The Terminator (

1984

)

The Terminator opens with a post-apocalyptic hellscape, where the bones of murdered humans are ground under the treads of colossal killer robots. A small alliance of human freedom fighters, clad only in rags and armed with plasma rifles, wages a desperate struggle against their new machine overlords. Against this bleak dystopia, the present of the film actually manages to look rosy by way of comparison, even though it would be plenty grim enough for most people. Los Angeles here looks like the Detroit of Robocop (1987) or the Mega-City One of Judge Dread. To be fair, to depict pretty much any major American metropolitan zone as otherwise in the mid-1980s would be being downright dishonest; this was the zenith of a long process of urban decay that had been eating away at the big cities since the 1960s. Still, I cannot help but suspect that director James Cameron is embellishing some of the details here. Surely there had to be more to 1980s LA than blighted alleyways, drunken hobos, seedy clubs, and tough-looking punks.

Somewhere in-between the 1980s urban wasteland and 2020s robot wasteland, the US government decided it would be a good idea to automate their defense systems with a vast computer network al la Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970). Rather than the computer turning into a benevolent tyrant though, this one decided that its objective was to eradicate all life, not just all Russian life and set about the wholesale slaughter of mankind (presumably because someone forgot a semi-colon somewhere). The AI running America’s defense network decided to stick to proven methods for genocide, and followed the playbook of 1930s and 40s Germany almost to a T. Soon, the world was dotted with hellish concentration camps complete with a barcode tattoo identification system. It looked like mankind is all but doomed, until a hero arose, a man named John Conner (don’t think for a second that those initials are coincidental). Conner led a revolt against the machines and even succeeded at striking a blow against the master computer itself. The machine forces, crippled but still dangerous, put all their resources into a last-ditch effort to stop Conner’s revolt before it could ever begin. They built a time machine and sent back a lone robot assassin, a human-shaped model called a Terminator, to kill John Conner’s mother, Sarah Conner before he was ever born. Fortunately, Conner and his troops captured the facility before any more killbots can be sent back to the 1980s and Conner sends his own man, Sergeant Kyle Reese, to foil the Terminator’s plot.

None of this will be explained to the audience for a good while. At the start, all we know is that amid a shower of cheesy special effects, two naked men have appeared in downtown Los Angles. One, is a pretty normal-looking dude (though with an alarming number of scars and old battle wounds) who quickly and skillfully evades the police, and the other is a gigantic slab of meat that displays no traces of emotion, can punch through a man’s stomach with ease, and for no discernible reason speaks with a heavy Austrian accent. They are of course, Kyle Reese and The Terminator respectively. Both are looking for Sarah Conner, but they have nothing to go on but the name, as it turns out there are three Sarah Conners in the phone book, so the Terminator takes the practical approach and starts at the top of the list, killing each woman in turn. A sound strategy, but luckily for mankind, our Sarah Conner is at the bottom and by the time the Terminator has finished dispatching the first two, the police have recognized the pattern and start looking for her. Even luckier, Reese is able to track her down and offer her protection against a threat that only he truly appreciates.

Sarah Conner is very much the type of female protagonist that you don’t see anymore; IE one that is allowed a compelling arch. She starts off the movie as a waitress struggling to keep her head above water in a rough city. In other words, a regular Joe maybe even a bit sub-regular at least as evidenced by the day we spend with her: She shows up late to work, screws up at the job, gets stood up by her date, and needs a pep talk from her roommate just to keep going. She’s not a loser, but she is struggling just to get by, something that makes her immediately relatable. When she starts being tracked by a robotic assassin and a helpful but seemingly psychotic drifter, she realizes that she’s in over her head. Sarah behaves about as well as a normal person could in these circumstances by ducking into a public place (here, a night club) and calling the cops. When the bullets start flying, she shows enough good sense to run and even to accept help from the apparent lunatic that is not actively trying to kill her. The sequence paints her as merely capable, but rather a long way from anything resembling an action hero. For the time being she is going to be hopelessly outmatched by the monster trying to kill her and the man trying to protect her. It’s only after overcoming the challenge of the Terminator that Sarah emerges on the other side as a bonafide badass. What makes the Terminator seem so impressive when compared to modern action/sci-fi movies is its willingness to turn Sarah into a hero, rather than just having her emerge as one at the start of the film with no development whatsoever. Somehow, in the past three decades, filmmakers have decided that using the former approach was sexist and have opted to abandon it in favor of the later. So, when I watch Resident Evil (2002) or Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), I can’t help but feel a little disappointed that Sarah Conner’s story is such an outlier and that James Cameron’s advice on writing compelling female protagonists is so widely derided.

Thanks to a bit of luck, some help from Reese, and a fair bit of quick thinking Sarah evades the Terminator long enough for the cops to arrive on the scene. The cops take Sarah into protective custody, arrest Reese, and dismiss the Terminator as a Kevlar-wearing PCP addict. In a highly amusing scene, a condescending police psychologist interrogates Reese about his backstory, and the film playfully flirts with the possibility of revealing that its assumptions about time travel don’t make any sense. The thing is: Reese is a soldier who understands how the time machine works about as well as I understand how my TV does (which is to say not at all). He knows how to use it, and what its limitations are but if you asked him to draw you the blueprints or even explain the principle behind it he’d probably draw a blank. It makes sense in the context, and it allows the film to effectively hand-wave away all the confusing logic inherent to a story that includes time-travel. All things considered, it’s the best cop-out about the hazy mechanism of time travel in sci-fi until Looper (2012) just flat out told its audience to stop worrying about how time travel works and enjoy the movie.

Naturally, the Terminator isn’t just about to give up on its mission or let a little thing like a building full of cops get in the way of its target. The robot crashes through the front door of the police station in a car (the famous, ‘I’ll be back scene’) and proceeds to mow down dozens of policemen. In the confusion, Reese manages to escape as well, the guard given the task of keeping an eye of him failing spectacularly the moment his superior leaves the room. After watching the entire station be massacred by the Terminator, it becomes obvious to Sarah that the police can’t protector her, that this is no armor-clad drug addict chasing her, and that the only one with a chance of keeping her safe from the killer robot is Reese. The two beat a narrow escape from the Terminator and flee into the hinterland, holing up in a remote motel and stocking up of bombs and guns for when the Terminator inevitably tracks them down.

The Terminator is a great pick and mix bag of sci-fi, action, and horror that is all the more impressive by predating Aliens (1986) and Predator (1987) by a few years. The secret to Terminator’s success is that both horror and action rely on the same element to make them exciting, suspense. Too many action movies forget this and load themselves down with visually impressive fight scenes where the outcome is never in any doubt. Honestly, for me there is nothing more boring than a fight scene without tension (the only place I have seen it pulled off successfully is in Only God Forgives (2013), and that would make a poor model for most action movies to base themselves on). Cameron understands this and capitalizes on it by pulling his villain straight from the slasher formula. The Terminator is a (nearly) silent killing machine bent on eradicating a particular young woman. The killer robot thus has quite a bit in common with horror villains like Jason Voorhees, Leatherface, and Michal Myers. He’s also comparably overpowered, being able to shrug off bullets and bombs with relative ease. Indeed, Reese expresses doubts that he will ever be able to kill the Terminator “with these weapons.” No matter how many times Reese and Sarah escape the Terminator, the villain never loses his ability to threaten them, thanks in no small part to how much sheer punishment the audience watches him absorb. Using slasher tropes in an action movie has all the marks of brilliant innovation, being odd at first thought but then making more and more sense the longer it is considered.

The Terminator’s practical effects are stunning and complemented by a brilliantly mechanical performance on the part of its leading man. Arnold Schwarzenegger's every movement seems stiff and unnatural like there is something slightly off about him. When it comes to the actual business of killing his movements are a little too perfect and too perfectly choreographed to be human. Even his voice, in his few spoken lines of dialogue, sounds more like it was created with a synthesizer than with normal human vocal cords. It’s a masterful performance, one that dips ever so slightly into the uncanny valley. The performance complements the stunning visual effects that Cameron employs. In the scenes where the terminator is making repairs to itself, Cameron uses a mix of puppetry and makeup to depict the process. Since Swartzenegger has been acting in a jerky unnatural fashion for the entire film, it becomes almost impossible to tell which shots are using the puppet and which shots are showing the man.