"The Terminator" is a true blockbuster classic, for me personally, it is the best action movies I've ever seen (for me, of course!). While its sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, is far superior technologically and visually, this first film in the franchise is by far the best of them all, and in no small part thanks to James Cameron's brilliant script and direction in which he creates Moody a, atmospheric landscape within which a struggle between man and machine is over, and even a love story about star-crossed lovers is the true center of the film. Arnold Schwarzenegger found his signature role, and some might say the only role he really fits like a glove, that a killer robot from the future with a deadly mission to kill Sarah Connor, the future mother of the human resistance leader against the machines in the future. Unlike other sci-fi films, which tend to limit stupid or funny side, this is a movie you can take quite seriously even with Arnie at the head, and is a thrill ride from start to finish.
After being treated for a post-apocalyptic nightmare for the future of the film opening prologue, the film begins with Arnie as Terminator's arrival in LA. He comes completely naked, a fact that some street punks find amusing until Terminator kill them to take their clothes. From there, we are introduced to Sarah and her normal life and then to Kyle Reese, a human sent back in time to help protect Sarah from the Terminator. All three eventually come together in a very tense sequence in a nightclub where Terminator reveals himself to all, pull his pistol and is to shoot when Sarah Reese intervenes and rescues her.
After today's standards visualization of Terminator on the screen (at least at the end) looks a bit old fashioned and clunky, but it is no less exciting. We have examined a series of full body shots towards the end, there are stop motion and stilted, but this does not thrill, especially when in a sequence where we think Terminator have been destroyed twice, and he still get up again. There is a great scene in the documentary on the bonus disc, where the composer, after first seeing this scene, says, "if things come up again, I swear I will ... &%$#!". It is very suspenseful and entertaining.
Linda Hamilton is an amicable job as the vulnerable Sarah Connor, she is The Girl Next Door, who find themselves in an extraordinary situation, and must learn to adapt to a whole new life when the Terminator comes into the picture. Michael Been plays Kyle Reese with an almost manic intensity, the drive to protect Sarah Connor at all costs. Throughout the film, we slowly treated at a more human side to the character that comes to fall in love with Sarah, and thus imagine the leader of human resistance, John Connor. Been does an excellent job, not least because it falls on his shoulders to explain everything that happens, something I am sure that he would not have enjoyed. But while it is that Cameron's credit that this statement would have been boring otherwise always said in the middle of a tense action sequence, so it's never boring.
Perhaps what sets this film off from most action movies is that everything is driven by the drama of history, something not often. So when the Terminator is chasing our heroes in a spectacular car chase with guns go out and parts of the city to get destroyed, we can still feel the excitement and drama of the scene for the characters, rather than being a spectacular technical achievement which so often happening in so many action movies. As a result, you constantly wonder whether they will be able to stay one step ahead of the unstoppable cyber.
"The Terminator" is a truly amazing film, it can be a bit of time, but it is no less than when it was released.
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