Update in late 2019 with the release of Dark Fate: The glum and more self-consciously morose later sequels track, recode, and needlessly convolute this film’s elegant, inescapable trudge toward oblivion, shading and sharding Cameron’s original vision in various ways, but they all completely miss the original’s brilliance: its sense of soul-death. Nominally an action film but far divorced from the self-amused tone of the Schwarzenegger pictures that were in the can as soon as this one made a fortune,  The Terminator is as implacable and monosyllabic as its namesake: a blood-and-guts slasher film in a metallic overcoat, and one with significantly less Pavlovian satisfaction at the death it deals. Brutal simplicity at its finest, The Terminator essays a dystopic future that ultimately, tragically, realizes its far-flung visions of eventual catastrophe already came to pass in the present while it wasn’t looking. How far this franchise has fallen …

Original Review:

Those who’ve only seen the sequels to this truly distressing Reagan-era portrait of social aimlessness and blight, a film that typifies menace itself, may be forgiven for thinking this first film is something it has no interest in being. The later films focused on action, action, and more action (the first sequel being one of the greatest slam-bang thrill rides ever made, and with a touching human-machine relationship to boot), emphasizing escalating narrative stakes rather than deepening emotional texture, and have since run out of steam. While this lean-and-mean low-budget 1984 film starring a mostly unknown who couldn’t speak much English is plenty thrilling, it’s tempered with an overpoweringly grim sensibility, a magisterial sense of mounting dread and desperation that establishes a mood of forlorn malaise more than fist-pumping aplomb. Horror is as appropriate as action. Fortunately, it happens to be one of the grimiest, most caustic horror films to take over the public consciousness in that decade, and one of the best.

In 1984, none of the principles involved in making The Terminator were household names. Arnold Schwarzenegger had starred in Conan the Barbarian and had an impressive bodybuilding career behind him. James Cameron had a couple films behind his belt, but none worth mentioning. Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn were largely unknown. But when it came out in 1984, the film was an instant success, one which would catapult its villainous performer and director into monstrously successful careers (Hamilton and Biehn would find some success as well). Soon enough Schwarzenegger would be a name (and accent) known to all, one of the most gosh-darned perplexing head-scratcher cinematic success stories this side of, well, Jupiter.  Cameron, for his part, was offered Aliens, replacing the nervy wide-silences of Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece with something decidedly more heated and propulsive, before going on to experiment with CGI in The Abyss and onto directing the gargantuan success story sequel T2: Judgment Day in 1991.

But The Terminator is just about the last thing one would imagine from the director of two of the most self-consciously elephantine films of all time and the star of mostly chipper, winking action pictures. This film is tense, terse, and bad to the bone – a sleek and efficient killing machine as single-minded and scarily chilling as its antagonist. It doesn’t have a funny bone, or an ego, to save its life. It is for this reason that it is so out-of-sync with the decade that produced it, and so much better than just about any genre film from its time period.

As the story goes, the future is a bitter post-apocalypse, a war between humans and “machines”, robots who gained sentient intelligence as a result of mankind’s quest for advancing technology. One man, John Conner, leads the human resistance, and is perhaps the only figure capable of overthrowing the machines. This prompts the metal menace to send one machine, a Terminator (guess who?), back in time to nip the problem in the womb by killing Connor’s mother, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) before he is born. The humans, meanwhile, do their part and send a man, Kyle Reese (Biehn), back as well, ostensibly to protect her. There’s ample ground here for heady sci-fi social exploration, but this film doesn’t have a didactic bone in its body. It’s too busy doing something wholly more effective – crushing anything in its path with a single-minded obsession so murderous it borders on the psychotic.

One wonders then whether watching this first film is a humbling experience for those now-famous involved. Anything high-minded about it is just icing on the cake of a masterful case study in tension-building and white-knuckle dread. Most of the film plays out as one long, unceasing nerve fryer of a chase scene. There are affecting moments of genuine mournfulness, mostly related to Sarah and Kyle’s budding relationship, but they’re filtered through an atmosphere of foreboding apprehension so palpable it suffocates and strangles them. The film’s greatest strength is its relentlessness, its commitment to a singular vision of pure style. It doesn’t let up and doesn’t let us question it – we come to feel as Connor and Reese do because the film is so committed visually and aurally to making us feel it. They’re more human punching bags than honest-to-god characters – but there’s nothing wrong with characters as meat for raw filmmaking, as long as that filmmaking is up to the task.

And, wouldn’t you know, it sure is. Most notable is the film’s positively dour, lived-in mise-en-scene, an aesthetic that crawled right out of the gutter and onto the screen. This is not a clean film. Although the final scene is hopeful in a bittersweet way, mirrored by the sun rising on the end of an endlessly hellish night, most of the movie exists in the muck and grime of a nighttime urban jungle. And even that final scene still lowers its head to an oppressive, washed-out sun that threatens something more malaise-yellow than a sense of renewed passion and vigor about life – the night, it turns out, lives on, festering and permeating throughout the day. The darkened cinematography, the sparse, stark keyboard-enhanced score, and the anguished, merciless cuts-on-motion sweat and suffer with us.  Never for a moment do we feel the characters are safe, and never for a moment do we doubt that this gritty, apocalyptic 1984 could easily become the 2029 harrowingly depicted by the film.

At the same time, I shouldn’t extend the film-as-pure-style argument as I far as I am wont to; after all, there is a real anxiety about the fate of Kyle and Sarah, and not only because of the raw, relentless filmmaking and guerrilla sensibility of the camera movements, but because we do after all come to care about these two. As the two get to know each other, they develop a genuinely touching, reasonably human relationship (under the circumstances at least), important when one considers the film’s deep core of “humanity” in relation to machinery. When Reese initially saves Sarah from the film’s titular character, she’s naturally terrified and distrustful of him as much as her pursuer.  A relationship develops, but it’s more a shared hopelessness and desire to continue fighting than a true romance – she never truly comes to trust him, but her existential crisis gives her few options. This soul-deep hopelessness adds a layer to The Terminator lost on the (still great) first sequel. If that film rollicks and raises hell, this one haunts and hurts.

And in the middle of it all is the ubiquitousness of the titular figure, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger with a stark, chilling minimalism that’s striking to this day. It’s easy to mock Arnie today, but it’s easier still to forget what a presence he brought to this film – he dominates every scene he’s in and haunts every one he isn’t. It doesn’t require anything other than that he be completely committed to the role of a soulless killing machine, but that’s not something every, or even most, actors could pull off. Clad in leather and sunglasses, he’s more an image than a character, but he’s so effective as a nightmarish killing machine you wouldn’t dare say as much to the guy himself.

Ultimately, The Terminator is the kind of unsparing entertainment that viewers don’t so much watch as come to terms with. It’s less a reality than a state of mind: it approximates a film version of late ’70s or early ’80s gutter punk  – an apocalyptically reckless rock n’ roll vision of the world that doesn’t resemble reality but a sort of collective technological nightmare. The rock ‘n’ roll connection is more than implicit too – the Terminator wears a punk outfit throughout the film, literally adopting the persona of three angry punks he kills at the beginning of the film. Later on, he attacks in succession a disco night club (its own kind of apocalypse) and a police station to lay down the line for both overly “safe” party-goers and the moral authority, perhaps the two greatest enemies of the hard rock/ punk sensibility.  The Terminator himself is literally a metal warrior, a cyberpunk who belongs in a Judas Priest album.

In doing so, the film essays like no other the hopelessness of trying to stop a future that it renders as visually of the present – the stark, dialogue-free, cavernous emptiness of a city at night, a metal and concrete jungle slowly closing in on two helpless people as it threatens to overwhelm them with its very mundane emptiness, is already so much like the film’s 2029, a ghostly premonition of what will come to pass. It captures a sense of disarming futility – it asks its characters to prevent an apocalypse and then conveys visually that a sort of apocalypse has already happened. If some of the character dialogue is slightly dated or artificial, the film, like its titular character, aims for something more primal than character psychology or narrative complexity – it works on a deeper level of image and sound that burrow into our souls and don’t leave. It’s a nightmare playground,  an action movie so loaded up on and completely committed to its own taut, relentless effectiveness that it does many things, but most of all, it just works.

Score: 9/10