As part of my ongoing quest to share the best and worst of old movies with my girls, this week we sat down and watched an absolute classic: 1984’s The Terminator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton. The girls were dismissive at first – something THAT old can’t be any good – but I was happy to prove them wrong.
No in-depth plot breakdown here, you all know this movie: a cyborg is sent from a future war to terminate Sarah Connor, mother of the future resistance leader, and it’s up to a scrappy future soldier Kyle Reece to save her skin and show her the destiny she must rise to fulfil.
The film has some great pacing, jumping right into the action by showing the consequences of war-torn Los Angeles in 2029, then sending the Terminator and Kyle Reece back to the innocent world of 1984. Reece and the Terminator try and locate Sarah Connor, the scenes switching between Sarah’s humdrum life and Reece’s desperate search. Once Sarah has realised that she is marked for death, the story becomes a sequence of wild chase scenes, the humans desperately trying to escape the implacable cyborg. One of the things I loved was how the final scenes actually slow the pace down. The girls were jumping off the couch screaming at the television as the battered and wounded heroes limp away from the similarly damaged but unstoppable Terminator.
As a result, there’s very little dialogue in this film, and this is a good thing. This is a great “show, don’t tell” story, where the consequences of each bad decision are immediate and dramatic. Arnie turns in a great performance as the silent, relentless T101 cyborg, his raw strength contrasting well with the resourceful, improvisational Kyle Reece.
This is not to say that the film is perfect. When dialogue does occur, it feels a little infodump, breaking up tension and requiring a new chase scene to ratchet things back up again. While watching Sarah turn from harried waitress to iron-willed survivor was a great journey, her romance with Kyle came out of nowhere (and included lots of hurried fast forwarding). The film was made on a relatively small budget, and while I loved the practical effects, the girls laughed a lot at the puppetry scenes – but only up until the Terminator began to catch up with the stricken heroes.
The film was also a good opportunity to explain the fears that the 1980s generation had to deal with; imminent nuclear war, a world where machines had taken over from humans (pointedly illustrated by the Terminator walking through the automated factory), and the spectre of a totalitarian state.
Forty years later, The Terminator is an enduring classic. Despite the girls’ initial laughter at the film, they begged to watch T2: Judgement Day right away, and the rest of the afternoon was chock full of action sequences, iconic one-liners and Linda Hamilton being badass.
I’m chalking this one up as another win for the classics. Next film up for review, 2006’s Idiocracy.
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