What's most striking about the original "Terminator" is its intimacy. Cameron doesn't make movies anymore unless they have nine figure budgets and three hour running times. This one revolves around three characters in a do-or-die situation. The tale begins in a dystopian future. Human rebels have turned the tide against machines that nearly wiped them out. The machines send the titular cyborg (Arnold Schwarzenegger) through a time portal to kill Sarah Conner (Linda Hamilton), the mother of future resistance leader John Connor, while the humans send guerrilla warrior Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) to protect her. Further details are surely unnecessary: by now, the plot of "The Terminator" is almost as canonical as the the New Testament or the story of Superman’s arrival on earth, although it should be noted that the basic story was so close to a Harlan Ellison-scripted episode of TV’s The Outer Limits that Ellison sued Cameron and releasing studio Hemdale and won an undisclosed settlement and a vaguely apologetic end credits card (“The Producers Wish to Gratefully Acknowledge the Works of Harlan Ellison”).
The film’s intimacy was a byproduct of its low budget (about $6 million) but as often happens in such situations, it turned out to be a wellspring of storytelling strength. Cameron’s script and direction are spiritually attuned to the resourceful Reese, a Jason Bourne prototype who steals whatever he needs at any moment (from a tramp’s pants and an off-the-rack trenchcoat to a police shotgun) and sprints from one location and plot point from the next, always glancing furtively around for the next threat and noting possible escape routes. Cameron and his producer and then-wife Gale Anne Hurd, were masters at making small films look big; they threatened to become the most potent husband-wife director-producer team since John Carpenter and Debra Hill until their 1989 divorce. They realized that as long as the story moved inexorably forward, pausing only to bash the audience across the face with rock-'em, sock-'em action sequences, it didn't matter how big the sets were; as long as audiences were invested in the characters, and the images were imaginative enough to make up for their cheapness, they'd get pulled in, and stay in. The damned thing never lets up—still. Yes, the miniatures, rear screen projection and stop motion effects have become quaint. But they were quaint in 1984, honestly—trust me on this; I saw it in a theater as a teenager after a childhood spent worshiping Ray Harryhausen and spotted every rear-projected image, stop motion effect and bloody puppet in place of an actor. But the film remains as involving as ever, thanks to the precision and emotional conviction of the storytelling.
There’s more terror than wonder in this picture—in sharp contrast to the incrementally longer and more expensive works that Cameron would direct from the late ‘80s onward—but this is ultimately a good thing; there’s no place for sentimentality in the universe of "The Terminator," although gallows humor and tenderness are allowed. From the instant that Schwarzenegger’s nude cyborg rips a punk rocker’s heart out, "The Terminator" establishes itself as a relentless. mainly visceral experience that owes less to "Star Wars," "Close Encounters," "E.T." and other then-recent science fiction spectaculars than to the lean and mean horror flicks of Carpenter-Hill.
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