The Terminator (1984)

I saw James Cameron's The Terminator thirty-nine years ago. Like most movie lovers at the time, I got out and watched it in a theater. I liked the movie, but not as much as everyone else.

Snotty science fiction snob that I was, I thought The Terminator was an exploitation movie dressed up as an A-List Hollywood production. And I was right. A Roger Corman movie done up with an extravagant budget.

We'd seen this sort of thing before. Jaws, Star Wars, these type of plots were previously the realm of low budget pictures. This was the beginning of the trend, and now all these superhero and greenscreen-heavy action opuses have become the norm. Thankfully we get an Oppenheimer and a Killers of the Flower Moon now and then to offset things.

I've finally watched The Terminator again after all these years, and it's only in hindsight that I see how smart and important a film it is. The Terminator reinvented the action picture, presenting the tropes in a new way. Ultra-violence, gory effects, pyrotechnics, and a sly sense of humor. It's been ripped off hundreds of times.

Now, seeing how so many of these kind of movies are vastly inferior to The Terminator, I realize how much of a visionary James Cameron was.

So wet behind the ears at the time, I didn't even know who Roger Corman was. I didn't know Bill Paxton, but this was years before he became one of the most beloved stars in history. I think I recognized Dick Miller, but I couldn't have told you his name.

Schwarzenegger was rising like a nova beforehand, but The Terminator made him a superstar. Everyone knew him after it came out, and the phrase "I'll be back" become synonymous with his face. Catchphrases were all-important to the success of an action movie: "Make my day". "Do we get to win this time?" "Be nice until it's time not to be nice" "Yippee Ki Yay, motherfucker"

Schwarzenegger was the villain in The Terminator, but everyone loved him anyway. Cameron and company were shrewd enough to make him the hero of the blockbuster sequel, which is arguably the better movie.

The Terminator is a lovely snapshot back to the early eighties. The styles, the music, the laughable way the movies portrayed punk rockers. It also paved the way for a plethora of dystopian science fiction movies that continue to this day.

Original? No. The Terminator owes a tremendous debt to the "Soldier" episode of The Outer Limits, with a teleplay by Harlan Ellison. Crewmembers supposedly claimed that Cameron was well aware of the resemblance. Ellison successfully sued Cameron for an undisclosed sum of money, and all prints after the original theatrical run of The Terminator express the debt to Harlan at the end of the movie.

"Great graphics!", everyone proclaimed about Terminator 2, but I thought the movie's greatest strength was the chemistry of Arnold and Edward Furlong. I did like the graphics, but they also made me uncomfortable. Part of me knew it was a harbinger of the end of movies as I loved them.

Computer effects dominated big-budget action movies in the wake of Terminator 2, and I mostly lost interest in them. I didn't see many pictures from Arnold or Sylvester after that, though The Last Stand from 2013 was a nice throwback to the days of yore.

Going back to The Terminator was a thrill for me. I liked it far more this time than I did thirty-nine long years ago. James Cameron might not get the highbrow critical acclaim of Spielberg or Scorsese, but he was and is a powerful visionary who manipulated the present to alter the future of our culture.

Written by Mark Sieber