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Terminator Reviews
NYTimes.com Review
By Janet Maslin | October 26, 1984
ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER is about as well suited to movie acting as he would be to ballet, but his presence in ''The Terminator'' is not a deterrent. This is a monster movie, and the monster's role fits Mr. Schwarzenegger just fine. He plays the computerized automaton of the title, sent from the year 2029 back to 1984 to assassinate a young waitress named Sarah Connor. Even if the movie had nothing else to recommend it, the sheer unlikeliness of this mission, and the teasing gradualness with which its meaning is revealed, would be enough to hold an audience's attention.
''The Terminator,'' which opens today at Loews State and other theaters, is a B-movie with flair. Much of it, as directed by James Cameron (''Piranha II''), has suspense and personality, and only the obligatory mayhem becomes dull. There is far too much of the latter, in the form of car chases, messy shootouts and Mr. Schwarzenegger's slamming brutally into anything that gets in his way. Far better are the scenes that follow Sarah (Linda Hamilton) from cheerful obliviousness to the grim knowledge that someone horrible is on her trail.
The denouement is convoluted, to say the very least. But it is set forth engrossingly by Miss Hamilton and by Michael Biehn as another 21st-century warrior, this one actually on Sarah's side. Both he and Mr. Schwarzenegger's Terminator arrive in Los Angeles stark naked, and they must somehow find clothes, weapons and Sarah before they can begin to fight. Mr. Biehn is seen stealing pants from a drunk and shoplifting a combat jacket, which make him a most inferior fashion plate compared with the star. Almost everything Mr. Schwarzenegger commandeers, from his jackboots to his fingerless gloves, is made of dark studded leather.
Paul Winfield and Lance Henriksen have some good moments as a police inspector and his assistant, but they don't last long; hardly anyone in the film does, when pitted against the behemoth of the title. Mr. Schwarzenegger eventually shows signs of wear and tear, losing an eye and part of one forearm before being incinerated down to his gleaming, metallic skeleton. Even in that condition he keeps on marching. The special effects are good enough to allow this skeleton a distinctively lumbering gait that matches Mr. Schwarzenegger's own.
TVGuide.com Review
Back before Arnold Schwarzenegger's ascendence to his current status as Hollywood's designated Action Hero of choice, husband to Kennedys, and buddy of presidents, he was still willing to play villains. As such he made an indelible impression as the titular character of THE TERMINATOR. This was the film that demonstrated to the dubious everyone that the musclebound fellow with that outrageous accent might be more than just another passing blip on our pop culture radar screens. The sleeper hit of fall 1984, THE TERMINATOR is an intelligent, smoothly crafted, and stylish low-budget science fiction action movie that astounded fans of the genre.
This was an enormous career booster for writer-director James Cameron (ALIENS, THE ABYSS, TERMINATOR 2) as well as stars Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton (TV's cult favorite "Beauty and the Beast" and TERMINATOR 2). The movie opens in the hellish Los Angeles of the year 2029. We see a world destroyed by nuclear war and run by sophisticated machines that have decided to obliterate the weak humans who created them. The action then shifts back to Los Angeles in 1984. In two separate locations, two men--the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn)--materialize out of what appear to be small electrical storms and wander off into the night.
The next day, after having stolen several deadly weapons and a car, the Terminator looks up the name "Sarah Connor" in the phone book. There are three Sarah Connors listed. The stoical mystery man sets off to kill each of them. Two of the women are killed, but the third (Linda Hamilton) has gone out for the evening. Noticing she is being followed by Reese, the nervous Sarah ducks into a nightclub aptly named Tech Noir and tries to disappear into the crowd. But the Terminator has traced her to the nightclub. Fortunately for her so has Reese. From him Sarah will learn about her destiny and that of the human race.
THE TERMINATOR is an amazingly effective picture that becomes doubly impressive when one considers its small budget. Looking better than most big-budget efforts, it contains dozens of impressive visual effects, including some very good stop-motion animation. For our money, this film is far superior to its mega-grossing mega-budgeted sequel. This is fresh, exciting, and surprisingly witty viewing. Like most genre films made post-STAR WARS, it alludes to many other works. However, this film went a bit further than most.
The producers were successfully sued by cult fantasy author Harlan Ellison who claimed that significant chunks of plot and imagery were lifted from two of his celebrated teleplays for "The Outer Limits," a beloved science fiction series from the early 1960s. The two episodes in question are "Soldier" and "Demon with a Glass Hand." Anyone who has seen those episodes will readily agree that THE TERMINATOR took its homage a bit too far.
FilmCritic.com Review
By Max Messier
The Terminator stands as a personal favorite. Schwarzenegger was in his prime in the 1980s -- in guilty pleasures like Commando, Raw Deal, Predator, Conan The Barbarian, and The Running Man. But he gave many kids my age something to hang on to during the Reagan years. Schwarzenegger was our generation's John Wayne, a muscle-bound bodyguard extracting his own kind of vengeance from a cold and dangerous world. He was always the good guy, but it’s almost ironic that his first indelible impression on our minds was that of a killer robot from the future sent back in time to murder a hot coffee shop waitress.
The Terminator was actually conceived from a dream that James Cameron had of a killer robot from the future that was sent to kill him. In the 21st century, a war between man and machine has just about wiped out humanity. The war is due mainly to the inception of artificial intelligence in the early part of the 20th century, which triggered a nuclear war in the year 1997. The problem is that the machines are finally losing the war due to a human named John Connor and his band of resistance fighters.
The machines decide that the only way to kill Connor is to send one of their own cyborg Terminator T-800 robots (Schwarzenegger) into the past to kill John’s mother, Sarah (Linda Hamilton) and thus remove him completely from the biological cycle. To protect his momma from the big bad killer robot, Connor sends Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) into the past to save her and somehow destroy the indestructible Terminator. The only problem is that this particular robot has a really bad Austrian accent, a taste for guns and knives, and likes to drive around at night with his sunglasses on just like Corey Hart.
Sound like an episode of The Outer Limits? Well, one of the original writers for that show, Harlan Ellison, who wrote one of the show’s best episodes ("Demon with a Glass Hand"), was later given screenplay credit for the film’s original story. The ingeniousness of The Terminator is in giving us one of the most memorable and brilliant villains ever printed on celluloid. Schwarzenegger’s cyborg requires no motivation for his crimes. He kills without remorse or shame. His actions and his attitudes are governed not by morals but by binary code. If one of his coronary units is damaged, he plucks it out with a sharp knife.
There is no reasoning with this character, no evolution or transgression from his purpose of killing this woman Sarah Connor. The size of Schwarzenegger and his deadpan, monotone voice lends an unnerving edge to all of his sixteen lines of dialogue and all of the bodies he leaves in his wake as he hunts Sarah Connor. The relationship between the befuddled and frightened Sarah Connor and her unexpected savior/hero Kyle Reese is also a high point. Michael Biehn has never been better in the role that fully defined his career.
Cameron’s use of a love story underlying an action film -- which he would repeat in virtually all of his films from The Abyss to Titanic to True Lies -- makes it raw and emotional. The Terminator is a profound reminder that science fiction can entertain while working as a warning about the future. It also makes you pray that a big Austrian guy with a bad haircut never shows up at your door asking for “Sarah Connah?” Dead or alive, you're going with him.
All-Reviews.com Review
By Dragan Antulov | 3½ stars out of 4
Science fiction fans are seldom satisfied with the way their favourite genre is used in films, especially those produced in Hollywood. More often than not filmmakers totally forget the meaning of "science" in the term "science fiction", and such films ignore basic scientific facts, as well as elementary logic. This is especially the case with time travel films. Screenwriters of such films are more than eager to embrace the concept of time travel (which is rather controversial in the realm of established science), but they seldom pay attention to some mind-boggling issues associated with it, like Grandfather Paradox.
Fortunately, there are few filmmakers ready to approach time travel with these problems in mind. One of them was young Canadian director James Cameron. In 1984 he co-wrote and directed THE TEMINATOR, low-budget science fiction film that would launch one of the most spectacular careers in modern Hollywood and also become one of the most influential films of its time. Script for THE TERMINATOR, written by Cameron and his producer Gale Anne Hurd, was based on the original screenplay by Harlan Ellison (fact established after serious litigation).
The plot begins in Los Angeles 2029 AD. The world was ravaged by nuclear holocaust and the surviving humans are fighting desperate war against sentient machines. >From this world two time travellers arrive to Los Angeles in 1984. The first one is Terminator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger), human looking but deadly and seemingly indestructible cyborg. His mission is to kill Sarah Connor (played by Linda Hamilton), future mother of John Connor, charismatic leader of human resistance. Another time traveller is Kyle Reese (played by Michael Biehn), Connor's soldier from the future, and his mission is to protect the mother of his commander.
When he finds Sarah Connor, she doesn't believe his story, but all her suspicions are swept away when the unstoppable, remorseless and invulnerable killer starts chasing them across streets of Los Angeles. Today most people think of James Cameron as Hollywood's greatest and most successful megalomaniac whose trademark is big budget of his movies. In 1984 the budget for his groundbreaking film was quite low, even for the standards of the time. However, even in such conditions, Cameron's talent of superb filmmaker became more than evident.
Few filmmakers are able to achieve things Cameron had done with THE TERMINATOR - to create successful combination of interesting and thought-provoking science fiction, powerful human drama and action-packed thrillride. Unlike most of the other time travel movies, THE TERMINATOR takes time travel quite seriously and the Grandfather Paradox here builds the plot instead of destroying its plausibility. In this film the future is set and the characters are aware than that they can't escape it; instead of trying to change their destiny, they fight to preserve it, no matter how ugly and depressing it might be in the end.
The atmosphere of impending doom could be sensed throughout the film. Cameron, obviously inspired by the heightened Cold War tensions of Reagan years, and worried about possibility of sophisticated and automated weapons systems running out of control, uses these fears to build the vision of future apocalypse, which is even more frightening, because it shares many elements with the world of 1984. Low budget, which forced Cameron to shoot this film at night and in the back alleys of Los Angeles, actually helps this film.
In this dark, cold and unforgiving world of 1984 Los Angeles we could see glimpses of 2029 - bums in the street, which are not very different from the surviving post-holocaust humans, or robot factories that probably use the same technology of future killing machines. This was good opportunity for Cameron to establish his trademark - ambivalent portrayal of technology. While he obviously admires efficiency of machines and their obvious superiority over frail humans, Cameron in this film also shows frightening consequences of technology running amok and turning their former human masters into slaves.
Thing that separates THE TERMINATOR from most of the other science fiction films is not just technical superiority or intelligent message. Cameron also brings very strong human dimension to this film. Characters in this film aren't cardboard or stereotypical - in relatively short amounts of time, before the action sets in, we meet them as three-dimensional, convincing human being and later we sympathise with their plight. This is the technique that would serve Cameron very well in his later films like ALIENS or THE ABYSS. For that he had to rely on very good actors.
Although the first actor associated with this film happens to be Arnold Schwarzenegger, his non-human character of Terminator is convincing more because of his frightening physical appearance. Schwarzenegger's one-liners (including his trademark phrase "I'll be back"), spoken in robotic monotone and with heavy Austrian accent, didn't require much of the acting ability. On the other hand, such ability was perfectly demonstrated by two other leads. Linda Hamilton was excellent choice for the role of Sarah Connor; not very attractive in a physical sense, she is quite convincing as an average woman caught in nightmarish situation.
Her slow evolution from clueless and helpless damsel in distress to tough feminist role model in wonderful to watch. Michael Biehn, one of the most underused actors of modern Hollywood, is also great as her heroic and vulnerable partner; the audience can sense the pain and anguish on his troubled face. Finally, Cameron relies on the services of very capable character actors Lance Henriksen and Paul Winfield as police detectives; their roles as voices of reason and "normalcy" actually are the closest equivalent of comic relief in this grim tale.
Engaging story, superb acting and moviemaking craftsmanship - all that ensured that THE TERMINATOR remains as one of the best films of 1980s. Unfortunately, the reputation of this film was later influenced by its more expensive, more spectacular, better-hyped but ultimately inferior 1991 sequel. Compared with it, THE TERMINATOR looks rather cheap, at first glance almost indistinguishable from the hundreds of its own C-grade rip-offs made in late 1980s. Person that could be responsible for such impression is Brad Fiedel, author of musical score, which is hardly impressive except the main theme. This unimpressive musical score, however, is hardly the reason to view THE TERMINATOR as less than excellent piece of science fiction cinema.
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