The Movie:
Time travel stories give me a headache. Have I ever mentioned that before? And yet I love the Terminator and it’s far superior spawn, T2. Strange but true.
Terminator is one of those movies that didn’t make its full impact on me until after having seen the second one. It was then that I could look back and realize how all of the really good storyline elements for the second movie came into place as a result of the first movie.
Kinda like the plot for the movie, if you think about it.
The story is a classic not unlike Keats or Chauser: The year is 2028 and mankind is getting their ass kicked by a huge computer called SkyNet that rules everything in the world with an iron fist and spends a great deal of time running over human skulls with tanks, and sending robots into rebel bases to kill them. Okay, so maybe not so much like Keats. At any rate, the leader of the remaining humans is John Connor, a miracle-working military leader who inspires his troops to greatness, not unlike Stone Cold Steve Austin and the Alliance. Connor leads his men to victory over the computer, but luckily for SkyNet, it just happens to have a time machine, with which it sends back one last Terminator. The robot’s goal is simple: Kill John Connor’s father and marry his mother, thus sending Star Trek geeks into fits of rage because such a thing should be impossible.
Okay, I just made that last part up.
No, the REAL goal is to kill Sarah Connor, John’s mother, but SkyNet is a little shaky on the details, so after he lands in L.A. and mugs future movie star Bill Paxton and friends for clothes, the Terminator (Arnold Schwartzenegger) just grabs the nearest phone book and starts icing everyone in there named “Sarah Connor”. Thankfully for the plot, the good guys thought enough to send back their OWN guy to stop the Terminator. A chase results, with Sarah not quite sure if Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) is a loony like the police think he is, or really is a solider from the future who’s just doing his job in order to protect the mother of his leader. Thankfully, lots of things blow up along the way to keep the viewer from stopping to think how far-fetched and stupid the story really is. And I mean that in the nicest possible way.
Low budget aside (check the Arnie puppet in the eyeball-slicing scene for proof enough of that), the young James Cameron does pretty much the best job he’s gonna do with the money given, and you can tell that everyone involved really cared about the movie. In fact, Cameron seems to love certain images a little TOO much, recycling them for the bigger-budget T2 years later. To wit, compare:
– Reese blasting away at the Terminator with a shotgun in the nightclub; and Sarah blasting away at the Terminator (Robert Patrick) with a shotgun in the molten metal factory in the second movie. The camera move and chereography are almost exactly the same.
– The Terminators jumping onto a moving car and punching through a windshield in both movies.
– The Terminator imitates the hero’s mother in both movies.
– In the climactic scene of both movies, the Terminator climbs into a moving vehicle and intones “Get out” at the terrified driver.
Just small stuff, but it’s neat continuity between the movies. That being said, T2 is a FAR better movie overall than Terminator is — with this one, it basically feels like a low-budget B-movie with a good sci-fi backstory built into it. The second one is more of an epic story of human nature and man v. machine. Still, for what it is, the Terminator remains one of my favorite movies of all-time within the genre. ***1/2
Video:
Well, given the movie was, to quote James Cameron, shot for the cost of what Arnie’s trailer was worth in the second movie, it looks about as good as it’s going to here. It’s 1.85:1 anamorphic, and the grain and general quality of the film has been cleaned up significantly from the previous Hemdale video release, but man the colors are bad for what we’re used to out of DVD these days. When the POV switches to the Terminator’s red-tinged vision, the entire screen looks murky and blacked out. Most of the scenes are shot at night, and since they didn’t have the money to light things properly the entire movie has kind of a dull, dark tone to it that leaves the DVD not looking the best it could. And grain and scratches on the film are sadly evident more times than I would have liked. But then I’ve never been a big fan of MGM’s transfers to begin with, and I wish Artisan had been able to get the rights to this movie (and Robocop for that matter) so they could give it the star treatment they did with T2. But it’s from 1984 and it’s not exactly Lawrence of Arabia, so you take what you can get. **1/2
Audio:
Well, this time you get Dolby 5.1 and the original mono, instead of the mono that was your only choice on the original DVD. The 5.1 feels a little bit, I dunno, forced somehow, like they were basically taking the mono sound and repeating it through 5 different speakers. The dialogue is clear for the most part, although like most action movies you have to turn it WAY up to hear everything, and then watch your windows shatter when there’s a sudden explosion. The bass in this mix is AWESOME, rumbling the room with every gunfight and explosion. My biggest beef is with the horrible synthesizer score, which sounds incredibly dated and would be better suited to Van Halen’s “Diver Down” album than a major motion picture. An orchestral score would have lifted the movie so much more, but again, budget dictated that they do it quick and cheap, and keyboards were the way to go back then. Otherwise, a fine job of remixing the sound here. ****
The Extras:
Again, MGM sucks. All those years of waiting for a better version, and we get two documentaries, the trailers, and some deleted scenes. Pretty good but somehow disappointing. The only thing that really tells you anything new is the “Other Voices” documentary, which runs more than an hour and features cast members reminiscing. The “making of” documentary runs about 30 minutes and says pretty much nothing, unfortunately. The deleted scenes total about 6 minutes, and there’s nothing we couldn’t have lived without here, so it was a good decision to yank them from the movie. Also included is the original treatment, and the usual useless photo gallery. Some good stuff, but it’s no T2. **1/2
