My youngest made a special request to see The Terminator, the opening volley in what has become an endless (and interminable) film franchise. I agreed, because I hadn’t seen it in many years, but I also recalled not liking it.
That was correct. I don’t like it.
In some ways it’s a decent, low-budget sci-fi horror film, very much of its time. It seems crazy now, but until the runaway success of Star Wars, science fiction (which includes space fantasy) was something of a film ghetto. It was chock full of crap films, some of which had decent concepts and even respected actors slumming it for a quick and easy paycheck. Again, it was not surprising that an actor of the caliber of Alec Guinness would be in a film like Star Wars. It happened all the time.
What was surprising was that the film was actually really good. The Terminator is not actually really good. It’s one of those “so bad it’s good” kind of films, although I don’t think the good parts redeem it. Indeed, watching it again after at least 30 years, I was constantly rolling my eyes at all the braindead tropes and forced coincidences to keep the story lurching forward.
I’m not going to get into serious spoilers, but some scenes are well known, like when our titular character goes into a gun shop seeking a phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range. It’s a worth a chuckle, but the owner might as well have handed one over, because the rest of the weapons on offer were equally unrealistic. Did James Cameron really think that in 1984 there were full-auto weapons just sitting on the shelf waiting to be sold in California?
And the trope of having live ammo right next to guns so you can just load a gun and kill the owner is just dumb.
But what makes it all so stupid is that none of that hardware is necessary. The Terminator can just kill with his bare hands. We already saw him do it once. Honestly that’s a lot scarier, though it may cost more.
And that gets to the other thing I loathe – the way the camera lingers over random, innocent people be slowly killed. Why? What is the point? Who wants to watch that? Later in the film, Cameron seems to get that, and instead he just lets you know the Terminator has killed someone off screen.
As for the time-travel thing, that’s fine, a nice little twist. One thing that I had never noticed before (again, because I didn’t like the film and didn’t rewatch it) was that a lot of the actors were featured in Aliens, a much better film. Indeed, Aliens borrows a lot from The Terminator, particularly in the way that a frightened woman is given protection and taught to defender herself from a strong man who is subsequently taken out of the fight, and so she must fend for herself.
That character development is really the only redeeming feature of the film, and it was fully exploited in the sequel, which was better, but still not anything I’ve been inspired to see again or purchase.
As for Cameron, he’s very much a hit-or-miss filmmaker, and while he’s made some excellent films, he gets into odd obsessions and produces absolute clunkers. His current Avatar obsession is a prime example of success wrecking a man.
Chateau Lloyd 
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