He did say he’d be back. Ahead of next month’s Terminator: Genisys, cinemagoers are being offered another – or perhaps a first – look at the grungy B-movie that begat the whole multi-million dollar franchise. Repeat viewers are invited to wonder how we got here from there: back in 1984, an action movie like this could still be observed running on ideas and energy rather than money and hype, even as it risked becoming every bit as much a footnote as the straight-to-video titles mocked in the recent Electric Boogaloo. It’s a fine line, after all, between The Terminator and an Exterminator.
It opens, as you surely know, with a cyborg in humanoid form being beamed into early 80s LA from the future, emerging naked in the night. This figure is Arnie, and he moves with the assurance of one destined to assume tremendous power over these streets. A scene or two later, he is followed by another agent of the future; this is our hero, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), who has the hair of one who flunked the Luke Skywalker audition, and speaks with the urgency of a man trying to get his words out before his career fades away.
They’re both hunting a waitress, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), no less cursed tonsorially, yet the mother of a resistance fighter-to-be, not that she knows it. The terminator, being of Republican leanings, wishes to abort this child with extreme prejudice, which is to say before it’s even been conceived; the other guy wants to plant the seeds of a revolution – and given the prevailing hair conditions, the nasty Y-fronts we spot in passing, and the cheap pop-rock rubbish littering the soundtrack, a revolution is perhaps what this world really needs.
It’s that simple. More so than 1981’s Piranha II: Flying Killers, this would be the film that established James Cameron as among his era’s major storytellers: everything from the opening title card (“This battle would not be fought in the future. It would be fought in our present. Tonight.”) to the barked refrain “Come with me if you wanna live” evokes something of that you-are-here immediacy that would elevate everything from Aliens to Avatar. Future and present are skilfully paralleled; the exposition – which nowadays adds another twenty-thirty minutes to our blockbusters – is thrown out of cars moving at 80mph.
In the conception of Sarah Connor, the waitress who holds the fate of the entire planet in her hands (and, indeed, womb), we might also see the first inklings of Cameron’s occasionally questionable urge to position his blue-collar viewers at the historical top table, although he’s far less sentimental here than he would be around those Irish travellers kept below decks in his Titanic. (Even as the narrative races along, you catch Hamilton morphing from damsel-in-distress to the beefed-up Sarah of the sequel and subsequent TV series.)
Set it against Orwell’s idea of 1984, or the film’s gravely philosophical predecessor Blade Runner, and it’s cartoon sci-fi, complete with a nemesis who just won’t die, but it’s sleek and well-drawn nevertheless, hustling and muscling us past its more familiar elements: the nightclub shootout, the backalley pursuit, the soft-focus sex scene that, with its mechanical grabbing and pumping, reveal Cameron as more fighter than lover.
Elsewhere, you can’t fault this director’s ability to pick the images that might lend narrative and emotional clarity to this choronologically complex project, whether the tank crushing skulls, the sly emphasis on upstart machinery (the Walkman, the answerphone, the flashing lights of inappropriately named discotheque Technoir), the photograph of Sarah Connor that burns up in a fire, just as the Titanic necklace would be consumed by the elements.
And then, last but never least, there is Schwarzenegger himself, so very unlike anything else on screen (his hair’s partway sensible, for one), and all the special effects any would-be blockbusting director would have needed back in 1984. Even now, after decades of Arnold mugging through dire kiddie comedies and appearances alongside talking CG meerkats, it is still possible to look at the Austrian Oak in his prime and marvel, nay goggle, at the sight. How do you hold that back? The years since have provided the answer: you don’t. You can’t.
(MovieMail, June 2015)
The Terminator screens on five at 11.30pm tomorrow, and again at 11.15pm on Sunday.
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