The Terminator

In what may turn out to be the very last movie night before Coronavirus ends the world, Raisa picked a classic sci-fi film that I can hardly believe had yet to be presented: James Cameron’s 1984 epic breakthrough The Terminator.  Yeah, I have no idea how that one made it through 378 screenings without being shown.  (Also, it’s the first James Cameron film, though for my money, I’m not really missing anything that’s not T2 or Aliens.)

Go Arnold!  It’s your birthday!

So everybody knows the premise of the film – in the near future (from 1984, that is) the defense department’s Skynet develops sentience, decides that humans are the enemy, and initiates a massive nuclear war to clear the planet for the rise of the machines.  And it would have worked, if it wasn’t for that meddling John Connor, who perhaps four decades into their reign, leads a successful guerilla movement to bring the few remaining humans to the verge of victory.  So the machines take the desperate step of sending a cyborg – a human-machine hybrid with actual flesh over a metallic robot body – back in time to kill John Connor’s mother before she is born.  However, since the time machine can only send back biological material (or that enveloped in biological material) our Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 Terminator has to travel back in time naked, which gives the future governor of California an opportunity to show off his glutes.

In the super-expanded “Spock” rules of rock-paper-scissors, 12-gauge slug to the chest beats mandatory California waiting period.

Once he steals some clothes so that he doesn’t stand out, this Terminator moves on to rob a gun store.  Come to think of it, theft is basically this guy’s modus operandi – over the course of the film he steals clothes, sunglasses, weapons and ammo, a motorcycle, cars (including police vehicles), a fuel tanker…  I mean, add in the break-ins and the murders and this dude is on a crime spree the likes of which has probably never been seen.

When your red face ISN’T rosacea

Anyway, once armed and provided with transportation, he starts going through the phone book and wasting all the Sarah Connors that he can find in the Los Angeles area.  There are only three.  This is the wrong one, not that it does her any good.

Well you’d better let him out, the Queen is pissed!

This is the right Sarah Connor.  Because she’s not at home when the Terminator visits, it’s her roommate who gets killed instead (in classic horror genre in flagrante delicto style).  And that might have been all, if it weren’t for the media reporting about the serial Sarah Connor murders, causing her to call home and leave a message on the answering machine telling her roomie where to come pick her up at a particular club as the Terminator listens in.

James Cameron’s J.J. Abrams Lens Flare Babies

The Terminator finds her at the club and is about to accomplish his mission, but for one problem.

The Doofinator

You see, the humans from the future found out that the machines had sent back a Terminator, and sent back their own human to try to stop it.  Importantly, they subsequently destroyed the time machine to prevent the machines from sending any other Terminators back (a key point, which turns away the nagging “when the machines realized the first Terminator didn’t succeed why didn’t they send back another one?” question, at least until the sequel).  This also means that the two that have been sent back are now stuck in the past – there’s no return for them.

Bob Guccione died in the Skynet Holocaust, so, y’know

The human, Kyle Reese, that was sent back had been carefully groomed by none other than resistance leader John Connor for this very job, presumably for years.  He has been given a photo of Sarah when she was younger, and has gone so far as to even fall in love with this ideal of a resistance leader’s resistance leader mother.  However, this may not be too terribly surprising as apparently in the future the contemporary pickings are pretty slim.

Anyhow, using a stolen police shotgun (and also wearing stolen clothes, but these from a clothing store – do the crime sprees never end?) Reese is able to temporarily cause enough disruption to the Terminator to get Sarah out of there.  “Come with me if you want to live,” he says, but to be honest Arnold did the line more justice in T2.  Of course, despite multiple shotgun blasts the Terminator was merely stunned, and a massive nighttime car chase ensues, with the Terminator eventually even commandeering a police car and the whole thing ends with Sarah and Reese being captured by the police and the Terminator somehow slinking away.

Oh, man, I forgot to turn off the flash!

While the Terminator (in marginal make-up) is doing some self-surgery (and I’ll bet he didn’t pay for the exacto blade, or for that matter the dingy hotel room he’s lodging in), Reese is being interrogated by the cops, who think he’s crazy.  Generally, when you travel back in time it’s a bad call to use “no, really, I’m a time traveler” as your primary story for the authorities.  The police psychiatrist is convinced that Reese is crazy, and has basically convinced Sarah of the same, but the Terminator arrives at the precinct station.

You know what this gun needs?  A chainsaw bayonet!

After being denied visiting access to Sarah Connor (despite very clearly stating that he is indeed a friend of hers, I mean how rude can the desk clerk be?) the Terminator utters the immortal “I’ll be back” before crashing through the precinct walls with a police car and then proceeding to shoot the living daylights out of anything that moves.  Reese, with the time loaf on his side, once again is able to rescue Sarah.  At some point, he tells her “Listen, and understand! That Terminator is out there! It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop… ever, until you are dead!”  Eventually, she believes him, but at least she fights it for a while.  I mean, creepy schizophrenic guy or benevolent time traveler?  That’s a tough one to work out.

That old “come hither” look gets ’em every time

They head off to a motel where they proceed to make seven pipe bombs and one future resistance leader, but Sarah, not yet the savvy guerilla she is destined to become, gives away her location by calling her mother and, at her mother’s insistence, telling her where they are while Reese is off shopping for bomb chemicals.   Of course, it wasn’t her mother – her mother is already dead and it’s only the Terminator mimicking her voice.  (It’s OK, they’ve already established the Terminator’s ability to do this earlier in the film, so it’s no vox ex machina.)

Oh, yeah, that Model 101 always puts out great plumes of hellfire when it molts, they had to fix that in the next iteration

Naturally, this leads to another epic nighttime car chase, this one ending with the Terminator at the wheel of a fuel tanker truck which Reese manages to blow up with the old pipe-bomb-in-the-tailpipe trick.  (Works a lot better with a pipe bomb than with a banana, interestingly enough.)  But, in the napalm aftermath, it turns out that the Timexinator has taken a licking and has kept on ticking.  Reese and Sarah flee into what happens to be a robotics factory (Cyberdyne, as it not so coincidentally turns out) where Reese is killed, but not before they manage to jam one final pipe bomb into the Terminator’s torso and blow it in half.

Come back here and take what’s coming to you! I’ll bite your legs off!

At this point, the Terminator is reduced to essentially late-era Black Knight status, but thanks to a dramatic score and I suppose some decent acting by Linda Hamilton, we’re still convinced that this upper torso of a robot, weaponless, dragging itself slowly across the floor by one arm while trailing electrical conduits is a serious threat.  I mean, fine, Sarah has had to pull a piece of shrapnel out of her thigh, but still, anything this side of a desert tortoise ought to be able to avoid capture by this thing.

I…only…thought…you…might…like…some…Shiatsu…

But not Sarah.  However, fortunately for her, at the moment that Eric the Half-a-Terminator finally catches up to her and reaches out to strangle her with its one good arm, it just so happens to be perfectly positioned in a hydraulic machine press, which Sarah obviously knows how to operate by feel (you’ve got to know these things when you’re a future resistance leader).  “You’re terminated, fucker!” she says, and the movie’s over.

Calvinist Dog Corrects Owner: No One Is A Good Boy

Well, almost over.  There’s still the minor subplot about the old photo of Sarah Connor that Reese fell in love with to tie up, and we do it in Mexico, where Sarah has gone to escape the nuclear wars and start the resistance.  (So…why is she in L.A. again at the beginning of T2?  Ah, never mind.)  A young child at a gas station snaps a Polaroid of her and insists that she buy it for $5 or his father will beat him.  She haggles him down to $4, which presumably means only a minor lashing.  As he’s exiting stage right, the kid mutters something.  The gas station attendant tells Sarah “He said there’s a storm coming in.”  “I know,” says Sarah, and now the credits can roll.

My one complaint about the film – this particular print that we watched – is that it was really, really, excessively dark.  I mean, yes, The Terminator is a film that does have a muted palette, but for some reason the night scenes (and that’s most of the movie) were almost completely blackwashed out.  For me, I knew better.  However, there were two attendees who had never seen the film, and I hope that didn’t spoil their opinions of what is, of course, a great film.  It’s not perfect, of course.  The plot relies a bit much on car chases to pad the film, and there are some make-up jobs and special effects that look laughable (especially by today’s standards), and the ending is a bit convenient, but aside from that I don’t know what to say wrong about it.  Sure, it’s a time-travel movie (at least, in principle) but the plot is actually pretty novel, the menace of the Terminator is dead-on, and the time-travel aspects are tight as can be.  The Terminator has to fail, because the Terminator has always failed.  The Mexican kid has to take the photo that John Connor will deliberately give to the man he knows will go on to be his father once he sends him back in time.  It all syncs up into that super-solid time loaf.  Of course, it’s relatively easy to do that, given that there are only the two one-way trips, but I appreciate it nonetheless.  And it’s got a few very quotable lines.  It’s a shame that Cameron didn’t really make anything worth watching after T2, because he sure started out with a ton of promise.