most beloved movies of the last few decades, one of the highlights of the 1980s; and you can certainly tell that's the decade it hails from with its big muscle man lead, brutal action scenes and a fantastic synthesizer score by Brad Fiedel. Its special effects, courtesy of the legendary Stan Winston, hold up extraordinarily well between the stunts, gunfights and of course, the various makeup and prop effects that turned Schwarzenegger into the titular villain. 

Arnold had just come from the Conan the Barbarian films, and while those films were successful, this was the role that made him THE action star of the '80s. Despite having less than a hundred words for the entire run time, he sets every scene through his sheer size and physical presence. Three words, “I'll be back” have cemented themselves as one of the single most famous lines in cinema, anyone who's watched a movie made in the last thirty years knows that line. Hamilton here is a far cry from her role in the sequels, a delicate teenager who is way over her head, but she plays it well and by the end, you can absolutely see shades of the action heroine we would see later on. Biehn, who studied Polish Resistance Fighters from WWII, plays the PTSD stricken Kyle Reese excellently, spending nearly every scene jumpy with haunted eyes. 

To speak very briefly of the plot for the one person on earth who might not know, the setup is very simple as it is for many successful horror films. Set in Los Angeles, Sarah Connor (Hamilton) is going through life when she is attacked by the Terminator (Schwarzenegger), a cyborg from the future sent to kill her before her son, John Connor, future savior of humanity, is even born. Protecting her is Kyle Reese (Biehn), a soldier from the human Resistance in the future, where machines controlled by the sentient AI Skynet, have taken over and driven humanity to the edge of extinction That's it, that's the whole plot. Get away from the evil killer robot from the future, and it's damn scary. 

Scary is the operative word here. As much as all of its sequels are hallmarks of the action genre, the first Terminator is a horror movie. As mentioned, having someone as big as Arnold Schwarzenegger hunting you down is scary enough, add in he's an unstoppable, unfeeling robot that will not stop coming after you until you are dead, and you have one hell of a memorable movie monster. Bullets? Car crashes? Explosions? He shrugs it all off, and every escape is tense and desperate. At around an hour and forty minutes, the movie is lean and fast-paced, with just enough breather scenes between the chases to let Sarah and Kyle bond, which gives Reese ample time to paint the grim picture of the future. Nothing drags here, its a tightly paced thriller all the way to the end. 

Of course, the movie was a smash hit and spawned a franchise, which began with what many consider the greatest sequel ever made, a film certain to be covered soon. Everything after that sequel? Sadly hit or miss, mostly miss. Like many of its franchise contemporaries like “Alien” and “Predator”, Terminator has overstayed its welcome, with poor films outnumbering the good ones. But that doesn't make the film that kickstarted the franchise any less fantastic.