140 Character Movie Review – #140RVW
Nearly perfect sci-fi/action film just as good as it was 30 years ago. Streamlined & tight. Best in the series. That’s right, I said it…
Spoiler-free Movie Review of The Terminator:
30 years ago, in a year already crowded with great movies, Orion Pictures released The Terminator. In the wake of the movie, James Cameron was launched into a career that would soon earn him a place as an A-lister & Ahnold would blast into the stratosphere. It was an amazing movie and enjoyed the reputation it rightly earned.
Then 8 years later, a funny thing happened: The Terminator became suddenly less impressive of a film. What actually occurred is that they released a sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, with legendary special effects, great stunts, a more ambitious story and a newly kick-ass heroine in Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). It was funny and exciting and the original film suddenly looked dated and underachieving.
Everyone fell victim to this bit of revisionism. I remember being reluctant to go see T2 because I couldn’t imagine how they could improve on the original, and then walking out of the theater convinced that the 1984 film was a dinosaur.
On the 30th anniversary of the release of the first film, it’s time to reexamine this movie and revisit this premise and come to the proper conclusion: The Terminator is the best film in the series.
“Are you kidding?”, you say, “T2 was so much better – it’s amazing!” Yes, T2 is amazing – it’s one of the greatest movies in the genre and one of my personal faves. But with clear eyes, The Terminator is a better and more unique film.
Five Reasons The Terminator is better than Terminator 2:
#1. Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn): Reese is an interesting character, a soldier who has volunteered for a one-way trip to the past. A man out of time who must quickly get up to speed in order to fulfill his mission – to risk and likely give his life for a woman he doesn’t know. He’s in a world he can’t possibly understand and is up against an unbeatable machine, but he never loses hope or determination to keep Sarah Connor safe. That – that right there is why this movie works so well. It’s not the fx, it’s the humanity. By contrast, the sequel has no meaningful characters or relationships. Sarah is so excellent of a character, but it really isn’t her picture this time around. Her character arc actually occurred off screen, in between the movies. May be why they did a tv series around her. No, John Connor is our protagonist (and to a not small degree so is the Terminator), which leads us to:
#2. No Edward Furlong. My problem isn’t really with the actor, particularly. It’s the character. It’s even the very idea of the character. The next great sci-fi/action film with a ten-year-old protagonist will be the first. Is there no reason that he couldn’t have been older? I love the attempt to try to have the series timeline mirror ours, but it really doesn’t totally work anyway, so maybe just write a more interesting and less irritating character and let the geeks retcon all this stuff to their hearts content. The underappreciated mixed bag that is Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines showed what would happen if you put an older John Connor in more or less the same situation and it was a much more effective dynamic, even if the film as a whole didn’t quite gel. (Except for the ending – one of the best endings I’ve ever seen…)
#3. The rating. Again, it’s not necessarily that going from an R to a PG-13 is a problem (although I can’t name one instance of this being a good decision), it’s what it represents – a move toward the middle. An attempt to appeal to the largest possible audience, which simply can’t be done without dulling the edge of the material; which leads us to:
#4. No jokes from Ahnold. The jokes are funny. It doesn’t matter. You’re taking a step down the wrong path. By the next film it will degenerate into camp. I laughed when I was supposed to in T2, but time makes that crap dated and cheesy. The only reason that the Louis Tully rule doesn’t apply to the T-800 is that he was the title character in the first picture and can’t really be considered a minor character.
#5. Finally, and most importantly, the run-time. The sequel was 136 minutes in theaters, 153 minutes in the director’s cut. The original by comparison was a half hour shorter at 107 minutes. It’s more tightly paced and just more direct. The pacing perfectly complements the rich but not complicated story.
It is, after all, a great story (although it may not be as original as first thought – author Harlan Ellison received a settlement and on-screen acknowledgment after he successfully demonstrated the possible plagiarism of some of his work on the tv show The Outer Limits – which Cameron proudly named as an influence on the picture). Cameron excels at creating interesting dialogue and personality for minor characters. Some of the effects are dated, but not as much as you might think. The amazing work by the late Stan Winston still holds up very well.
A franchise was practically a necessity with such a rich concept. If later films never quite lived up to the excitement of the original, that’s ok – it’s a hard act to follow, and each successive installment has offered something interesting. With a new film, Terminator: Genisys, in post-production and due for a July 1, 2015 release, the series that Cameron created seems to be stronger than ever.
Poster:
Trailer:
Bechdel Test:
Pass
The Representation Test Score: C (5 pts)
(http://therepresentationproject.org/grading-hollywood-the-representation-test/)
| Main Cast | Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator, Linda Hamilton Sarah Connor, Michael Biehn Kyle Reese, Paul Winfield Lieutenant Ed Traxler |
| Rating | R |
| Release Date | Fri 26 Oct 1984 UTC |
| Director | James Cameron |
| Genres | Action, Sci-Fi |
| Plot | A human-looking indestructible cyborg is sent from 2029 to 1984 to assassinate a waitress, whose unborn son will lead humanity in a war against the machines, while a soldier from that war is sent to protect her at all costs. |
| Poster |  |
| Runtime | 107 |
| Tagline | In the Year of Darkness, 2029, the rulers of this planet devised the ultimate plan. They would reshape the Future by changing the Past. The plan required something that felt no pity. No pain. No fear. Something unstoppable. They created ‘THE TERMINATOR’ |
| Writers | James Cameron (written by) and, Gale Anne Hurd (written by) … |
| Year | 1984 |
