Giant Franchise Stems From Surprisingly Small Story

About halfway through watching The Terminator for the first time, it occurred to me that, if Arnold Schwarzenegger had a knife instead of a small arsenal of guns, I’d essentially be watching a slasher film. It’s a thought director/writer James Cameron apparently had himself while developing the script, which came from his own nightmares. The structure is all there: an emotionless, remorseless, nearly indestructible killer; a list of victims systematically stalked and killed; a final heroine left alone to deal with the assault; and lots of running around at night.

But the vibe of The Terminator isn’t like Halloween or Friday the 13th. Schwarzenegger, even when playing a monotoned cyborg, exhibits more personality than a Michael Myers-type killer. That Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) is a woman marked by destiny puts the attempts on her life in a whole different context from Laurie Strode’s peril. And then there’s all the shoot-outs, car chases, and explosions – not the kind of thing you get so much of in traditional horror.

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I expected the heavy dose of action. And I more or less knew what to expect from the plot. As the parent film of a heavily spoofed and imitated series, it would be tough indeed not to have some idea about Skynet’s destruction of humanity, John Connor’s leadership of the resistance in 2029, the Terminator’s quest to destroy Sarah to prevent John’s birth, and Kyle Reese’s (Michael Biehn) efforts to save her leading to John’s birth in the first place. What I didn’t expect was just how small a film The Terminator is.

Because it is the beginning of such a giant franchise, and because of the excesses on Cameron’s other films, the expectation going in was that The Terminator would be similarly extravagant, slick and, frankly, self-important as his later work. But it’s a very modest movie. It looks smart for a low-budget movie of its time, but the limited funds are betrayed in the effects. The 2029 hellscapes are clearly miniatures on a small scale, the puppets and animatronics used for the battle-damaged Terminator don’t intercut well with Schwarzenegger and his make-up, and the stop-motion used for the endoskeleton is choppy. This isn’t a complaint; one of the great appeals of practical effects on low-budget movies like this is seeing artists and craftspeople come up with ways to convey an idea without too much photorealism; but it does narrow the scale of a film.

The story of The Terminator is also modest. In a way, it reminds me of Highlander, another 80s action film that does a simple idea well and depends more on character than plot. Except for a few pep talks by Reese, there isn’t a lot of pontificating on the great significance of Sarah’s role in history, or the greater meaning for humanity inherent in the story. It’s just two people being hunted, and along the way, Sarah goes from helpless schlub to self-reliant heroine, a journey all the more satisfying for not being over-explained in dialogue. Biehn’s manic desperation as Reese injects a level of tension into the film that the lengthy action scenes sometimes threaten to undermine, though Reese is responsible for a big laugh I suspect was unintentional – the guy who claims “I don’t know tech stuff” spends half his dialogue rattling off specs on future gear.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day, on the other hand, is almost exactly what was expected. It’s slick, it’s big, and it shows signs of the didactic conceit that bothers me so much about films like Titanic and Avatar. There’s not one thing Sarah Connor’s narration explains that couldn’t be gauged from what happens on the screen, and the dialogue is at its weakest when it tries to make heavy-handed comments on humanity, even if Sarah and John (Edward Furlong) abandon their fatalism by the end of the film. The action sequences in Judgment Day are longer and more stuffed than in the first film, to the point where all that excitement starts to cancel itself out and detract from the film as a whole. It’s a trend that’s gotten exponentially worse since 1991 in nearly all major Hollywood action films, not just Cameron’s work.

On the other hand, there is a good story to Judgment Day, one that needs a certain scale. While its opening seems like a glorified remake of the first few scenes of The Terminator, Judgment Day follows through with a nice series of reversals. The hapless Sarah of the first movie is now a paranoid, ruthless survivalist, her attempts to prepare John to be humanity’s savior have produced a punk, and Schwarzenegger’s reprogrammed T-800 steals the show as he gradually learns, through John, how to be as human as he possibly can. I expected to find the finale where Arnie’s Terminator marks his sacrifice with a thumbs’ up to be cheesy, but the character and the film earn that beat. And the material leading to that moment never overplays the humor or forgets that the T-800 is still a robot with certain limitations and a basic programming for destruction.

31 years after the novelty of the T-1000 (Robert Patrick) and his CGI effects have worn off, the character feels necessary more than mesmerizing. There has to be a villain in this sort of story, so why not have it be him? Patrick is suitably cold and threatening in the part, but the T-1000 spends a good chunk of the second act off-screen, and I never missed him. More intriguing to me was the dilemma faced by Miles Bennett Dyson (Joe Morton) whether to destroy his life’s work or be a party to mankind’s destruction. It’s tempting to imagine a sequel that cut back on action and beefed up the drama and indecision around that choice, which his made rather easily in the film as it is. Morton doesn’t get much time on screen, but he suggests more than the film has time to show about Dyson’s basic goodness and his many layers of regret over the fate of his research.

The much-discussed effects of Judgment Day hold up, for the most part. The CG is the bit that’s aged most poorly. It’s nice to see the progress made by Stan Winston and his studio between the two films, and there’s something to be said for the expanded look at 2029 that opens Judgment Day. But the charm and lack of pretense in The Terminator and its modest means is missed in the sequel. Judgment Day smoothed and stretched the premise behind these films about as much as it could be without snapping, and it did so with a firm conclusion. That subsequent films and series haven’t been able to measure up, is no surprise.

The Terminator rating: B

Terminator 2: Judgment Day rating: B-