November 11, 2008: The Terminator
In late 1997, during the lead-up to the release of Titanic, and through the subsequent shattering of box office records over the space of several months, I don’t think I ever really thought about James Cameron having been a well-established, A-list Hollywood director. I can be pretty dim sometimes. Sure, he struggled as did many a young director under the wing of Roger Corman in the early years. Then after somehow managing to bring his vision for The Terminator to the screen in 1984, he went on to direct Aliens (huge action sequel), The Abyss (intelligent sci-fi with pioneering computer graphics effects work), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (huge action sequel instrumental in bringing digital audio to cinemas), and True Lies (huge Schwarzenegger action/comedy). So it seems that he had some Hollywood clout, and perhaps someday I’ll sit through Titanic again to see what a decade has done to that film, and we’ll cover that story.
But right now, we’re talking about the real start to James Cameron’s Hollywood career as a writer/director, The Terminator. Arnold Schwarzenegger was a known quantity from the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron and had seen recent success with Conan the Barbarian, but was still not a major established movie star. That was all about to change with this movie, and despite only having 16 lines of dialogue in this performance, it kicked off a seemingly endless string of mediocre mid-to-late-1980s Schwarzenegger action flicks, with a few gems sprinkled in there. Linda Hamilton went on to TV success in Beauty and the Beast (and was married to Cameron for several years), and Michael Biehn as the heroic Kyle Reese has made a career of playing minor characters with real integrity.
The Terminator is about a robot covered with real living flesh to make him appear human, sent back through time by “the machines” to kill the mother of the man who tries to prevent machines from taking over the world, before this man is ever born. A regular human from the future is also sent back, trying to defy the odds and save the woman and destroy the nearly-invincible future robot.
The Terminator is a really well constructed movie, with a story that is compelling and makes sense (within the limitations of sci-fi and time travel theories) and maintains real suspense. It’s a classic. See it if you haven’t already.
On the production side, I need to comment on a couple of things.
1. The music. It’s real period stuff, synthesizer licks from the mid-1980s, but even 20+ years later, it doesn’t really seem dated in the way that music from so many movies from that time does. I think it’s because the tone of the music is exactly right, capturing the contrast between how the present-day (1984) L.A. thinks of itself as modern and maybe even futuristic, while it’s really just scummy and run-down. This transcends the particulars of the instruments making the music. We don’t need to demonize synthesizers. After all, it’s not like people hate harpsichord music just because it sounds “dated”.
2. The stop-motion animation. In the climactic scenes when the Terminator is only a robot skeleton and its Schwarzenegger-ness is all gone, the filmmaking technology of the day dictates stop-motion animation (no computer graphics yet, unless we’re talking Tron-style). While it’s competently done, it’s a jarring reminder of the age of the movie, and every time I see these scenes, it makes me think of the perfectionist James Cameron and how his film productions tend to blow up out of proportion (most famously with Titanic) precisely because he doesn’t want anything to look out of place. It kind of makes me glad that I can live with a looser set of standards (just take a look at the core concept behind this set of reviews). Anyway, I think it’s jarring because all the rest of the movie is (aside from human style choices of the day – hair, clothing, cars, etc) very modern looking. I mean, when I see Jason and the Argonauts (1963)*, I expect to see jerky stop-motion animation by Ray Harryhausen. When I see an ultra-modern sci-fi film, I don’t.
This is a great movie which holds together well even nearly 25 years later, a sci-fi action classic with a body count not nearly as high (28) as you might think for a movie with killing in the title.
* OK, I admit that I’ve never actually seen Jason and the Argonauts.
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