3 gibbles out of 5

Being a cyborg… not an exact science.

Director: James Cameron

Well, another classic down.  Another classic that I wonder what it would’ve been like to see as it happened, because I’m not sure if I get it.

But… let’s be clear: Terminator is a fun film.  And it’s interesting to see Cameron getting his chops.  He turned in to a director of such honed skills pretty quickly, but at this point he was still hanging on to a bit of his B-movie training, making Terminator a bit clunky in parts.

You know the story, but let’s review: in the future, robots are at war with humans.  The robots send a Terminator – Arnold, a cyborg – back in time to destroy the mother of the son who will grow into the leader of human revolution… so, you know, naturally the humans send Michael Biehn back to kill the cyborg.  It’s a time travel story so there’s holes-aplenty, but between the celebrated sequel and the purposefully silly third entry in the series, this introduction to our Terminator tale was rooted more in camp, so the quick-fire sci-fi made sense.

What didn’t make as much sense – but was an indication of the widescreen scope Cameron would learn to apply – was the heavy presentation.  James Cameron front-loads the story, withholding details on what’s what until quite a while into the proceedings.  While Linda Hamilton’s 80s-tastic energy makes this work, and Arnold plays up his muscle-bound screen-self in its perfect monotone representation, Biehn’s acting style has never been “light on its feet,” and adds a dose of droopy melodrama on top of the already questionable dour tone.

Thankfully, once we get our story pieces into place, things start moving along, and Cameron can rely on storytelling with images instead of straight story.  According to the history on our lil’ film, the first image which inspired ‘Terminator’ was a dream Cameron had of a robot torso crawling forth on its belly while holding kitchen knives.  A version of this image appears, at which point you can feel all of the effort put forth to work our script up to this moment.  Cameron has also been successful at showing on screen only what he’s capable of showing, and Terminator is no exception, using its budget wisely to give us rotoscoped images only when necessary, otherwise putting live models into the mix to give our robot assassin a heavy feel.

Years later, we know what this series is all about, so it’s hard to judge how successful the pace of the plotting was when this movie initially came out.  Undoubtedly, though, the staging has dashes of camp in it, perhaps leftover influence from his time working around Corman Studios, and doesn’t feel like it knows what kind of film it wants to be for the majority of its run time.  When the movies rears its head in its last third, it settles into a more accomplished style, an exciting blend of action and drama and horror that previews the amped-up form of this that would appear in Cameron’s future movies.  While the film is notable for bringing several major names to the light and grounding sci-fi into an accessible format for non Star Wars fans, it’s a little choppy and a little silly to really be called a great film.