Colin Moore
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“He’ll be back.” Like the perpetual sometimes hero/sometimes assassin that he is, rising after each improbable ass whoopin, the T-800 and its franchise soon will be. “Terminator: Gensys” is scheduled for release next July 1st, Canada Day (no apparent connection) but for now all hail to the king at 30, the original movie rather, not James Cameron. There’s no debating his involvement of course. The Terminator is his demon child, born from an affinity for The Outer Limits, “The Road Warrior,” John Carpenter and the dream of “a metallic torso dragging itself from an explosion while holding kitchen knives.” As the story goes, he had the vision under the spell of food poisoning during the release of “Piranha II: The Spawning,” a film he kinda, sorta helped direct.
Cameron, for those holed up in an underground bunker since 1983, is the writer/director behind some of Hollywood’s most ambitious popcorn pictures (“Titanic,” “Avatar”), event films that pushed the limits of their days’ technology. In an early treatment for “The Terminator,” he scripted two cyborgs traveling back in time, one of liquid metal. Ambitious but realistic, he would resurrect the idea when it became technically feasible, for “T2: Judgement Day” as it turned out. After selling the rights to “The Terminator” to producer Gale Anne Hurd for an entire dollar, the two secured a distribution deal with Orion. Hemdale would pick up the financing to the tune of $6.5 million, a third of the budget on Cameron’s next film, “Aliens.”
Time travel…“wash day”…waitress…Skynet. Four feature films, multiple comic book tie-ins, a Universal Studios attraction and one short-lived television series have kept the Terminator conscious over the decades. The inaugural story you probably know, but what the hell.
Los Angeles, 1984. Forks of energy extend through the ether to reveal two men. One is a hulking flesh-wrapped metal skeleton, a terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), the other a very human resistance fighter, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn). Both are buck to the elements after a trip through time, both in the fetal position before they stand. They’ve come from the year 2029 for the same woman, an unremarkable young waitress named Sarah Conner (Linda Hamilton), ordinary for the moment only. She’ll soon give birth to a son, John Conner, and prepare him for a rather significant destiny, to defeat an intelligent computer system (Skynet) bent on annihilating the human race. The terminator is the hit-man from its own future hell, sent by Skynet to prevent John’s birth and quash the resistance. Reese follows to ensure it. Moses. Neo. The Golden Child. There are similarities but Cameron puts his lens on mother rather than savior, a subject who would increasingly dominate the sequels.
Accusations of taskmastering and imitative storytelling aside, it’s hard to deny the buzz that comes with a Cameron release. “The Terminator” though was always an underdog, and with mostly unknown leads. By October of 1984, Schwarzenegger was a known action entity with two Conan films to his credit but far from a guarantee. “Orion Pictures did not have faith in ‘The Terminator’ performing well at the box office and feared a negative critical reception,” says Wikipedia. The film was a surprise hit, grossing $78 million worldwide ($178 million today) and jump-starting the careers of Schwarzenegger and Cameron. Both would become Hollywood power players less than a decade later. As important perhaps was its contribution to Beefcake Cinema, that much-loved but largely subpar string of bicep and bullet movies. Viva las 80s.
“The Terminator” isn’t the first artificial-human tale for screen. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956) and “The Thing” (1982, less 1951’s “The Thing from Another World”) dabbled in human-imitating organisms from beyond while series staples “Star Trek” and “Doctor Who” contained numerous examples for the idiot box. “Blade Runner,” for those who even bothered with it in ’82, offered one of the more believable constructs with its Nexus 6s, genetically engineered replicants capable of developing real feelings. As characters whose rebellion against their human enslavers drew comparisons to our own flawed society, the film has something in common with “Westworld,” (1973) where “robot becomes a tool of social criticism, an uncontrollable creation that hounds its arrogant creator.“ In that film, Yul Brynner plays a robotic themepark gunslinger that begins killing the guests who’ve paid to kill him. It’s a chilling performance. Not that Schwarzenegger’s simple trigger-squeezing brute is hack. No matter how limited his skills were in ’84, his size, movements and even his voice lent to the overall effect: the dude is not human. Interesting then that Cameron originally intented to cast Lance Henriksen in the title role (he would play Sergeant Vukovich). Only after interviewing Schwarzenegger for the part of Reese did the director see the promise of a bigger villain. In Cameron’s words:
“Casting Arnold Schwarzenegger as our Terminator, on the other hand, shouldn’t have worked. The guy is supposed to be an infiltration unit, and there’s no way you wouldn’t spot a Terminator in a crowd instantly if they all looked like Arnold. It made no sense whatsoever. But the beauty of movies is that they don’t have to be logical. They just have to have plausibility. If there’s a visceral, cinematic thing happening that the audience likes, they don’t care if it goes against what’s likely.”
And visceral it is, from police station massacre to eye-ball extraction, what the Los Angeles Times called “gory treats” and The Pittsburgh Press something closer to “exhibitionistic destructiveness.” Opinions vary, always will. At 13, I saw the film as hypnotic forbidden fruit. I might’ve loved it, was at the very least dazzled by its blue-tinted vision of a desolate future earth, the Hunter-Killers and Arnold’s screen presence. Make-up was cool (this Stan Winston maybe a guy to watch), the actors convincing and the story just cerebral enough for a lad in puberty; clever in how it used a future character (Reese) to father the very person who sends him into the past (a story loop made stronger with the film’s deleted scenes) but wasn’t saddled by too much tech-speak. Even the larger story concern, that Skynet was still on track to become self-aware and trigger a nuclear holocaust, seemed less important than the love story and the chase. That unending chase. Powered by Cameron’s relentless stop-and-go pacing and an anxious synth score by Brad Fiedel, the experience was fatiguing. Some people like that kind of thing. Some? Many.
