One Man Army

When I started this retrospective I mentioned that there was one film in Cameron's filmography that I held near and dear to my heart. I suppose before we go any further, I should mention that it's The Terminator that I was referring to. I've often held it aloft as a shiny example of what a chase thriller looks like, how it should be done, how it should be cut, scored, shot, staged and helmed. You'll excuse me, then, if every now and then my rhetoric dissolves into a series of gentle but enthusiastic kisses for a film that I value more than the lives of anyone who will ever read this.

I'm sure you all know the plot, but what kind of critic would I be without recounting it? It's the future and despite the fact that we somehow invented and mass-produced energy weapons, it kind of looks like a shitty place to raise your kids. Robots have taken over the world, and not the cuddly R.O.B.-style robots, the Fear Cereal-chewing, red-eyed Battlebot sort of robots. Around 1997 when I was just starting my Final Fantasy phase and you were all enjoying James Cameron's Titanic, super-advanced AI Skynet missed its appointment to take over the world and enslave humanity as prophesised in 1984 by this film. Skynet, with no regard for the prime directive, shoots a naked Austrian robot-man (Arnold Schwarzenegger as the eponymous villain) back in time to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) future mother of John Connor, leader of the human resistance. The human resistance send back a single warrior, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) to protect her.

Unfortunately for Sarah Connor, Kyle's a bit of a downer. Not only will we not be flying around the galaxy sending space-hippies to their death in fifty years, but he keeps going on about the futility of fighting the Terminator. With the weapons available in 1984, the Terminator is virtually indestructible.

And here's where the film starts getting intriguing. Out of the gate we're introduced to a villain that is unstoppable. He is cold and emotionless and, unlike so many other films that aped its style, The Terminator succeeds in giving the machine absolutely no human qualities. People often wonder about a one ton body builder being cast as a robot that's meant to infiltrate human society, but it lends several degrees of cold, mechanical evil to his character. If he was prancing around just like a normal human, acting precisely like humans do and adopting personality traits and character flaws and all the other things we like to see in our characters he would lose the thing that makes machines scary. Never once in this film do we look at the Terminator and mistake him for human.

Cameron masterfully wrangles Arnold Schwarzenegger's inexperience as an actor and his awkward Austrian screen presence to create a character that is a merciless killer, LOOKS like a merciless killer and has an intangible awkwardness about him as if he was created by machines that have only observed humans from a distance but were quick to dismiss them as dangerous variables.

I have fewer nice things to say about Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn. Hamilton is a bit bland (although she is written as an every-woman) but I don't think her performance spends any time detracting from the overall impact of the film. Michael Biehn has never been an actor I've liked much. He looks like he was told his father was eaten by wildebeests and never got over being told he lives in a hipster sitcom. I suppose it works well enough when he's playing a soldier who is constantly on edge and was learning to make plastique while we were dancing in demonic little circles to songs about the Black Plague. Furthermore, they have little romantic chemistry. That would be a real complaint if the romance was any more than a simple plot point, but the later scenes could have used the emotional impact a successful romance would have wrought.

If you've noticed, all the things I just listed were "it could have been this, but it remains functional and effective where it is", my point being that despite the criticisms I leveled against it, I'm just pointing out the things it doesn't excel at. Don't let that make you think it doesn't excel like crazy all over the place. First of all, the middle section of the film is as flawless as anything ever put on film. While the climax doesn't hold up to the absolute perfection of the TechNoir shootout and subsequent chase, that's a standard I wouldn't ever hold a film to.

And the early, largely silent scenes with the Terminator are incredibly tense, proving once again how overrated film scores are and how much more effective a film can be when its intentions aren't muddled by manipulative music.

The way James Cameron manipulates the gritty underbelly of LA as a stage for action calls to mind the greatest of classic noirs and is his single greatest accomplishment as a filmmaker as far as I'm concerned. The only way I can think to describe it is to call to mind Taxi Driver. The city itself is almost never directly referenced, but it becomes an indispensable part of the narrative and the visual vocabulary. A series of twisting alleyways strewn with litter and filled with homeless people and greasy dumpsters give way to streets lined with uncaring souls. It's a place where optimism dies. It's almost as apocalyptic as the world Reese grew up in. But every time we think this city can't become more dark and twisted, Cameron jerks us back to Reese's time, where rats are a delicacy and death is almost a relief.

The standoff between the very human, very fragile Kyle Reese and the indestructible, unstoppable Terminator has elemental qualities that make it a timeless formula. Rarely is the contrast between the hero and the villain so harsh, and rarely is an air of hopelessness so effective.

Yeah, it's a fucking bleak film. It's just as bleak as you've heard and probably more bleak than you remember. The whole experience is a bit like being dragged through gravel. It's the sort of thing you walk away from dazed but ready to experience again, hoping that this time the thick atmosphere of oppression will dissolve to allow you to read the story and characters more, but it never does.

The only film I've ever seen that has truly bettered its oft-violated style and formula is No Country for Old Men. That's a goddamn bold statement, but they're two films that I hold in exceptionally high regard, and while James Cameron is one of the most consistent blockbuster filmmakers of all time, he shares one thing with so many great directors of blockbusters. Like Spielberg and like Lucas, his first film will always be his best. If we're not counting that fucking Piranha movie.

11/10