Viking Night: The Terminator
By Bruce Hall
September 20, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
“But wait a minute, what about Conan the Barbarian?”
That’s what you’re saying now, isn’t it? Sure, there's no question that his largely non speaking role in that brutal, bloody fantasy classic got Arnold’s career rolling and opened doors for him. But it was his largely non speaking role as the iconic killer cyborg from the future that truly made Arnold Schwarzenegger a superstar. And he wasn’t the only one. Writer, director and Future King of the World James Cameron crafted a gory but surprisingly resonant thriller that immediately put him on the fast track to becoming George Lucas’ more talented replacement. And he populated his film with a serviceable cast, including frequent collaborator Michael Biehn and future ex-wife Linda Hamilton (it's good to be the King!).
The film was an unexpected success, spawning a cottage industry of imitators and exerting a profound influence on the sci-fi action genre in general. But if you ask me, it should have been a one-off event. Despite being all of the good things it is, The Terminator is an inherently flawed story. Not to the point that it has any significance to the first movie, but in the sense that subsequent installments only exposed the original plot’s soft underbelly and weakened the franchise. But on its own merits, The Terminator is still a solid thrill ride. It isn’t quite the masterpiece King James thinks it is, but it sure beats the hell out of the thing with the girl and the boat and the boy with the floppy bangs.
For those who haven’t seen it, or have been touring the Asteroid Belt for the past 25 years, The Terminator is really the story of Sarah Connor (Hamilton). Sarah’s a sweet, dorky girl with a big heart. But she’s also got a crappy job, a bad haircut, drives around on a moped and wears those horrible high waisted jeans all the girls had when Jordache wasn’t in the budget. Lucky for her, all this is about to change. On the other side of Los Angeles, two men appear in a literal flash of smoke and light, and begin a mad sprint across the city, clearly on an eventual crash course with one another. And the great thing about it, if you’ve never seen the movie before, is that you have no idea who they are or what they want.
One guy is as big as a water buffalo, never speaks, and starts randomly killing people almost as soon as his feet hit the ground. The other seems somehow more...human. Except of course that he’s got crazy eyes, is covered with grievous scars and likes to steal clothes from homeless people. But unlike his counterpart, he seems to experience pain, and dreams of a shattered post apocalyptic future every time he closes his eyes for more than five minutes. We’re not sure who he is, but it’s not hard not to somehow feel something for him.
As soon as the sun rises, both men start looking for people named “Sarah Connor” using a strange 20th Century technology called a “phone book”. While the Water Buffalo begins hunting them down and shooting them in the face, the other guy seems one step behind him the whole time, content to observe for now. (If you think about that for a minute, which one is the real sicko?) Meanwhile, the police get wind of the killings and manage to get in touch with “our” Sarah. Before long, The Water Buffalo, the Skinny Guy and the LAPD are all headed to the same spot on the map. And of course, they converge for what has to be the greatest car chase/running gun battle between a robot, a soldier from the future and a waitress from Culver City ever put to film. Ever.
You and I know the story of The Terminator today, but at this point if you’re sitting in a theater in 1984, you’re probably completely confused. Fear not - it turns out the Skinny Guy is named Kyle Reese (Biehn), and was sent from the future to protect Sarah from a pitiless killing machine called a Terminator (Ah-nuld). Apparently there’s a nuclear war in the near future when machines decide that humans are not efficient enough at killing each other off. They decide to finish the job, but a freedom fighter named John Connor organizes the remnants of the human race and fights back, defeating the machines and saving the world. According to historical records, John Connor is the son of a dorky waitress from Culver City named - wait for it - Sarah Connor.
That’s right, in a last ditch effort to survive the machines send back an infiltration unit to find the mother of their enemy and “retroactively abort” him, as one character puts it. The rest of the film is little more than an extended car chase, whereby Sarah and Reese hope to either escape the Terminator and live out their lives in hiding, or kill the thing and actually sleep at night again. Sure, this probably sounds like the kind of film that has few brain cells to spare, but you’d be wrong about that. Just as with Avatar, James Cameron was good enough to squeeze a pretentious social message in between all the explosions and bloodshed.
But unlike Ferngully 2: Smurfs in Space, the message is at least somewhat muted. It bears consideration that our dependence on machines is unhealthy and dehumanizing, and the story of the Terminator is no doubt intended to be a metaphor for this. That’s nice, but Cameron is hardly the first sci-fi writer to point this out, and in fact he was sued by Harlan Ellison for allegedly lifting the story from an old episode of The Outer Limits. But this is not why we love The Terminator, and James Cameron is free to pry my Blackberry from my cold dead hands. I admit that I’m dependent on it and if it wants to kill me then at least I know it’ll be on YouTube ten minutes later.
We love The Terminator because it’s a thrilling story about two very human people who want to live, and who grow before our very eyes as they fight to survive. Yes, Arnold is appropriately menacing as the towering cyborg who doesn’t feel pain, fear, pity or remorse and will not stop - ever - until Sarah Connor is dead. But if you have a tendency to use your brain when you watch movies, like I do, it’s a little hard to buy a six foot two, 230 pound man with 27 inch biceps as an “infiltration unit." Michael Biehn’s bulging bug eyes scare me a hell of a lot more than Arnold’s massive lats and rock hard abs. What does it for me is the story of Sarah and Reese.
Sarah is a meek, self conscious child who’s never been in love and “can’t even balance her checkbook” when we meet her. Reese is a battle hardened soldier who’s seen nothing but death and devastation from the moment he fell out of the womb. As they struggle to escape this relentless killing machine, Sarah begins to grow into the tough as nails Grizzly Mama we know she will later become. And Reese develops an new appreciation for what he’s fighting for. Having traveled back into the past and actually SEEN the world as it was, and experienced a few moments of peace and freedom rekindles his warrior spirit, infused now with a generous helping of humanity.
I’ve never considered Linda Hamilton to be much of an actress, but her expressive eyes mostly overcome her inability to emote consistently. Michael Biehn is a B-movie favorite, and is best known for his tightly coiled intensity and crazy serial killer eyes. But he also brings a sad vulnerability to Reese that makes you feel for the guy as he bravely accepts his duty and grimly faces his fate like the solider he is.
Like most great science fiction, The Terminator is not about machines, or aliens, or outer space, or even really time travel - and that’s a good thing because I could write a whole article on how The Terminator’s time travel plot cancels itself out and makes the whole damn plot completely irrelevant. Instead, the Terminator is about humanity and what it means to be human. It’s about what all of us should truly value in life. The people we love, the world we share and the freedom we have (most of us anyway) to determine our own future. There is no fate but what we make, and that’s anyone should be able to appreciate - whether we’re a waitress from Culver City, a soldier from the future, a Giant Smurf, or even the freaking King of the World.