A series of writings on films that I feel are essential for film lovers, coupled with films that are important to me. Spoilers for those who haven't seen the film.
The Terminator is maybe my favourite movie. Many people prefer Terminator 2: Judgment Day but I always go for the first one. T2 is more of a crowd pleasing summer action film about a boy and his pet terminator (I like the movie but have complicated feelings about it) but The Terminator is much bleaker and dirtier, a mixture of sci-fi and horror which its writer and director James Cameron called "tech noir." Like most first films in a franchise there's a real purity to it. There's no formula or call backs, just an inventive story its director, like George Lucas with the original Star Wars, wanted to put on screen.
While Lucas had the success of American Graffiti to his name when he did Star Wars, Cameron had Piranha 2: The Spawning, which bombed with critics and audiences. It was during post production of that film where Cameron got sick and had a fever dream/nightmare about a robot skeleton dragging itself along the floor with kitchen knives. This obviously stuck with Cameron and became the basis for The Terminator. The film is often considered a horror film and of all the Terminator films it's the only one that feels like a pure translation of Cameron's nightmare on screen. The sequels go more for bombastic action than the pure terror of an unstoppable killing machine. And while Cameron could've just made a killer robot movie, he places the "slasher" element within the context of a intriguing time travel narrative that has, what I think, is one of the most underrated twists/payoffs in any movie.
In terms of the slasher genre, Cameron clearly took inspiration from John Carpenter's Halloween. Both Carpenter and Cameron show us ordinary women being stalked by hulking killers who feel out of place in the normal world. Tension is created through this unease and question of when they'll strike at the main character. Cameron's original conception of the Terminator was that of a normal looking guy who could come up to you in a crowd and kill you. But when he met Arnold Schwarzenegger, he rein-visioned it as what we see in the film. This is one of rare instances of Schwarzenegger playing a villain. The image we have of him is the goofy cartoon come to life but here Schwarzenegger is actually quite intimidating, a real beast. We see him kill a couple of innocent women point-blank. Before he kills the first Sarah Connor (he only knows the name of the woman he's after), there's that striking shot of him in the door frame, emotionless. Arguably, one can't call the Terminator evil. Rather, it's just a machine with a program.
At first we don't know why the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) wants to Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), a waitress who's barely making it by. All we know is there's some future war between humans and machines and, as the opening text crawl tells, the final battle will be fought in the present day- with the Terminator , as well as another guy, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), coming from the future. We eventually learn that in the future her son John Connor will lead the human resistance against the machines and winning the war. In a last ditch effort the machines have sent back the Terminator back to kill John before he's even born.
The key to good exposition is to make the audience forget they're hearing an info dump. Cameron does this creating a sense of urgency during these scenes. When Reese tells Sarah about her son and the future war, they're on the run from the Terminator, hiding in a car and then attempting to get to another. Cameron also avoids using flashbacks during this scenes so we're allowed to imagine Connor leading the humans against the machines. And when Reese is being interrogated at the police station, talking about the time displacement field, he's talking to a psychologist who clearly doesn't believe him. We're sharing in Reese's frustration with Silberman (Earl Boen), since we know the Terminator is going to arrive at any moment. Reese is captive and Sarah is isolated.
A more routinely structured film would've given us all this information via Reese being told his mission at he film's beginning Reese would be this version's main character and the story would be that of a cool time-travelling action hero. Instead, Cameron takes a more subversive path, withholding the information regarding Sarah's significance from the audience until she learns it. Cameron wants this to be Sarah's story, a human story rather than just merely a time-travelling action movie.
Cameron also subverts the typical male action hero archetype of the time. Physically, Biehn is not a big guy but pretty skinny. And Biehn plays the character in the early parts of the film as very sketchy individual, possibly as dangerous to Sarah as the Terminator. He doesn't scresm "heroic" but makes Sarah nervous when she first sees him, thinking he's the ma who killed the other Sarah Connors (the Terminator doesn't know what Sarah looks like). It's only when Reese saves Sarah from the Terminator at the "Tech Noir" club that it becomes clear he's there to protect her. Cameron slows everything down as the Terminator approaches Sarah. In one of my favourite shots in the film- it points a laser target at Sarah. The suspense builds as Kyle takes out his shotgun and then everything goes back to normal speed as Kyle fires, almost as if the action has brought everything up to speed.
Biehn's performance is all raw, gritted teeth, sweaty, fried out energy. It's the type of character the franchise never revisited, even when they brought back Reese in later sequels. With the sequels, it's always Schwarzenegger as the robotic protector who fight another Terminator. Here, it's two humans against a unstoppable killing machine. It makes things more intimate, especially when Sarah and Reese do have sex. It's implied that Reese is a virgin before this and I can't think of another action movie of this kind that infers this about the main guy.
Even barring the "mother of the future" thing, Sarah is understandably skeptical of Reese telling her there's a robot from the future trying to kill her. It's only when the Terminator mows down the police station that she truly and fully believes Reese is telling the truth. My favourite moment from the film is when Sarah thinks the Terminator is coming through the door but it's Reese. She's relieved it's him and the two share a brief moment before escaping. It's at this moment that the two are completely together, and will be for the rest of the film
Cameron knew he wouldn't have the budget to do a story set in the future so he wrote this smaller story which has big implications. The fate of the human race depends on the outcome of this chase thriller, and by the end we realize what has occurred is even more monumental and mind-bending, which is that Kyle is John's father. We can also put 2 and 2 together and realize Sarah trained John because she knew about the future. The whole thing is a time loop and this chase thriller takes on a more mythic quality.
Unlike most of the sequels, we never see John on screen. I prefer this because I believe John works better as off-screen presence, a symbol. "I'd die for John Connor," Reese tells Sarah, and I don't know if any of the actors who've played John have conveyed what we get from Reese talking about the guy. It also puts the focus on Sarah. She's the hero of the story, not John John can only become the man he is because of his mother's training and being told the truth about his father, the man Sarah loved. At the end she questions whether she should tell John this, if it'll influence his choice to send Kyle back. I believe it's because John Kyle is his father that he sends him back. "No fate but what we make" becomes the philosophy of Terminator 2 but the original implies there can only be one path. Could Sarah ever have done anything different than tell John the truth. I don't know.
While the film concerns a future war, it's one of the great time capsule films of the 1980s. Sarah's hair is one of the most memorable images and the Tech Noir club, the music, the dancing, its just all drenched in 80sness. The film is also one of the great unsung L.A movies, especially L.A. at night. Cinematographer Adam Greenberg's shooting of the city at night has a Michael Mann-esque quality. I love the shot of the Terminator looking over the L.A cityscape, a city full of people who don't know of the coming apocalypse. And Brad Fiedel's score, that throbbing sound that's like the Terminator's mechanical heart, the mournful and metallic main theme, it's so good.
The biggest challenge Cameron when writing, casting and direction, was how to convincingly take Sarah from this timid waitress to a survivor who drives off in to a storm at the end, symbolizing, not subtly. the coming apocalypse and the dark days ahead. Even when Sarah accepts there's a terminator after her, she still can't see herself as the actual person it's after. I think we as the audience are also supposed to wonder how this person could ever train a child to become the leader of the human race. But by the end, when Sarah drives off, it feels like we've been on an epic journey with Sarah. Again, Cameron took a small story and makes it feel bigger through its implication. Hamilton is convincing as both the afraid young woman but also the woman at the end who says "You're terminated, fucker." Cameron puts Sarah through so much, and has her bond with so Reese so deeply, that it's completely believable she would harden and be able to save herself, as well as taking on the responsibility of training John. And as I argued earlier, the film is fatalistic. There's only one path for Sarah to take.
