Terminator Week Day 4: The Terminator

Last night we watched The Terminator for the first time in a decade and half...and it's astonishingly good.

Plot, pacing, duologue, the whole bit. Don't tell us James Cameron doesn't know how to make a movie. 

The man pays attention to detail. Sarah Connor sits at a table in a club amongst beer bottles and cigarette butts. The clocks are right. <>We recall a line in T-2 about the Terminator being wanted for killing 17 cops, and by our count, he killed 17 cops in the police station.

The Terminator takes place in an LA gritty like NYC. No glitz and glamour here, just Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese fighting for their lives.

Across three acts Sarah Connor is changed utterly. In the first she's a contented young woman, university student and waitress, who lets face it, is just waiting for the right guy to come along. In the second act her world is shattered. In the third Sarah Connor becomes the bad-ass she made famous in T-2. 'Move it soldier!' she shouted at Reese, and of course, 'You're terminated fucker.' In the last scene she's driving around Mexico with a German Sheppard and a .357.*

Paul Winfield and Lance Hendrickson play coffee drinking, cigarette smoking, pill popping police detectives, tropey as hell but well done. We love it when they grab M-16s.

Younger reader(s) this is an 80's film. If you want to know what 1984 looked and felt like, watch The Terminator.

*Hey, anyone see the final scene they cut from T-2? It made us air-sick.

Terminator Week day Two: Terminator

Lemme explain to whoever keeps making these awful Terminator sequels why Terminator works.

James Cameron made an action-scifi movie with a brilliant time travel twist. He did it on a budget of something like eight million bucks. Which means the film had to be tight and the characters had to carry the film along; people had to care about them. Big action sequences were not going to cover up flaws. 

Terminator didn't have Christian Bale, it didn't need Christian Bale. It had Arnold, who was originally slated to be the good guy, but who realized the film would work so much better with him as the bad guy. Don't tell this blog that Arnold doesn't know how to make movies.

Terminator taps into 80's psyche. Unlike the modern zombie craze, Terminator is a twist on something that was very possible, nuclear war. Every kid watching Terminator on Cinemax at 10:00* on a Saturday went to bed that night, and every night wondering, 'Will they press the button tonight?'

Had James Cameron decided to, he would have been an excellent horror film director. He made Terminator a goddamn horror show with scenes that have stuck with us our entire life.  Reese's flashback scenes are brilliantly executed nightmares that tell us about the world from which he came. And let's not talk about the police station massacre.

Terminator is a small, brilliant idea brilliantly executed.

*While waiting for the Skinimax stuff to come on, or if necessary, negative porn. You Millennials are just gonna have to google that last one. I hang my head in shame.