It’s been a brief, but interesting look at this anomalous, but wondrous year that gave us so many beloved classics, and I think that someday, we may return to this timescape for even more cinematic adventures. However, we’re going to wrap things up for the time being as next week, something very exciting is happening. Next week, the new Nintendo Switch gets released! In celebration of both that and the first Legend of Zelda game that I’ve been able to buy since 1998, we’re going to take a look at this new electronic marvel and see what it really has to offer, and what it lacks, if anything.
That said, we’re going to end our little exercise on a high note today. We’ve already looked a couple of fine films, and there are so many more that we could look at, but today, we’re going to look at the crown jewel of 1984, James Cameron’s sci-fi classic The Terminator. This is a complex, and rich narrative so let’s jump in and take a look around!
By now, hopefully, everyone knows the tale of The Terminator. In the future, 1997 to be exact, a self-aware artificial intelligence called Skynet, decimates the human race. Their victory is all but assured, but then, a resistance leader named John Connor topples their initiative and beats them at their own game. To stop this from happening, Skynet sends a Terminator agent back to the year 1984 to kill John Connor’s mom from ever even conceiving John. As a result, the future humans have to send back an agent of their own to protect Sarah. This agent is Kyle Reese, John Connor’s friend and confidante.
The Terminator arrives, and immediately everyone starts dying, and everything starts exploding. Most perplexing, is there begins to be a series of focused murders in the greater LA area, specifically, everyone named Sarah Connor starts dying. Actual Sarah figures out that whoever is perpetrating the murders is simply gong in the order that the phone book is laid out in. The police get involved, but per movie rules, they’re pretty much useless. Luckily for Sarah, there’s Kyle. Kyle Reese is a highly experienced, well trained operative with lots of surviving Terminator attacks skills. He teaches Sarah how to fire a gun, how to build pipe bombs, and of course, how to flee if things get too hot. Say what you will, but knowing when to exercise a tactical withdrawal is at least as important as all of the other stuff.
So Sarah goes to the club, and while she’s gone, the Terminator finds her apartment and kills her roommate. It also kills the roommate’s boyfriend, but he’s a jerk so we don’t really care. COming up empty, perhaps Sarah has dodged a bullet, but the Terminator figures out where Sarah is via the answering machine. So he goes to the club, and lots of people die horribly. Sarah nearly gets killed herself, but just at the last second, Kyle swoops in and saves the day! YAY! They abscond away to hide for a while so that they can regroup.
They end up at a skeezy motel where Sarah learns how to make those aforementioned pipe bombs, and by that, I mean that she and Kyle totally do it. It’s a touching scene really as two people who’ve known each other for less than 48 hours make the gigantic decision to bump naughty bits because they’re bodies are being flooded with adrenaline and endorphins from their near death experiences. Okay, so it actually might seem out of place, but there’s actually a good reason behind this one. See, Kyle is John’s dad. Um-hm. Couldn’t make that one up in a million years. Kyle Reese travels back in time, does his best friend’s mom, and becomes his best friend’s dad. I’m gonna give you a minute to let that one sink in… Just kidding, this movie is over 30 years old! If you haven’t gotten over the shock of that little revelation, then you need to do some meditation or something!
Anyway, the Terminator is pretty ruthless in its pursuit of Sarah and Kyle, but it takes it a minute to find them after their escape. But once he does, it’s all over. There’s a chase scene, and motorcycles, and the Terminator gets run over by a semi-truck. It’s all very exciting. Anyway, The Terminator commandeers the truck and chases Sarah and Kyle, and I gotta tell you, that’s one nimble truck, but anyway, Kyle blows it up, and we think the day is saved! However, the Terminator isn’t going down that easy, and the endoskeletal portion of the machine, which looks terrifying starts chasing them from the flames of the wreckage!
They all end up in some kind of factory where there are automated robotic arms, and awesome 80s computers, and a hydraulic press of some sort. The Terminator is chasing them, and it gets them cornered, but Kyle shoves his last pipe bomb in the Terminator’s chest, and blows it up! Surely, that’s the end, yes? No! The torso of the Terminator starts clawing its way around trying to choke the life out of Sarah, who can’t run because she took some shrapnel to the leg during the Terminator explosion. So they’re each clawing around, and it’s actually kind of intense, and Sarah finds herself crawling through that hydraulic press with the Terminator in hot pursuit. So she clears the press, lowers some gate thing, and just before the Terminator is able to actually get hold of her neck, she activates the press, and squashes the crap out of the Terminator! Terminated frakker!. She actually says that! Okay, not that exactly, but something very close to that.
In the end, Sarah is driving a sweet Jeep through the desert, and she stops for gas, and stuff. She looks visibly pregnant. A little kid screws her out of four bucks for a polaroid picture, and it’s the same picture that Kyle had at the beginning! Dun, dun, DUNNNN!!!! She talks about the coming storm, and the perils that lay ahead, and then drives off into a liter thunderstorm. It’s a very bleak ending, leaving the possibility of a sequel wide open. Indeed, we’ve gotten a lot of sequels and such from this one film. We’ll not go into them all here, but there maybe future articles springing forth from this franchise yet.
So a watching of this movie for the purposes of this article leave me just the slightest bit baffled. (Not really, but we’ll get to that in a minute.) This movie is considered a staple within the pantheon of classic film. It sets a benchmark for cerebral sci-fi action films that few ever reach, and yet, it hasn’t actually aged all that well. Hear me out before you start writing those death threats in the comments! As with any movie, it’s a product of its time so I can forgive the styles of clothing and hair that were used. That’s just what was in at the time. But in context of 2017, the special effects have dated themselves ever so slightly. Sure, they were cutting edge back in 1984, but the stop motion is kind of jerky, and even the creature effects were sometimes a little off. I know, I know, they were ambitious for their time. Okay, so we can agree that for it’s time it was cutting edge? I’ll accept that, but I don’t think any of those things are the reason that the film has endured for so long.
I think the primary reason that The Terminator has become a staple within the film classics category is because it taps into a fear that is, I think, universal to every human being, the future. No one knows for sure what’s going to happen in the future, and some fates are actually worse than death so that unknown realm can be really scary if we allow ourselves to dwell upon such things. It was definitely a product of its time in many regards, but I think the base examination going on in this movie is still relevant today. Look at the march of ‘human progress’. As we grow, we mostly do so technologically. Every year, we find new ways to turn our free will over to machines. I can literally run most of my life via my phone, and when you stop to think about all of the ways that that arrangement could go awry, it’s a pretty scary prospect. That idea of technology rebelling is not new, but I think that it becomes more and more pertinent as the days go by, and as technology creeps further and further into our daily lives. Now, I’m not saying it’s a bad arrangement, but I can definitely see how it could be unsettling to some.
The Terminator taps into both of these facets of our existence, and feeds on all of the terrifying what-ifs that exist there. That’s what makes this a great film, in my opinion. Beyond that, there is so much to love. The atmosphere in this movie is dark, and it’s legitimately scary. The look of Schwarzenegger as the Terminator is unsettling. Once the ‘friendly’ exterior is removed, it’s even more so! The scope, and the pacing of this film are a perfect storm of unease as the viewer tries to remain calm. It makes it really easy to get swept up in this movie. The acting is mostly good. There are a couple of lines here and there that make you roll your eyes just a little, but for an 80s film, it manages to keep the cheese to minimum. The ‘romantic subplot’ was definitely rushed, but had to be there so what are you supposed to do? There really wasn’t anyway that that sort of thing was going to happen organically anyway.
The score for this film really adds to the ambience. It’s dark, it’s brooding, and at times, it can be completely unnerving. My only complaint there is that Brad Fiedel made the unfortunate decision, again in my opinion, to do the entire score with synthesizers! As a professional audio engineer, I can confidently say that there are really only a couple of places in movie scores where synthesizers are okay to use. One is as a place filler before the actual orchestrations have been recorded and mixed, and two is playing second fiddle to back up said orchestrations! DANGIT! Good compositions should never be rendered in synthesizers! Do you hear me Hollywood?! NEVER! Okay, that aside, here’s the rationale behind it. Even as you watch this movie, you know there’s synth. It’s not something that can be easily overlooked, and it pulls me right out of the experience every time it takes the spotlight in a scene. I understand why that decision was made, but holy crud, was it a bad idea. Don’t get me wrong,the arrangement of notes that probably ended up on the paper are brilliant, it’s just the execution via synth really drags down that brilliance. As an example, here's the theme the way it was originally presented. And here's an orchestral arrangement. Can we all just agree that I’m right on this point, please? Nah, it’s cool if we can’t just realize that you’re all kinds of wrong.
Enough of that. The creature effects in this film actually weren’t bad. I can tell that for 1984, they worked their butts off to make everything as believable as they could. That’s no easy feat to accomplish using only practical effects. Oh, and the gore is awesome! It just makes this film. I don’t think the movie would have been received nearly as well if they had shot for a PG-13 rating. The gore in the film, while not excessive, is effective.
And finally, let me just mention briefly some of the franchise, as we will be looking at pieces, if not all of it over what I hope are years of faithful reading. Terminator 2 was a brilliant! We’ll look at that one more closely later for sure. I felt like The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the short lived TV series, was cancelled before it really had a chance to to what it was meant to do, and it was an awesome show. We’ll look at that one later too. As for the other ones, they all bring a little something to the universe, but they don’t ever really congeal in a good way. We may look at them anyway at points when I happen to be bored, and lacking any better material, but the fact that all of these sequels and spinoffs exist is just a testament to the impact that this original film had on people.
In all, an experience that I would recommend in case you haven’t actually seen it. To which I would ask, what are you still doing reading this article?! Go watch the movie! As I said earlier, we’re looking at the switch next week, and if it arrives early enough, I might give my first impressions of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Until then!
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