From the far reaches of the Milky Way Galaxy, It's Retro Nerd Girl with a film review for you.
Today I'll be reviewing the movie Terminator released in 1984.
Starring:
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn
Directed by:
James Cameron
Genre:
Action, Sci-Fi
Rating:
R for sex, nudity, gore, violence, and profanity.
Budget:
$6,400,000 (estimated)
IMDb Rating is currently:
8.0
The Synopsis is:
An indestructible cyborg from 2029, the T800, time travels to 1984 to terminate Sarah Connor, the mother of John Connor, the leader of the human resistance against the rise of the machines.
Story:
The Terminator was written by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd who at the time were husband and wife, with additional dialogue by William Wisher Jr..
Many people think that this was James Cameron’s directorial debut after working behind the scenes for a few Roger Corman films as an artist and production. However, this was really his third. The first was a sci-fi short, Xenogenesis released in 1978 and the feature film, Piranha II: The Spawning released in 1981.
The idea of time traveling soldiers and robots is not a new one. It was done before as seen in the TV series, the Outer Limits, responsible for many science fiction, noir short stories.
Science fiction author Harlan Ellison who wrote many of the Outer Limits episodes actually went on to sue James Cameron, claiming that the film plagiarized multiple stories. James claimed that it was a coincidence, which is totally possible.
When watching episodes that Ellison wrote you can clearly see the connections to The Terminator’s themes, story lines, and even visuals.
In Soldier (1964), the opening of that episode and the films opening look quite similar. And in that episode, the main characters are sent through time into the past.
In the Demon with a Glass Hand (1964) and "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." you can see the possible influence of the creation of the movie’s ultimate villain, Skynet, the mega computer that is out to destroy mankind.
The suit was settled out of court and prints of the film now acknowledge Ellison, which was ultimately what he wanted.
Other influences were The Driver (1978) and The Mechanical Man (1921).
And those influences are great, but what was done creatively was nothing short of genius tying in those ideas, with James Cameron’s initial concept he came up with while in a hotel sick in Rome. He was having a nightmare and in it was a vision of a metal endoskeleton emerging from flames.
It’s a terrifying visual, it’s unique and became the brand image of the film. He said that the script was written from there, trying to figure out how his terminator would come to this visual.
Because the endoskeleton would have to be futuristic, and setting the film in the future would be too expensive, the solution was time travel.
So to tell you the truth, time travel movies are tricky because if they are not done right, you either get the best movies or the worst movies littered with tons of inconsistencies and burning questions that lead to dead ends.
It turns out that this movie handles time travel well by not getting too detailed into it. It’s just there, but not going to give you a headache trying to figure things out.
There is a lot of exposition in the film concerning the timeline and I love that it that occurs in the film naturally. Sometimes happen right in the middle of the action, not wasting any time at all, and then during a period of quiet time to give the audience and the characters enough time to absorb all that we have learned. It’s beautifully crafted in my opinion.
The film has lots of fun memorable dialogue. The line "I'll be back." was the #37 out of 100 movie quote recognized by the American Film Institute, and listed as #95 from the "The 100 Greatest Movie Lines" by Premiere magazine in 2007.
Pacing:
At an hour and 47 minutes the pacing is nearly perfect to me. It moves quickly but it allows a few moments for you to catch your breath and learn more about the characters and what they are fighting for.
Challenge:
The main villain in the film is a computer system called Skynet. It sounds like it could have been some kind of human monitoring system, but it’s not. The soul purpose of Skynet is to destroy the human race, because it sees it as a threat. Why? I don’t know. It’s so much more superior humans. What will skynet do once humanity is destroyed? Who knows. It just has it out for humans. End of story.
So to be honest, Skynet is the coolest sounding point to the story on the surface and it’s just about tolerable for me in this film. Because when you boil down to real logic, humans are interesting, but a threat to an indestructible force, no.
I think that an advanced intelligent computer would be interested in studying humans as one of many specimens of organic life, and surpassing our scientific research, venture and study other worlds, fold space, decode black holes. There would be so much knowledge to conquer, puny humans would not be a threat.
But a computer with a limited ability or capability would be quite defensive and this is where this is explained in the sequel to this film. There was plot point that was omitted from the film concerning the company that is responsible for Skynet, Cyberdyne, but was cut due to budget reasons and, it might have made the story too busy. I could not have agreed more.
In this story Skynet wants a leg up on the war against the humans, to wipe them out, so it sends a terminator to kill the mother of the human resistance before he is born.
Even though I think that Skynet is not smart, I believe that the terminator is sent to 1984 to terminate Sarah Connor is very smart. The terminator is a logically gritty and realistic as a character and that is what makes him extremely terrifying. He moves realistically in an unrelenting pursual, using logic and ingenuity.
The terminator is like Hal in a way, the robot featured in the film 2001 a space odyssey. Hal is embedded with way more human personality traits like paranoia, and vanity. Like Hal, the terminator is also willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish his goals. Faking emotions, voicing other people's voices and personalities to get what he wants.
When Sarah calls her mom, he doesn’t use his own voice and says tell me your location. He uses finesse and plays upon Sarah's emotions towards her mother to get what he wants.
In today's reviews of movies, we hear a lot about back stories for our villains and how much it is needed for character development in order for us to enjoy them.
The terminator has no backstory and yet he is such a terrifying villain, dripping with logical menace. And yet he is an icon among villains of all time. We don’t need much to enjoy him because as the film continues we learn how capable he is at what he does and becomes more extreme as he overcomes his challenges. He’s fully developed as a character because as brutally simple as he is, we understand why he’s doing what he’s doing and we are afraid for the people he considers a threat.
Empathy:
Wow! The empathy was off the roof. We are slowly introduced to the characters. The main two characters we are concerned with is Sarah Connor who is a waitress when we meet her in 1984 and Kyle Reese who is a soldier sent by her son from 2029 to protect her.
I love the fact that in the beginning of the film, both Kyle and the terminator are treated in the same way as ominous sinister characters. In the case of Kyle, he never hurts anyone, but we only know that he arrives in the same way that the terminator does and that creates a lot of speculation about his purpose.
Kyle is very handsome, but he looks like scavenger on the edge of survival. His eyes are all bugged out and they shift a lot. We see him get a shotgun and stalk, Sarah and this is very scary until, he saves her life.
What I love about this character is how intense he is when he speaks of the seriousness they are dealing with. He’s also a great match for Sarah who is nearly hysterically after losing her friends, home, and everything she knew.
The biggest character arc comes from Sarah Connor. She starts out being an average girl who can’t catch a break. Even with the terminator after her she can’t believe what is happening and still believes in the world that she has known all of her life.
She doesn’t suspect much when she simply calls her mom to let her know how she’s doing. The reality of the situation is much more terrifying than she wants to imagine.
With everything she loses through the film it is in the last chase scene when she takes the wheel of the car, she takes charge. It’s both physical and symbolical. There begins a separation between Kyle and Sarah signifying her independence from his help going forward.
Then it is she who terminates the terminator, signifying her transformation into the Sarah Connor Kyle Reese has been raving about her being the mother of civilization if it is to survive.
There were many who have reviewed this film and were not happy about the lovemaking scene, which was a sign of the 1980’s. There was a love scene in nearly every movie. But I didn’t mind it and I didn’t think that it was out of place to happen because for Sarah, Kyle Reese is the only person left for her to trust and he does everything to protect her without asking for anything in return.
And from Kyle’s point of view, he knows at that particular time that it may be some time before the Terminator finds them so he can let his guard down. She is the one to make the move on him, and he goes along with it because he was unknowingly conditioned to love Sarah from a picture John Connor gives him.
Technical:
Technically, this is where this film excels to tell the story, but also falters with a few innovative moments for 1984, but not so much for the present day.
Stan Winston did the make-up and the creature effects. They were pretty shocking and impressive at the time. No one had ever seen anything like it. I don’t think anyone ever dared to try.
There were several puppets made. The endoskeleton Terminator made of real metal had a full standing unit, which took nearly a year to make. It had an upper body portion (and it’s probably my favorite puppet in the bunch the way it’s used in the film), and it had additional arms and legs for close up details of the terminator walking and grabbing things.
The puppets of the terminator with skin is where the film took it’s biggest risk. There was an arm puppet, that featured all of the inner workings of the terminator’s arm. A fascinating sight for the audience.
In the scene where the Terminator performs surgery on itself to remove its damaged prosthetic eye, there was a puppet created for the terminator’s head with a missing eye which took six months to create.
The detail on the puppet is astounding and fascinating, but it does have a jerky movement to it.
The movement doesn’t match the live action performance, and I’ve always wondered why it wasn’t cut around, or simply shown for a few seconds. The camera holds on this puppet for a while and it showed much of the terminators mechanics on purpose, to help tell the story and I admire that. It was as big risk and as with many risk, it sometimes doesn’t always work as planned.
In 1984, I can tell you that it was pretty amazing to see this effect, but now as new more realistic technologies have developed. It seems too rudimentary now.
However, it is special effects like these that inspired the experts of movie makeup and special effects to push the envelope. So we have this movie to thank for the great work we see today.
Now around that shot, they were vastly creative in the means of trying to sell the shot, because the hands that perform the surgery are actually Arnold Schwarzenegger's.
And many people think that the close-up of the robotic eye is a close up of the skin puppet of the terminator, but it isn’t. An oversized version of the eye area was made, using a camera lens as the eye’s iris focusing.
That was pretty amazing how they shot that all together.
The studio, Fantasy II did the miniature effects and they knocked it out of the park. All of the scenes of the future world was a mixture of miniatures and live action, shot seamlessly.
What a lot of people don’t know is that the semi truck that is blown up was actually a miniature. It was very realistic and the chromakey work that was done to put Sarah in front of that explosion was excellently done.
The most iconic vision of the film is the metal endoskeleton emerging from the flames was a brand new image in 1984 which sent shivers up the spines of most people who watched the film at the time.
The last scene of the terminator dying is just two planks of foam core painted and tin foil for the metal terminator and a small light bulb for his eye. The smoke flowing out of The Terminator when it is crushed in the hydraulic press is actually cigarette smoke.
The body bag Reese is put in at the end of the film is actually a suit bag owned by director James Cameron.
The "fog" in the scene after Sarah and Reese leave the bridge where they spent the night is actually residual bug spray at the filming location at that time.
The music for this film is so Iconic, used and reused in several other sequels and synonymous with the terminator himself. It was very metallic, highly charged, electric and almost throbbing, like a heartbeat.
Brad Fiedel said that he basically wrote the score live while watching the film and the classic metal clanking sound was made by Brad Fiedel by hitting a microphone with a cast iron skillet.
Performances:
A happy accident of this film which adds a deeper significance to the story is that originally, the terminator would have been played by an average looking guy and the part of Kyle Reese would have been Arnold Schwarzenegger, the buff former bodybuilder with a budding acting career.
However, when the decision was made to switch the roles, it really enhanced the intimidation of the terminator as a physically superior killing machine, creating more fear playing upon the David and Goliath trope. It ramped up the tension to incredible heights for the audience making it feel as if our protagonists were in terrible danger.
One of the actors considered for the part of the terminator in the early stages was Lance Henriksen who would have be excellent as the terminator, I’m sure. He definitely has the intensity to play the character well.
I think Arnold Schwarzenegger’s performance was incredible and really enhanced the physical intimidation and control that was needed to depict robotic behavior. Even his Austrian accent and the deeper octaves in his voice lent to the performance in a unique way.
Excited by the opportunity to play this role with impact, prior to filming, Arnold Schwarzenegger spent weeks learning how to assemble, dismantle, reload and fire every weapon used in the film blindfolded. The result added to the eeriness of his performance giving it just the right amount of impact of terror.
In addition, he practiced using different firearms without blinking and not looking at them when reloading or cocking. He also practiced being ambidextrous with the weapons as well as several different poses. His performance got the highest compliment for handling guns in a film by "Soldier of Fortune" magazine.
Besides the dedication of hours and hours of makeup, special effects and stunts, he was so valuable to the production that when he had to leave to film Conan the Destroyer (1984), the sequel to Conan the Barbarian released in 1982, they were prepared to wait, rather than recast.
This was an iconic role for him and it was the beginning of a long career in the action genre. Some would say it was Conan, but this proved he could do more.
Before the production began, Linda Hamilton broke her ankle. Ouch! Most of her action scenes were shot at the end of production and it had to be tightly wrapped for the running she had to do in the film. You could hardly tell that was the case throughout the film. She was happy and cheerful when her character needed to be, and hysterical when she had to be. There was something so very natural and so very believable about her performance as a woman who just had her world ripped upside down.
As I told you before, Arnold was going to play Kyle Reese, but can you believe that Michael Biehn almost didn't get the role of Kyle Reese because in his first audition he spoke in a Southern accent as a result of working on a part for a stage production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof".
His performance in this film really sells it. If his performance was not spot on because of all of the exposition he has to tell, it would have really tanked the film, not totally, but it would be hard to buy what happens in the film. He is so intense, wide eyed and serious. He makes the audience believe he is really Kyle Reese from the future. What a performance.
Best:
The best part of the film for me is pretty much every scene. If I list it off, I’d just be listing play by play of the entire film.
The ending:
For me the ending was powerful packed with realizations. Sarah Connor is driving off to the future, where she delivers John Connor, who then sends Kyle Reese back to 1984 to save her and become John Connor's father. The loop continues over and over again for all time. It’s romantic, in a crazy way.
The romance element of the story is subtle thread that is not really spoken but revealed in a Polaroid John Connor gives to Kyle to prime him for his mission. We see this near the beginning and this pays off at the end of the film. It’s wonderful.
Enjoyment:
In the film, the name of the night club where the Terminator first targets Sarah was named Tech Noir which is the genre of film James Cameron coined, like Blade Runner (1982) with the futuristic elements of a sci-fi thriller.
It is essentially a horror film. I am not a horror fan, but what I love that every horrible thing that the Terminator does is helping to define his character and tell the story simultaneously. Every action in the film makes sense in the story and the world of the Terminator setting up a believable scenario.
This is my all time favorite movie. It’s strange to say it out loud but, so far, it is. I would consider this a near perfect movie, especially story wise even with the drawback of time travel. I must attribute it to all the amazing forces of film making coming together to make this film a true masterpiece. I love it.
My Rating:
9.8
That sums up my review. I hope you liked it. This is Retro Nerd Girl signing off!
Take care movie lovers! I'm off to the next review!
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