SF I MODERN CLA S S I C S

JLc Jcrm ILatCr

Sean French
OFI PUBLISHING
Fi rst publ i shed In 1996 by the
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Copyri ght Sean French 1996
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Contents
Introduction 6
1 Beginnings 12
2 Borrowings 15
3 Making The Terinator 23
The Plot 27
5 Schwarzenegger 30
6 Defending The Terinator
7 Watching The Terinator
8 Mterlife 62
Credits 70
B FI M O D E R N CLA S S I C S
Introduction
Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their
lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer
night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a
sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met
a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I
remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as
he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the
kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.
Walker Percy, The Movie-goer, 1961
It could be said of Cameron that no one did so much to redeem the
eighties genre of high-tech threat through the overlay of genuine
human interest stories. But that description smacks of the formulaic.
Perhaps it would be more to the point to ask who smothered so
many promising stories with effects and apparatus?
David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary o/Flm, 1 994
Wth alphabetical serendipity, the entry after James Cameron in David
Thomson' s Biographical Dictionary is Cameron' s polar opposite,
artistically as well as literally, Jane Campion. Thomson rhapsodises over
The Piano: ' The sense of place, of spirit, and of silence is
Wordsworthian . . . rare poetry . . . . No one has better caught the mix of
sensitivity and ferocity in the human imagination.' This is the sort of
praise Campion' s flm asks for. With its systematic symbolism, its
schematic characterisation, The Piano was manifestly conceived as a
masterpiece and this intention is evident in every frame, in every
carefully composed set-up. It is a flm for adults.
How different from The Terinator, the sort of project that seems
to have been developed without even the intention of being any good.
The flm' s producers at Orion could scarcely have anticipated much
from its writer-director. James Cameron had worked i various technical
THE TERMINATOR
capacities for Roger Corman and had confmed his lack of promise at
the helm of a disastrous cheapo sequel to Joe Dante's Piranha ( 1978).
His Terinator storyline was largely culled from time-travel ideas that
had already been explored in 1 science fction shows like The Outr
Limits and Star Tek. The flm's star was an Austrian muscleman, a
European import i the tradition of Anna Sten, who had already become
a laughing-stock because of his inability to act and his ineradicable
accent. ('To crush your enemies,' went one of his lines of dialogue in his
previous f, as transcribed by Nigel Andrews i Tre Myths: The Lie
and Times o/Arold Schwarzeneger 'To see dem driven before you and
to hear de lamentation of de vm.') The action was heavily
dependent on visual effects, yet the f was initially budgeted at a
minuscule $4 million (less than the special efects budget alone for the
same year's Ghostbusters), and raised to $6. 5 mon only with the
greatest reluctance.
Even when the f had opened and been initially acclaimed,
Cameron himself was rueflly modest in his expectations, telling Film
Comment (January-February 1985), 'We know we're going to get
stomped by the Christmas movies. Dune, 2010, . . . I'l be lning up to see
them - why shouldn't everybody else?' Dune? 2010? Dune is now
remembered as David Lynch's $50 million disaster. Peter Hyams's 2010
isn't remembered by anybody except Cameron himself who has twice
adapted its central conceit, according to which the computer H, the
villain of the frst f, comes good in the sequel. (Ian Holm's android
betrays the crew in Alien, while Lance Henriksen's android sacrifces
himself for Ripley i Aliens; and in Terinator 2, Schwarzenegger's
cyborg is reprogrammed to protect John Connor instead of destroying
him.)
Isn't there something wrong with symbolism as obtrusive as what
Jane Campion presents us with in The Piano? If you want a real 'sense of
silence' look instead at the fst fve minutes of Hawks's Rio Bravo
( 1959). Dean Martin's alcoholic Dude shows the depth of his
degradation by scrabbling for a coin in the spittoon. John Wayne tries to
B FI M O D E R N CLAS S I C S
save Martin from himself and is struck down by him. Claude Aikens
commits murder and walks down the street to another bar. We hear the
sound of the door swinging open offscreen. It is Wayne once more, with
blood trickling down his face. Speaking the frst words i the @m, he
arrests Aikens and sets in motion the drama. It is a magnifcently bold
piece of cinematic narrative, yet it doesn' t call attention to itself in the
way that more celebrated opening tours de force do, such as that of
Welles' s Touch ofEvil or the parodic long opening take of Robert
Altman' s The Player.
Critics are preoccupied with themes of flms, what they are
' about' . And if an obviously commercial, popular @m should be found
worthy of attention, then that must be because it has some serious
themes as well. Is this so? R Bravo is about loyalty, honour and
redemption, I suppose, but isn' t it also about Angie Dickinson throwing
the vase through the window as Ricky Nelson tosses the rife to John
Wayne and shoots two men while it' s i the air? And Wayne rolling his
cigarettes with one hand and constantly searching for a match? Dean
Martin noticing blood dripping into his drink and turning and killing the
murderer of Ward Bond in a single shot? It' s about the aplomb with
which Hawks and his cast can take the most cliched of Western
archetypes, a dancing girl, a comic Mexican, a drunk, a crippled old
timer, and make them strange and complex once more.
Maybe there are some flms that work like a Henry James novel, as
an organic whole, but most of the ones that matter to us are about
moments, quirky details we take away from them and treasure, an odd
cameo here, a funny line there, an audacious camera movement, an
amusing cut, a dazzling special efect or a satisfingly baroque machine
gun. ' You know your weapons, buddy, ' as Dick Miller says to
Schwarzenegger i the gun shop scene. Film i s a visceral, kine
.
tic form
for which critical criteria largely derived from literature and the theatre
are ill suited.
By hi s own account, James Cameron grew up writing stories and
painting pictures . His interest i storytelling led him to a fusion of the
T H E T E R M I N AT OR
two in comic books. Then he discovered the cinema and realised it was
what he had been looking for: 'That's what a movie is. It's a visual
medium with a narrative intent.' To put it another way, James Cameron
was perfectly qualifed to make a low-budget f called The Terinator
into the most important and infuential f of the 80s. & he told an
interviewer from Films and Filming (August 1986) who questioned h
about the cyborg's destruction of the police station: 'I suppose it's anti
authoritarian. Why no? It's also visual, it's 9ynamic, it's the ultimate
extrapolation of confict, it's what makes things exciting.'
Is this enough to make a flm a classic? Does the word even make
sense in regard to a flm barely more than ten years old? I the preface
to his edition of Shakespeare's plays, Dr Johnson knew what was
required to earn status of that kind:
The Poet, of whose works I have undertaken the revision, may now
begin to assume the dignity of an ancient, and claim the privilege of
established fame and prescriptive veneration. He has long outlived
his century, the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit.
Whatever advantages he might once derive from personal allusions,
local customs, or temporary opinions, have for many years been
lost; and every topic of merriment or motive of sorrow, which the
modes of artificial life afforded him, now only obscure the scenes
which they once illuminated. The effects of favour and competition
are at an end; the tradition of his friendships and his enmities has
perished; his works support no opinion with arguments, nor supply
any faction with invectives; they can neither indulge vanity nor gratify
malignity, but are read without any other reason than the desire of
pleasure, and are therefore praised only as pleasure is obtained; yet,
thus unassisted by interest or paSSion, they have passed through
variations of faste and changes of manners, and, as they devolved
from one generation to another, have received new honours at every
transmission.
10 I B F I M O D E R N CLA S S I C S
Perhaps The Terinator has earned similar status by outliving its decade,
if not its century. This 1984 flm was considered worthy of a sequel afer
a gap of no less than seven years. As I write, in early 1996, twelve years
afer its opening, you can still buy it on video. What greater
demonstration of longevity could be required?
The methods by which critics fnd commercial, unpretentious flms
worthy of serious attention, and accord them classic status, would in
themselves constitute something of a history of flm criticism. The stages
of appreciation might go something like the folowing: X is trash but it
has a vitality which is lacking in more artistic flms; X may seem to be
trash to the snobbish but it actually has serious themes and issues just
like an art flm; X is trash, so what's wrong with trash, anyway? Why
should we be grown up all the time? X is commercial, it's proftable, it's
enjoyable, what more do you want from a flm?
Pauline Kael's brilliant, and hugely infuential, 1968 essay, Trash,
Art and the Movies' (reprinted in Going Steady: Film Witings,
1968-1969) explored these ideas while deliberately taunting the
moviegoers who like flms to be serious works of art like Blow- Up or
2001. She was also trying to return to the experience of the way we look
at movies: 'Tere is so much talk now about the art of the flm that we
may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not
works of art.' Cinema, 'the most total and encompassing art form we
have', was a landscape we could walk into: 'The romance of movies is
not just in those stories and those people on the screen but i the
adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what
you've seen. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at
once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love
in bad movies.'
And somehow, like a landscape, the movies were just there, a
resource that intelligent, independent-minded people could me in
search of the occasional nugget that would show that Hollywood was not
entirely corrupt. Kael's distrust of fashy technique was so deep rooted
that it sometimes seemed like a distrust of any technique, as if the best
T H E T E R M I N ATOR
flm-makers and performers were Rousseauesque, instinctual creatures
who produced moments of genius like hummingbirds inadvertently
catching a sunbeam for a moment. It was still the debate between pulp
and art; it was just that Kael tipped the balance slightly towards pulp.
If The Terinator deserves to be called a classic, then this is
because the @m transcends that largely sterile debate. The mark of a
serious SF movie used to be that at some point a scientist would give a
speech about the fture of humanity (Linda Hamilton delivers a parody
of such a speech in Terinator 2). James Cameron makes no bid for that
sort of signifcance, but he remains a semiotician of immense resource.
If one suspects that Luis Bufuel might have smiled at the @m, it is not
because of any ideas the flm articulates, and not just because of the
reference to his Un chien andalou in the cyborg's operation on his own
eye, but that he might have
been tickle
d
by the idea of a
machine that rots. If Andy
Warhol might have approved
of the f, it is not because
of any experiments with form
but because of its casting
coup, humanising his friend
Arnold Schwarzenegger and
making him the biggest star
in the world by turning him
into an inexpressive robot.
And Fritz Lang might have grimly approved of a f that seems to
preach peace whie depicting a fture of Hobbesian struggle for surival
between psychopathic machines and a tribe of Nietzschean human
warriors.
The Terinator remains as irreducible and unpalatable as it is
viscerally enjoyable. Only one man has been able to tame and civise it,
and that, in his self-consciously respectable sequel, is J ames Cameron
himself.
Above Un chien anda/ou
. B FI M O D E R N CLAS S I C S
1 Begi nnings
James Cameron and his co- screenwriter and producer, Gale Anne Hurd,
frst met in their mid- twenties, when they were both employed by Roger
Corman. They were among the last graduates of the New World Pictures
company before Corman sold it and moved on. To Cameron and Hurd,
as to other aspiring flm-makers from Francis Coppola in the 60s to Joe
Dante in the 80s, Corman ofered an opportunity: in return for a
willingness to accept strict fnancial and creative constraints, they would
have the chance to work on movies in a variety of capaciti es. It was the
closest Hollywood had to a functioning apprenticeship system for
directors and producers.
Hurd worked as a production assistant on two rousing thrillers
directed by Lewis Teague and written by John Sayles : The Lady in Red
( 1979) , a noirish tale about the ex-girlfriend of John Dillinger, and
Alligator (1980) , about a giant alligator terrorising an American town.
Then she co- produced with Roger Corman Smoke Bites the Dust (1981) ,
a trashy thick-eared work, for which the car-chase sequences were simply
snipped out of earlier Corman flms such as Eat My Dust ( 1976) and
Grand ThefAuto (1977; this flm was Ron Howard' s directorial debut) .
Cameron, i n Film Comment, recalled hi s younger self as ' interested
in photography and design-related special effects' and he reached his
zenith at New World Pictures with fve credits on Battle Beond the Stars,
a characteristic Corman project, transposing The Magnicent Seven into
space. He did 'everything from special effects to production design to a
little bit of second unit to post-production work as a matte arti st ' .
The infuence of the Corman industrial process on Cameron and
Hurd was decisive. The subj ect matter was restricted to familiar genres
and past flms were raw material to be imaginatively plundered. Movies
had to be made quickly and cheaply, yet they discovered what could be
achieved with the most limited of resources. There were few professional
barriers. Everbody got involved with everything, and for Cameron this ,
was crucial: 'You see with some flmmakers where they begin to delegate
T H E T E R M I N AT O R
too much authority. They're not in control of the nuances that give
texture to a flm like Das Boot, let's say where every scene and every
shot has some thought behind it. People get the smell of a movie that is
too glossy or too packaged. They tend to like underdog movies.'
In her famous jeremiad, 'Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The
Numbers', frst published in the New Yorker in June 1980, Pauline Kael
lamented the results of using so many untrained and unprotected frst
time directors, technically ignorant, unused to working with actors, ill-at
ease on a movie set. This was never to be Cameron's problem. By the
time he went out on his own, he had a basic technical grasp of every
aspect of modern flm-making from operating the camera to the most
arcane details of special effects. He could write a script and he could
storyboard a scene. When he came to make his own flms, he had a
Escape from
New York
kowledge of everybody's job that gave him a more than nominal
authority He could maintain control from a distance with the knowledge
that the material he had storyboarded, even if it was created by diferent
people in different places, would ultimately cohere.
In 1981 Cameron supervised the special efects on John
Carpenter's Escape /rom New York. This is set i a future in which New
York City has become so squalid that it has been abandoned, sealed of
.SF I M O D E R N C LAS S I C S
and turned into a prison. Wen the US president's plane crashes into
the city, Kurt Russell is sent in to extricate him. The initial idea was
compelling and the grungy setting was effective, but the story remained
curiously undeveloped.
In the same year, Cameron directed his first flm, Piranha II: The
Flying Killers, a sequel in name only to the witty 1978 original by the
recent Corman graduate Joe Dante. It has far less in common with
Cameron's later work than any of the films he had previously worked on,
even before it was heavily recut by the Italian producer, partly to include
a sequence of half-naked women sunbathing on a yacht. Cameron
himself has only commented that he would have done anything that gave
him a chance to direct. It was an uninteresting and insignifcant film
which did nothing for Cameron except give him the title of director.
Piranha 1/: The Flying Killers
T H E T E R M I N AT O R
2 Borrowings
According to James Cameron, The Terinator began as an image in his
mind of a robot walking out of a fre. Probably he was remembering the
scene in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, in which the robot imitation of Maria is
burned at the stake and the metal machine beneath is revealed. It is not
suffcient merely to say that The Terinator teems with echoes of this
kind. It is built out of them.
Cameron has been open about the cinematic memories that feed
into his work. Soon afer the release of The Terminator, he told an
interviewer from Cne/antastique (October 1985): 'I I really t about
the infuences that helped shape the story the entire feeling can be
traced back to some '50s science fction flms and Outer Limits episodes.
Te thing that The Outer Limits had, that always impressed me visualy
was its use .. of the deep focus
f
lm nair look of the '40s fs and the
German Expressionist movies of the '30s.' Paralels were speedily
alleged with a specifc 1964 episode of The Outer Limits called 'Soldier',
written by Harlan Ellison, which Cameron was known to have seen.
Further comparisons were made, during this interiew, with a machine
against-man story also written by Ellison, 'I Have No Mouth and I Must
Scream', which begins in words simiar to the text at the beg g of
The Terinator:
The Cold War started and became World War Three and just kept
going. It became a big war, a very complex war, so they needed
computers to handle it. They sank the first shafts and began building
AM (Allied Mastercomputer) . . . and everything was fine until they
had honeycombed the entire planet, adding this element and that
element. . . . In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race .
. . . With the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the
weak, soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge.
Other resemblances were also asserted. Another 1964 Outer Limits
B FI M O D E R N CLAS S I C S
episode, 'Demon with a Glass Hand', featured a time-travelling robot
entrusted with the fate of the human race. In a famous Star Trek
episode, 'City on the Edge of Forever', McCoy travels back to
twentieth-century Earth and his arrival is reminiscent of Reese's in The
Trminator, in a similar back alley witnessed by a down-and-out in a
doorway. But isn't this an example of a resemblance caused by practical
responses to the same problem? The time traveller has to arrive i a city,
but if he appears in a busy street, there wlbe distracting complications
that have nothing to do with the story. The same could be said of other
resemblances. Cameron certainly knew Ellison's work, but his vision of a
future confict between man and the technology he has.created goes
back to Prometheus. More recently, the battle beteen machines and
people had been dramatised in Kubrick's Dr Strangelave ( 1963) and
Metropolis
2001 ( 1968), in John Carpenter's Dark Star ( 1974) and in numerous
episodes of Star Trek. The issue was concluded as murkily as it had
begun. Mter tortuous, acrimonious legal proceedings, a settlement was
reached with Ellison, the enactment of which has itself been a matter of
constant dispute.
In the aftermath of a sudden success, accusations of this kd are
T H E T E R M I N AT O R
routine. Not all of them are unjustifed. Dorothy Parker famously said
that the only 'ism' Hollywood understood was plagiarism. Studio lawyers
prefer to use terms like hommage (using the word in French makes it
seem more artistic), coincidence or even 'fragmented literal simiarity'.
In fact, the more examples are produced against The Terinator, the less
damaging they seem. Tey merely demonstrate the degree to which
these ideas formed a bottomless pool of material, available to anybody
who could fnd a use for them.
I an ingenious essay identifing the archetypes used in
Casablanca, Umberto Eco pointed out in his book Faith in Fakes that
what Casablanca had done unconsciously more recent fs have done
'with extreme intertextual awareness'. He continued:
It would be semiotically uninteresting to look for quotations of
archetypes in Raiders or in Indiana Jones: they were conceived
within a metasemiotic culture, and what the semiotician can find in
them is exactly what the directors put there. Spielberg and Lucas are
semiotically nourished authors working for a culture of instinctive
semioticians.
Like Spielberg and Lucas, Cameron belongs to a generation of
cinematically literate directors who are hghly conscious of what they are
doing. Cameron can draw on anything, from Un chien andalou, when
Schwarzenegger slices through his damaged eye, to the slasher movies
that were so commercially successfl in the early 80s. Accusations of
plagiarism are beside the point. Like many artists in all felds, Cameron
has considerable skill in fnding things that have worked for other people
or, more interestingly that haven't worked for other people but can work
for him.
A typical example is his obvious debt to Michael Crichton's debut
f, Wstworld ( 1973). Tis is about a Western theme park where adults
can go and play at cowboys, shooting a robot who looks like Yul Brn er
and bedding the local whores. When - as in Crichton's later Jurassic Park
18 B FI M O D E R N CLAS S I C S
- the exhibits tur on the guests, the hero is pursued by the vengefl
Brynner android. Cameron drew on two separate aspects of the fm.
Crichton's most striking visual coup was to show us the worl
d
through
the android's electronic eyes, an electronic mosaic, a surprisingly
touching effect which enabled the audience to identif briefy with the
creature. Cameron borrowed the idea and enriched it in The Terinator,
and made even subtler use of it in the sequel. If the lesson of The
Terinator and Wstworld was that to share a character's point of view is
necessarily to identif with it and even feel something for it, then one of
the logical methods of preventing any audience involvement with the
even more advanced cyborg that pursues Schwarzenegger is to deny us
any participation in his point of view By contrast, Cameron makes more
detailed use of the old terminator's point of view and the fm's most
poignant moment is a technological effect: after the terminator has sunk
himself into the vat of molten metal at the climax of Terinator 2, we
see his visual display crackle, collapse and fade to a dot.
Cameron's second use of the @m arose from his recognition of
how an initially potent idea had remained oddly unsatisfing. In
Wstworld, Crichton showed little interest in the details of how the
androids might plausibly work. It was this abnegation that stimulated
Cameron's imagination, as he told Film Comment: 'I was thing of an
indestructible machine, an endo-skeleton design, which had never been
@med as such. We'd had things lke Wstworld, where Y Brynner's face
falls off and there's a transistor radio underneath - which is not visually
satisfing, because you don't feel that this mechanism could have been
inside moving those facial features. So it started from the idea of doing
this sort of defnitive movie robot, what I've always wanted to see.'
Cameron has a reputation as a director who is preoccupied with
technol
o
gy but this mechanical skill is accompanied by a fm fan's sense
of what the audience wants to be shown. He devoted scarcely any of his
limited resources to the time machine at the beginning of The
Terminator, because he rightly calculated that the audience would accept
that as a given. But since we are told so much about the cyborg's
T H E T E R M I N AT OR
capabilities, and then get to see it in action, we want to be shown the
details of how it works .
.
T
e obvious infuence of the psychopathic murderer in John
Carpenter's highy successfl Halloween ( 1978) is another example of
Cameron's creative borrowing. Carpenter had based the entire structure
of his f on the progress of an unstoppable kler, defing all traditions
about character and suspense as to how he could be caugt. The kiler
had no psychologcal motivation and was also, in some unexplained way,
non-human, and apparently impossible to kill. As an abstract experment
in cinematic suspense it was interesting, as a cinematic narrative returns
soon began to diminish.
A similar idea was used more compellingly the following year in
the form of the lethal creature in Ridley Scott's Alien which slaughters
Westorld
20 I SFI M O D E R N CLA S S I C S
the crew members of a spaceship one by one. The high-toned style of
Kubrick's 2001 was applied to a B-picture plot featuring splattery
violence that was previously more associated with exploitation movies.
In his frst, unguarded days as a newly successful director,
Cameron sprinkled his interviews with references to an extraordinary
range of flms which were not just vague stylistic infuences, but sources
of detail on which he could draw Cameron was an open admirer of the
pioneering action director Walter Hill: 'I had The Driver i mind when I
was writing certain scenes in The Terminator. Not that I was cribbing; I
had only seen the picture once and just had a dim memory of the kinetic
forward energy And, presumably the car-park interiors, the dark,
deserted urban exteriors and the car chases. In due course, Hill himself
became an admirer of The Terinator and tried to interest Cameron in a
version of Spartacus set in space. Cameron was not interested in this,
presumably because he had already used this as the inspiration for the
character of John Connor, leading the human slaves in a revolt against
the machines. Instead, Cameron agreed to write and direct the sequel to
Alien. The Driver ( 1 978) supplied the style of the moderday scenes, but
for the glimpses of the future, Cameron had to look elsewhere: d
then when I was writing Terinator, The Road "rior came out and I
said, "This is the next step." Nobody in between had come close.'
In The Road "arrior ( 1 98 1 ; known in Australia and Britain as Mad
Max I, George Miller created a brutal post-holocaust world, a
tribalised society almost pre-industrial in everything except its weaponry.
It is sometimes forgotten that one of the innovations of Star "rs ( 1 977)
was that its futuristic technology was grimy and battered. George Miller
and, in his wake, James Cameron took this further, giving the future the
dirty creaky look we associate with flms set in the past. The World War
I submarine in the war f Cameron so admired, Das Boot ( 1 98 1 ) , is
not gleamingly solid but rattling, ricketty, leaking, dirty. Tech-Noir, the
name of the nightclub in The Terinator, was also adopted as the name
of Cameron and Hurd's production company, and it has frequently been
cited as a description of Cameron's entire aesthetic. Whatever role
Above The Road Warrior (aka Mad Max 1/)
Below Oas Boot
THE TER M I N AT O R .
22 B F I M O DER N C L ASSI CS
technology plays i n Cameron's work, i t i s not the harbinger of a new,
rational, effcient order. Like many of his generation, Cameron - who
was born in 1954 - grew up watching Star Trek with its clean surfaces, its
hygienic technology of phasers and transporter beams, and its jump
suited crew members. It was the suburban American kitchen projected
into the future. By the time Cameron had begun to make fms, the
future had failed. For the frst time in living memory, the standard of
living of the American middle class was falling i real terms; there were
social problems that couldn't be solved, diseases that couldn't be cured
and the future of Things to Come (1936) no longer seemed convincing.
The crew members of the Nostromo in Alien are grubby, pale, unshaven,
unft. They complain about their food and their wages.
In Blade Runner (1982) , also directed by Ridley Scott, the rainy
urban squalor of the future has apparently been lef to the orientals, the
latinos and to Harrison Ford. Scott's invention of the fture was an
awesome visual achievement, some compensation for the failures of the
narrative. If budgetary constrictions prevented James Cameron from
dwelling on the details of his invented future in the way the Scott did
with long panning shots over futuristic urban scenes, then the loss of
lyrical design in favour of narrative tautness was well worth it. Cameron
may have been eclectic in his inspirations but he was never indulgent
towards them. Directors like Brian De Palma, Joe Dante and John
Landis seem unable to resist any allusion or visual joke that comes into
their mind. This can be fun but when you are spotting a series of cameos
by flm directors in minor roles (in Landis's Into the Night) or spotting
references to Hitchcock flms (in many of De Palma's flms), you can
lose your involvement in the story. Cameron remains fully conscious of
where his material comes from without ever winking at the cineastes in
the audience. The Terminator is one of those flms (John Sturges' Bad
Day at Black Rock is another) which on a second viewing seems shorter
than you expected. There are no distractions, no padding, no
indulgence. The narrative's progress is as purposefl as that of the
cyborg.
THE TERMINATOR ..
3 Making The Terminator
] ames Cameron is currently a benefciary of the most lucrative
production deal ever given to a movie director. Yet whatever freedom he
is given, whatever power he goes on to achieve, he wlnever be able to
recapture the creative opportunity he had when he made The Terinator.
He still had one foot in the rafsh, small-scale Corman world of
flm-making in which the director coud - had to - do a bit of
everything. Mer the opening of the flm, Cameron was conscious of the
benefts of this method of working, even as he abandoned it for the
opportunties and constraints of larger budgets. He said to Film
Comment' s interviewer:
Terminator was in some ways an ultimate experience for me. I got to
conceive the idea, write the script, have a deal made, storyboard the
major scenes, go about creating those images in casting and sets
and locations, then film it and compare the finished shots to the
storyboard and see a satisfyingly similar type of image. For me it
was a clean sweep. I got to do everything I wanted to do.
There was a minimum of actual interfrence from the movie's
paymasters at Orion, partly because there was relatively little money at
stake. There are only two recorded creative suggestions from the
fnanciers. The frst was the addition of a canine cyborg to accompany
Reese, which Cameron turned down. The second was a strengthening of
the love interest between Reese and Sarah, which Cameron wl gly
accepted. This resulted in the flm's one period of repose, in the scenes
in which the couple shelter frst under the bridge and then in the motel,
reminiscing, bandaging, making love and manufacturing explosives.
Elsewhere, the necessary explanatory details are defly incorporated into
the action (unlike in the sequel, which is slowed down by a large number
of expository sequences and lengthy dialogues).
Cameron was both knowledgeable about the possibilities of
.SFI M ODE R N C LASSI CS
special effects and fnancially limited i n the number of them that he
could use, so he was forced to decide which were the ones that realy
mattered. As Cameron later recalled in Films and Filming 'Writing
Trinator was really the art of throwing out and winnowing down, going
on the basis of certain assumptions about the audience's education in
science fction.' Wat could he get away with omitting? The time travel
at the beginning was suggested only by a few electric sparks that
pleasingly recall the primitive technology of B science-fction movies in
the Flash Gordon tradition.
What could he get away with showing only in part? For much of
the flm, the mechanics of the cyborg are shown in careflly selected
detail: the detachable eye into which Schwarzenegger plunges his
scalpel, the creaking levers inside his damaged forearm.
What did the audience really need to see? Cameron husbanded his
special effects resources for just two sequences with a shrewd sense of
where they would be most needed. The frst is the battle in the Los
Angeles of 2029 seen at the beginning (and a few minutes later in
Reese's memory), to give the audience an initial (and defly misleading)
impression of technical opulence. Even here, the computer forces are
suggested with the utmost economy and because of the limited budget
Cameron had to keep all these scenes brief and obliquely portrayed,
with consequent benefts to the flm's pace and structure. The second
sequence was the appearance of the cyborg at the flm's climax, burned
down to its endo-skeleton. It emerges from the fames and chases Reese
and Sarah into the factory.
Both these sequences were created by Fantasy II, a special effects
company headed by Gene Warren Jm. The second sequence involved
cutting between two versions of the cyborg, a full-scale mechanical
terminator constructed by the famous special effects man Stan Winston
in his shop and a stop-motion puppet built by Doug Beswick at Fantasy
II. The diffculties involved in the use of this model were considerable.
Cameron insisted that the miniature had to be as detailed as the full
scale version, but fnancial limitations prevented the crew from building
T H E T E R M I N AT O R .
a smaller, more easily workable puppet. Ts puppet is seen nine times
in fll shot, walking out of the fre, moving down the corridor into the
factory, on the catwalk and then, in the flm's single most technically
chalenging sequence, receiving Reese's blow with a metal pipe.
Camero
n
storyboarded these episodes, but he knew that he
wouldn't be able to supervise their production because of the pressure
of time. Stan Wmston's model wasn't completed until just before
principal photography began and the puppet had to be constructed and
flmed with almost no preliminary testing. Fortunately, Cameron's
expertise extended also to a crucial understanding of what was
unrealistic to demand of his technical crew. He wanted the cyborg's
metal structure to convince the audience that it was capable of what the
audience had seen Schwarzenegger doing, but it was evident that there
James Cameron
BFI M O D E R N C LASSI CS
was no way that the stop-motion process could satisfactorily imitate
Schwarzenegger's distinctive gait. So, i Schwarzenegger's fnal
appearance on screen, w
t
see h

m badly injured by the truck and

limping away from it, a linp that the model could easily imitate. I the
event, the animation wa
s
effective, and its occasional jerkiness could be
excused, or even enjoyed, as a reminiscence of - even a homage to -
Ray Harryhausen's celebrated stop-motion animation i @ms le Jason
and the Argonauts and One Milion Years B. C.
Cameron also benefted from low audience expectations, born of
bitter experience of cheap SF movies. They didn't anticipate seeing
much of how the cyborg actually worked in what was patently a low
budget @m. Having startled and rewarded his audience in The
Terminator, he would never be granted the luxury of low expectations
again. In Cameron's later flms the budgets would multiply drastically in
constantly escalating attempts to startle the audience once more with the
metamorphosing water creatures in The Abss, the mimetic poly-alloy
cyborg TlOOO in Terminator 2, the helicopters and Harrier Jump Jet in
True Lies. But that pleasure of surprise - the audience's delighted
realisation that just for once it wasn't going to be ripped off - could
never quite be recaptured.
THE TERMINATOR
4 The Plot
God, a person could go crazy thinking about this.
Sarah Conor, to her tape recorder.
Where does one start in summarising the story of The Terinator?
Numerous works of art make use of the idea of circularity. Finnegans
wke and the fourth chapter of Nabokov's The Gif both fish by
leading the reader back to their beginning. The same is certainly true of
flms le Dead of Night. A paradoxical form of circularity occurs in the
'Planet of the Apes' sequence of movies. I Escape from the Planet of the
Apes, the origin of talking apes on Earth is explained by a time travel
machine bringing two of them (Roddy McDowel and Km Hunter) from
Earth's future.
But this is positively linear compared with the cumulative
developments in The Terinator and Terinator 2. Best perhaps to begin
in the middle, wth Linda Hamilton's voiceover in the pre-credit
sequence of the sequel:
Three billion human lives ended on August 29,1997. The survivors of
the nuclear fire called the war Judgement Day. They lived only to
face a new nightmare: the war against the machines.
The computer which controlled the machines, Skynet, sent two
terminators back through time. Their mission, to dEstroy the leader
of the human resistance, John Connor, my son. The first terminator
was programmed to strike at me in the year 1984 before John was
born. It failed. The second was set to strike at John himself, when he
was still a child. As before, the resistance was able to send a lone
warrior, a protector for John. I t was just a question of which one of
them would reach him first.
Te paradox in The Terinator is that the man sent back to protect
Sarah Connor actualy fathers her chld. John Connor knew that he was
BFI M O DERN C L ASSI CS
sending his own father back in time in order that he himself be
conceived. In Terminator 2 the paradoxes multiply. It emerges that the
sophisticated new technolog which provoked the nuclear war was
developed from the fragments of the cyborg remaining in the factor at
the end of the frst flm. In Terinator 2, the cyborg not merely saves
John Connor but prevents the war which was responsible for sending
him back and thwarts the technological development which resulted in
himself being invented and then destroys himself in order to remove the
slightest possibility of himself being created. So by the end of
Terinator 2, the invention of the computer defence system, and hence
the nuclear war, has been forestalled. So the war with the computers will
.
n
ever take place. So John Connor's heroic leadership of the men against
the machines will not be called for. So there will be no need to prevent
Techno fi rst ai d
him being born, and no
terminator to do it even if
there was a need. So
there will be no need to
send Reese back to
protect the unborn John
Connor. So John Connor
won't be born. So in
which possible universe
have we ended up? It's
'tech stuf', as Reese
says.
By the end of
Terinator 2, the story is
not so much circular as a
spiral vanishing up its
own mimetic poly-alloy
fundament. Its enjoyably
baroque complications
{probably infuenced by
THE TERMINATOR 129
the playful paradoxes of Robert Zemeckis's 1985 time travel comedy,
Back to the Future, in which, for example, Chuck Berry learns the riff of
'Johnny B. Goode' by hearing it played by Marty McFly, who learned it
from listening to Chuck Berry) may obscure in retrospect the satisfing
formal neatness of the frst flm. Reese has fallen in love with Sarah's
photograph, given to him by her (and his) son, and he has always
wondered what she was thinking about when it was taken. In the fnal
moments of the flm, as Sarah sits in a Mexican gas station telling her
tape recorder about the love she and Reese shared in their brief hours
together, a little boy takes a Polaroid photograph of her and sells it to
her for four dollars. We see that it is Reese's photograph. Click. The
circle of the story is complete. Sarah drives off into the impending
nuclear holocaust and the audience walks out surprised and satisfed.
This effciency of construction, a cross between Star Trek and O.
Henry may seem a small thing, but it was a witty variation on the linear
chase-and-kill structure of Alien, Halloween and even Blade Runner.
When J ames Cameron came to make The Terminator, he had already
established his credentials as a technician. The surprise was that he had
applied his standards of craftsmanship to the story as well as to the
special effects. In a Hollywood era in which the main plot tist comes
when the villainmonster gets up again afer the audience thinks it's
dead, Cameron actually surprised the audience with some real plot
twists. In hs interview with Film Comment Cameron himself saw his
achievement in typically technical terms: 'It was an underdog movie
from a production standpoint. People come out of the t
h
eatre feeling
that they got more than they expected from the marketing. That's
positive word-of-mouth.'
30 BFI M O DER N C L A S SICS
5 Schwarzenegger
The frst time Pauline Kael reviewed a James Cameron @m (it was
Aliens in August 1986) , she described him as the man 'who directed the
Schwarzenegger @m The Terminator, and wrote the script for Rambo:
First Blood Part I before Stallone reshaped it'.
And of course The Terminator is inescapably a Schwarzenegger
picture, the Schwarzenegger picture, the @ more than any other that
turned him both into a cult and into a major interational star. As
Cameron himself admitted, the casting was crucial and altered the
meaning of the flm. The original plan had been to make, in Cameron's
words, 'a gritty street-level science-fction movie that you would buy as
if it was really happening.' He imagined the terminator as 'a more
anonymous, saturnine fgure' and the frst actor he had in mind was
Jiirgen Prochnow, star of Das Boot. He was presumably intending a more
down-at-heel versi
o
n of the android-leader in Blade Runner, played by
Rutger Hauer. Almost in reaction to Blade Runner, making a vrtue once
more of the budgetary limitations, The Terinator would have been a
grim, punitive science-fction tale, defned by Reese's austerity, the
future existence of deprivation, pain and eternal confict imported back
into the 20th century. He might have been something like the TlOOO
model terminator (played by Robert Patrick), Schwarzenegger's
antagonist in Terinator 2, when they certainly weren't going to cast an
actor who would obliterate Schwarzenegger the way that
Schwarzenegger oblterated poor Michael Biehn in The Terinator.
Patrick is the cyborg as nerd, the cyborg as conformist company man,
compared with Schwarzenegger who is bizarrely reincarnated in the
sequel as a microchip representative of frontier independence.
Once Schwarzenegger was cast, the grim, realistic conception of
the story was no longer tenable. In Cameron's. words: 'With Arnold, the
@m took on a larger-than-life sheen. I just found myself on the set doing
things I didn't think I would do - scenes that were supposed to be
purely horrifc that just couldn't be, because now they were too
THE TERMINATOR
famboyant.' This alteration was not due to any insight brought to the
role by Schwarzenegger himself. Shrewd as he is, Schwarzenegger's
analysis of his own work has generally been restricted to its importance
for his long-term strategy in the industry. As he said early in his career in
Interiew (October 1985) : 'I never think about money. I don't. I don't
like that whole idea of being into money. I like to make good money
only because it's part of the game. You have to have a certain value i
Hollywood. There's the $5, 000 actor, the $1 million actor, $5 million
actor, and so on. You have a certain value, so you try to put yourself
higher and higher up into this category.'
It has been said that Schwarzenegger was ofered the part of
Reese and opted for the part of the villain in order to broaden his
range but this may well just be an attempt to give a retrospective
Schwarzenegger
B FI M O DERN CLA S SI C S
purposefulness to what at the time must have seemed like the most
routine of projects. According to Nigel Andrews' shrewd biography of
the star, Schwarzenegger approached the flm with little enthusiasm.
Talking to a friend shortly before shooting started, he referred to it as
'some shit movie I'm doing, take a couple of weeks'.
Schwarzenegger's principal creative input in the years of his early
success was to put more humour into his flms in order to make his
character more sympathetic. These resulted in the famous Arnie
'zingers', reminiscent of - and probably inspired by - the wisecracks in
the James Bond flms of Sean Connery and Roger Moore. Thus, in
Predator (Schwarzenegger's best flm apart from The Terinator) during
a fght sequence, he throws a knife at a man, pinning him to a wooden
post: 'Stick around,' he says, a remark which is entirely inappropriate for
the sombre character Schwarzenegger was playing, but entirely suited to
the persona he was developing. Terminator 2 is full of these zingers, and
we are even alerted to a hitherto unrevealed aspect of cyborg design
which permits the development of human characteristics and hence
allows Schwarzenegger to employ some of his - by then - trademark
grimaces and narrowing of eyes, and to deliver carefully honed
catchphrases: 'No problemo', 'Hasta la vista, baby.'
Schwarzenegger's mastery of self-invention and the management
of his own career is not in doubt but Cameron knew how to use
Schwarzenegger for his own purposes. Cameron is famous as a control
freak, even in a profession of control freaks, and Schwarzenegger's only
revealing memory of making The Terinator is an account of Cameron's
direction of the scene when the terminator has been blasted through the
windows of the Tech Noir club on to the Los Angeles sidewalk.
Cameron stood to one side, off camera, and instructed him in every
movement, from opening his eyes to the moment at which he should
raise himself from the ground, as if he were another of Stan Winston's
stop-motion models.
Cameron had caught Schwarzenegger at the right time and seen
something in him. Sergio Leone once spoke of what had drawn him to
T H E T E R M I N AT O R
cast a T cowboy called Clint Eastwood in the leading role of A Fistul
of Dollars: 'The story is told that when Michelangelo was asked what he
had seen in one particular block of marble, which he had chosen among
hundreds of others, he replied that he saw Moses. When they ask me
what I saw in Clint Eastwood, I replied that what I saw simply, was a
block of marble.' James Cameron had had the same sort of perception.
Schwarzenegger was 36 when he appeared i The Terinator and his
career had already passed through several stages. In Bob Rafelson's
undervalued Stay Hungr ( 1976) and George Butler and Robert Fiore's
documentary Pumping Iron (1977) he had emerged as a bodybuilder
with an unexpected charm and humour. Conan the Barbarian ( 1982) had
made him well known but at the price of becoming the butt of the joke, a
risibly cartoonish embodiment of John Milius's proto-samurai phiosophy.
Conan the
Barbarian
B F I M O DER N C L A S S I C S
Schwarzenegger was poised for a career either in the straight-to
video market that seems to have claimed actors like Rutger Hauer and
Dolph Lundgren (both more technically accomplished performers than
Schwarzenegger) or in John Waters-style campery or perhaps the
European muscleman epics of the kind that made Steve Reeves a cult.
Cameron saw in this apparently absurd, overblown fgure a poise and
stillness that made apparent disqualifcations, such as his accent and his
inability to act, irrelevant.
Schwarzenegger's terminator demands to be compared with one
of the mythic creations of the cinema, Boris Karloff 's great performance
as Frankenstein's monster in James Whale's 1931 flm. The monster in
Mary Shelley's novel was quite another thing, a person more sensitive
and articulate than his creator. The original casting for the flm was Bela
Lugosi, who could only have been a small twisted maniac, more like Igor
than the monster itself. But Lugosi turned the role down because of its
lack of dialogue and Boris Karloff took it over. On the face of it, the
flm monster, with its metal bolts, its inhuman appearance, its criminal
brain (stolen from the wrong jar) was a straightforward object of horror.
But Karloff, huge and stately, lent the role his own gravity. Reaching for
the light, attempting to play with a young girl, the creature became an
embodiment not merely of pathos but of nobility. He defned the image
of Frankenstein's monster for ever and the name of Boris Karloff
became and remained one of the most famous in world cinema.
There are other points of resemblance between Karlof and
Schwarzenegger. Both were immigrants who retained their foreign
accents (Karloff was an English ex-public schoolboy). Both achieved
fame relatively late (Karloff was 44 when he played the monster for the
frst time). Both were physically imposing, though Karlof developed his
physique not in the gym but in the labouring jobs he did in the sizeable
gaps beteen roles during the 1920s. But the diferences between the
two are more instructive about the Schwarzenegger phenomenon. Boris
Karloff was an assumed name; Hollywood was not ready for a star called
William Pratt. Anold Schwarzenegger became the most famous star in
T HE TER M I N AT O R
the world, keeping a name that many of his fans couldn't spell or even
pronounce. Yet it was Schwarzenegger who gleefully became an
American citizen and married into the American royal family, the
Kennedys. Karlof maintained his British citizenship, read Wisden and,
from the mid-50s onwards, actually lived in England, leaving only to
appear in flms. Above all, the effect of Karloff 's success in Frankenstein
was to confne him to horror flms for ever. How could an actor caled
Karloff do anything else? He played the Mummy and Fu Manchu and
endless recyclings of Frankenstein's monster, and then with the decline
of the horror genre in Holywood, he went wherever they were made,
however cheap and sleazy He survived to beneft from the partial revival
of the genre and appeared in two Roger Corman flms ( The Raven and
The Tror, in 1962, both featuring the young Jack Nicholson). There
Bori s Karl of
B F I M O DER N C L AS S I C S
was never the smallest possibility that Karloff could use his fame to gain
control over his flms or to extend his range into other genres, as
Schwarzenegger has done.
Schwarzenegger' s terminator, who massacres a series of innocent
bystanders, seems an unlikely object of the audience' s admiration, let
alone sympathy. Excluding the lines of dialogue in which
Schwarzenegger is dubbed ( such as when the terminator imitates Sarah
Connor' s mother over the telephone) , he speaks seventy-four words of
dialogue and kills twenty- seven people.
On the terminator' s frst appearance, the cyborg encounters three
punks ( their leader is played by Bi Paxton, who later played one of the
marines in Aliens ) and repeats what they say to him: ' Nice night for
walk. . . . Nothing clean . . . right. ' Then he adds: 'Your clothes . Give
them to me now. ' ( Cameron' s slightly of-key dialogue for the terminator
complements Schwarzenegger' s pronunciation, that idiosyncratic
mixture of Austrian and southern Californian. )
Most of Schwarzenegger' s long speeches take place in the gun
shop where he acquires his armoury from the Corman repertory player
Dick Miller. My transcript of the dialogue in this scene is unlikely to be
accurate, but the word- count at least must be about right. The
terminator asks for ' the twelve gauge autoloader, . . . the . 45 longslide
with laser- sighting' and the as-yet-to-be-invented ' phased plasma rife in
a forty-watt range' . ( Perhaps that' s what the cyborgs are wielding in the
frst scene of Terminator 2. ) The plasma rife being unavailable, he settles
for ' the U zi nine millimetre' . Asked which of the weapons he wants, he
replies, 'll . ' Then, when cautioned that he isn' t allowed to take them
with him, he replies : 'Wrong. '
Knocking at the door of the frst Sarah Connor, he says simply
' Sarah Connor' before shooting her in the head. Almost all of the rest of
his dialogue is delivered at the beginning of the celebrated police station
sequence. First he delivers his longest single speech of the flm ( though
he is not required to manage it in a single take) : ' I' m a friend of Sarah
Connor. I was told that she' s here. Can I see her please?' On being told
THE TERMINATOR
that this is impossible he asks: 'Where is she?' Before leaving he delivers
the line that was to become the frst of his catchphrases: 'I'll be back.'
There is now almost half of the @ remaining, ffy minutes, but
Schwarzenegger speaks just ten more words. Back in his lodging house,
the terminator's wounded fesh is starting to decay and the landlord
inquires from outside the door whether he has a dead cat in his room:
Schwarzenegger ripostes, with the @m's best line, 'Fuck you, asshole.'
Mer impersonating Sarah Connor's mother, the terminator calls the
hotel: 'Give me your address there,' he demands. Finally, while
commandeering the lorry, the immolation of wh
i
ch will burn his fesh
away, the terminator speaks his fnal words of the @ to the co-dr
i
ver:
' Get out.'
As for the killings: the terminator kills the punk who draws a knife
In the gun shop
on h by plunging his fst into the young man's chest. This is the frst,
blackly comic touch of the @m, and the frst hint to the viewer that this
character is not human. The second victim is the gun store salesman.
The third victim is the frst Sarah Connor, shot through the head just of
camera. The fourth victim is the second Sarah Connor, whose murder
M O D E R N C L AS S I C S
we only hear about. The ffth victim is Matt, the boyfriend of Sarah' s
fatmate, Ginger, and the sixth is Ginger herself. Ginger' s killing is the
most brutal in the flm ( the terminator ' s confusion of identity may have
been suggested by the similar mistake made by David Warner' s Jack the
Ripper in Nicholas Meyer ' s 1 979 Time Afer Time) . Victims seven and
eight are bystanders in the Tech Noir club. Vctims nine to twenty-fve
are police offcers (we are told in Terminator 2 that seventeen police
offcers were killed - if anything a suprisingly low fgure) . One mark of
the bracing unsentimentality, if not brutality, of the flm is that by the
end of the flm, most audience members have probably forgotten that
the terminator has kilkd not just the father of Sarah Connor' s unborn
child, her best friend and the policemen who promised to protect her
but also her mother. She is the twenty- sixth victim with Reese as the
twenty- seventh and last. And this is the character who, according to
Cameron, had to be transformed into a hero in the sequel, because so
many young flmgoers admired him.
Cameron resists adding any humanising touches to the terminator.
Schwarzenegger himself observed in Interview, not entirely with
approval, that ' there was some indirect humour, but it wasn' t written for
that; that was just the reaction of people' . The audience response to the
flm revealed that there was something intrinsically attractive and comic
about Schwarzenegger, even in the grimmest of contexts. The murder of
Ginger, just after her energetic sex with Matt, is thoroughly in the genre
of those slasher movies in which sexually active women are butchered
one by one as some sort of psychopathic puritan revenge, and if the
terminator had been played by Jirgen Prochnow, it would have been
indistinguishable from similar scenes in flms like Halloween or He
Knows You're Alone. But because it was Arnie, audiences half-knew that
it was all in fun.
Cameron claimed in Film Comment that Orion originally thought
that the poster of Schwarzenegger with his chest bared might attract
women to the flm, ' but I don' t think anyone sees him in a sexual way in
the flm. They see him almost from the beginning as this implacable,
THE TERMINATOR
sexless, emotionless machie - in the form of a man, which i s scary
because he' s a perfect male fgure. '
There was more than that. One of John Carpenter' s much-copied
innovations in Halloween was his sustained use of the Steadicam, a
camera which could be strapped to a camera operator and could obtain
tracking shots of a smoothness and a mobility that had previously been
impossible. Carpenter saw that this mobile camera could be used to
convey the stalking murderer' s point of view, and he established this
immediately with the virtuoso long opening shot of the flm i which a
camera prowls round a house before stabbing a naked woman to death.
We then cut to the murderer, who turns out to be a small boy Tis l
beteen the voyeuristic murderer and the voyeuristic cinemagoer se

ted
in the dark was a familiar enough theme, most obviously in the flms of
Afred Hitchcock, but in the hands of Carpenter it became both
powerfully insistent and coldly repelent. Aer al, it' s not much fun,.
even in an irresponsible way for moviegoers to identif with a man who
stalks young girls and then stabs them to death.
But as Cameron was the frst to see, the covert identifcation of
the audience with the terminator really was fn. He realised from the
beginning that the flm allowed the audience to have it both ways. They
want Reese and Sarah to get away, but they also have the chance to root
for the bad guy ( the following quotation, incidentally, is a further
demonstration of the degree to which Cameron does most of the critics'
work for them) ;
There's a little bit of the terminator i n everybody. I n our private
fantasy world we' d all like to be able to walk in and shoot somebody
we don' t like, or to kick a door in instead of unlocking it; to be
immune, and just to have our own way every minute. The terminator
is the ultimate rude person. He operates completely outside all the
built-in social constraints. I t' s a dark, cathartic fantasy. That's why
people don't cringe in terror from the terminator but go with him.
They want to be him for that one moment. But then when we go
4 0 B FI M O DER N C L AS S I C S
back to Reese and Sarah, you get the other si de of i t, what i t
woul d be l i ke to be on the receiving end.
This dark freedom was only possible because Cameron had still not
entirely escaped from Corman' s unrespectable exploitation world. The
terminator' s activities are unhampered not only by human morality but
by directorial notions of decorum or good taste. Once the terminator
slaughters the two Sarah Connors who come frst in the Los Angeles
phonebook and then Sarah' s fatmate by mistake we can sit back in the
pleasurable anticipation that he isn' t going to turn sentimental on us. In
the Tech Noir he shoots heedlessly into crowds and the glorious slapstick
climax is reached in the police station which he rams with his car,
shooting everybody on sight. In Terinator 2 where this slaughter is
recalled, we are piously informed that ' those men had families' but we
didn' t know that at the time, or want to know it .
The sequel shows what happens when J ames Cameron becomes
self- conscious in a different way, assumes a civic mantle and forgoes the
dark pleasure of being an exploitation director. The reprogrammed,
reformed terminator of Terinator 2, whose powers are at the service of
freedom, gives us none of that dark sense of release that we had in the
frst flm. Instead, this large man with his access to Sarah Connor' s
secret cache of weapons i s uncomfortably close t o a survivalist with a
righteous sense of mission. Admittedly there are a couple of grimly
amusing murders committed by the TI OOO, most notably the almost
casual dispatching of John Connor' s stepfather with a blade through the
head. This gives the opportunity for the best camera movement in the
flm, a tracking shot along the arm of the stepmother (whose shape the
TI OOO has assumed) as it becomes a blade penetrating frst the carton of
milk and then the stepfather ' s mouth. ( The carton of milk is a sly
reference to the murder of the senator in The Manchurian Candidate,
shot by another dehumanised killer, the brainwashed Laurence Harvey,
through a similar carton, causing him to ' bleed' milk. ) But with his
metamorphosing blades, the nooo is too close to the psychopathic
killer i a slasher movie for us to take much pleasure in it.
THE TERMINATOR
There is very little that could be described as a performance in
Schwarzenegger's role as the terminator, yet experience shows that there
is nothing as potent on the giant cinema screen as the blank face on to
which the audience can project their fantasies and desires. Tn of
Garbo at the end of Queen Christina at the prow of the ship, famously
instructed by Rouben Mamoulian to express nothing, to think of
nothing, in the knowledge that the audience would do that for her.
Clarence Brown, Garbo's most regular director, famously paid tribute to
her impassivity: 'Garbo had something behind the eyes that you couldn't
see until you photographed it in close-up. You could see thought: If she
had to look at one person with jealousy, and another with love, she
didn't have to ch8nge her expression. You could see it in her eyes as she
looked from one to the other.'
I The Terminator Schwarzenegger took this even further. Not only
does he lack expre
s
sion in his eyes as well, he even slices one of them up
in order to re-inforte the point. To a degree that even James Cameron
could not have anticipated, Schwarzenegger demonstrated that the
audience gravitates towards the character who has the aura of a hero
and that impassivity is one of the crucial attributes of the f hero. Cary
Grant was famous for wanting to give the lines in the bread-and-butter
expository scenes that give the audience essential but non-dramatic
information to supporting actors whle he would do what stars do best,
which is to listen.
The Terinator spectacularly succeeded in making Arnold
Schwarzenegger a star. It spectacularly failed to make stars of the
ostensible heroes of the flm, Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton. I the
improbable event that we encountered Biehn's Reese in real life, we
would consider him to be an extraordinary hero. He sacrifces himself
for a mission to save a woman, out of idealism but also because he has
fallen in love with her picture (like Tamino i Mozart's Magic Flute) . He
arrives in our world with nothing and manages to save Sarah Connor
with the pitiful weapons available to him and, more than this, to awaken
her to her true self But heroism doesn' t work like that on the big
screen. It has been n
o
ted before that since Schwarzenegger's terminator
4 2 B FI M ODER N C LAS S I C S
isn' t going to explain to us who he is and what he' s doing there and how
he got there and what life is like in the future and why the computers
are fghting against the humans, then Michael Biehn wlhave to do it
and that leaves him with an awful lot of explaining to do. Tere is
remarkably little dialogue i the intriguing, mysterious early scenes of
The Trinator as Cameron cleverly keeps the audience wondering
about who these two men are. Then things suddenly get garrulous as
Reese has to explain to Sarah that Schwarzenegger is ' a cyborg, a mache,
a terminator, Cyberdyne systems model one zero one. Infltration unit.
Underneath it' s a hyper- alloy combat chassis. Microprocessor controled,
flly armoured. Very tough. But outside it' s living human tisue. The 600
series had rubber skin. Easy to spot . ' And so on.
Once Reese is under detention, the true Hollywood hero would
Reese i n custody
stay contemptously silent, but Reese still has information to impart to
the audience. Te unfortunate result is that we see hi blabbing away to
the police like a stoolie. Wen he is asked about how he wlget back,
he stoically replies, ' Nobody goes back, nobody else goes through. It' s
j ust him and me. ' But even this heroism leaves us uncomfortable. He
T H E T E R M I N AT OR 43
ought t o have a sidekick, a Walter Brennan, who can tell us alabout
that. Cinematic heroes aren't meant to bleat about their own heroism.
They just do it. The reason that Humphrey Bogart can be so laconic and
modest in Casablanca is that Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney
Greenstreet, Paul Henreid and almost everybody else keep informing
him about his own heroism and idealism.
And while Reese is identifing himself as a soldier from the 132nd
under Parry, and describing the enemy a computer defence system built
for SACNOR by Cyberdyne systems and about Skynet and about
time displacement equipment and explaining why it is too late for the
enemy to klJohn Connor in their own time, the terminator is striding
into the police station and just saying: 'I'll be back.'
Biehn's very capability as an actor, in obvious contrast to
Schwarzenegger, is part of his problem and this was only compounded
by the scenes, extended on the advice of the @m's producers, in which
Reese's relationship with Sarah was emphasised. Reese tals of the
brutality of life in the future, of the pain of travelling through time and
the love for Sarah that has brought him here: ' So much pain,' Sarah
says, stroking him. These complicated emotions which should make h
more sympathetic actually make him seem weak and neurotic. Pursuing
a woman across time, which might seem impressive in a narrative poem
or a novel, appears on the big screen more like the behaviour of a
stalker. Reese's most impressive achievement of all, galvanising Sarah
into discovering and developing her inner resources, counts against him
as well. The frst sign of Sarah's strength, when she bandages Reese's
wound under the bridge, is acceptable. The hero is permitted to be
nursed by the woman he loves. But after the fnal car chase, when Reese
has been badly wounded, when he collapses and is ordered to his feet by
Sarah, he is failing in his duty as a hero. Worst of all, an authentic action
movie hero does not die and leave the heroine to face the villain alone,
however capable she may be. Compare the climax of Terinator 2 in
which the terminator, minus an arm and much of his head, appears at
the crucial moment to blast the TIOOO into the vat of molten metal.
EF MO D E R N C LASSI CS
Tere is a substantial problem with this explanation. In Terminator
2 Arnold Schwarzenegger takes the Michael Biehn role, while Robe;t
Patrick takes the strong, silent Schwarzenegger role. This time it' s Arnie
who has to embark on the long explanations about the mimetic poly
alloy and why the nooo can' t just turn into a bomb and blow John
Connor up. Ten he must explain to Linda Hamilton about the details
of Cyberdine' s part in the development of computer technology.
According to the pattern demonstrated in the audience' s response to the
frst flm, viewers should have started rooting for Robert Patrick' s
nooo. Why didn' t they?
Arnie was now a world famous star and had to be protected, so he
and Cameron made sure he wasn' t upstaged. The same kinds of dry
technical explanation are more acceptable from the terminator because
he is a computer and are actually a sign of his imperturbability and
strength. They can also have a laconic power of their own, such as when
the terminator imitates John in a phonecall to his fosterparents and then
replaces the receiver with the dry statement : 'Your fosterparents are
dead. ' The reprogrammed terminator is cleverly portrayed as an ideal
father-fgure for John (yet another insult to the defunct Reese) and when
he frst saves the boy from the TI OOO, he doesn' t just j ump out of the
way of the bullets, he does what every father would like to do, he
t
nterposes his body, taking the other terminator' s bullets in his own
back. And in case we happen to have missed the point, Cameron spells
it out for us in the form of Sarah' s thoughts spoken in a voiceover:
Watchi ng John wi th the machine, i t was suddenly so cl ear. The
terminator would never stop, i t woul d never leave hi m and i t would
never hurt h im, never shout at him or get drunk and hit him or say i t
was too busy to spend ti me wi th him. I t would al ways be there and i t
woul d di e t o protect him. Of al l t he would-be fathers who came and
went over the years, thi s thing, thi s machine was the only one who
measured up. I n an insane world i t was the sane choi ce.
T H E T E R M I N AT OR .
Wen Reese informs Sarah that the terminator can' t be bargaied with,
can' t be reasoned with, he sounds like a whiner. By contrast, when
the terminator dispassionately informs John of the superior capabilities
of the TI OOO he makes himself sound like . an underdog we want
to cheer.
Great pains were evidently taken to ensure that no misplaced
sympathy went the way of the TI OOO. Dressing him throughout in a
purloined police uniform makes him seem cowardly (the police are at
best hapless onlookers in all James Cameron' s work) . He is neither
strong and silent, nor is he given anything to say that could conceivably
become a catchphrase. Instead, he is only given geekish dialogue like,
' Say, that' s a nice bike. ' He' s given feeble pistols to fre as wel, always a
sign of moral inadequacy in the world of James Cameron. The TI OOO
' So much pai n' ,
Sarah says
B F! M ODER N C LASSI CS
could never become a cult hero, except t o other geeks and stalkers and
anorak wearers.
The main difference, though, between Arnold Schwarzenegger and
Michael Biehn ( let alone Robert Patrick) is that Schwarzenegger is a star
in a way that Biehn could never hope to be. As the terminator,
Schwarzenegger has that quality that Ronald Reagan had as President of
the United States on state occasions, that occasional hint of the twinkle
in the eye, the half smile, that showed his own recognition of the
improbability of what had happened, and that he was enjoying it and
therefore we were free to enjoy it too. Michael Biehn' s skilled
performance gives us the feeling of the pain of being a hero, of self
sacrifce, the fear of failure, of disaster. Arnold Schwarzenegger makes
us feel the enj oyment of watching a flm, of guns and explosions and
violence, all in the knowledge that he doesn' t really mean it and that the
lights will come up and we can all go home.
Yet there are limits, even to charm of this magnitude. The one
liners in Terminator 2 are amusing, but they begin to pall during its
excessive length ( more than half an hour longer than The Terinator)
and in later flms, like Last Action Hero and Junior, Schwarzenegger' s
self-deprecating humor slackened the grip of the narrative t o the extent
that both flms lost their audience.
The Terinator is Arnold Schwarzenegger' s great cinematic
moment. In later flms he displays the practised ease of a politician on
the campaign trail, but it is only here that all his attributes, from the
slightly dislocated oddness of his accent to the chiselled physiognomy
and the infated physique, all work for the f. In The Terinator he did
what he could do; his success in the role enabled him to devote himself
to what he can't do.
THE TERMI NATOR
6 Defendi ng The Terminator
The Terinator is so viscerally enjoyable an experience, so defly crafed,
so unex:ectedly satisfing in its resolution, that there is the temptation
to legitimise this pleasure by demonstrating that the flm is good for you
as well, that it is 'really' a serious work, with grown-up ideas, respectable
themes and a basically liberal political vision. And here, as elsewhere,
Cameron provides his audience with the material to work on. A he put
it, speaking to Film Comment shortly afer the flm's frst success:
The producer, Gale Hurd, and I set out to make a movie that would
function on a couple of levels: as a linear action piece that a 1 2-year
old would think was the most rad picture he'd ever seen, and as
science fiction that a 45-year-old Stanford English prof would think
had some sort of socio-political significance between the lines -
although obviously it doesn't attempt to be that primarily.
What might this imaginary middle-aged Stanford English professor
say about the flm in the campus cofee shop after the screening?
S
he
might point out that the flm is a feminist subversion of what had been
a quintessentially male genre, and that Cameron, with his collaborator
(and, briefy wife), Gale Anne Hurd, would go on to re-inforce this in a
series of high-tech action pictures. We frst encounter Sarah Connor as
a down-trodden, but good- humoured waitress, with her wise-cracking
colleague and fatmate, Ginger. It's a standard, complacent sitcom
setting, and ths is folowed by a series of other disparaging images of
Sarah: she is the fn-loving but basically unrefective party animal. She is
not merely going out with empty-headed men who drive Porsches; they
stand her up on Friday night. She is a helpless victim of the terminator,
saved by luck and the repeated intervention of her male rescuer. But
then she fnds her hidden resources frst in nurturing Reese (' Good feld
dressing,' he compliments her) , learning from h about explosives and
fnally becoming the active partner and destroying the terminator herself.
. B F I M O D E R N C L AS S I C S
Better still, she allows Reese to display his feminine, emotional, neutrotic
side, deconstructing the traditional model of icy heroism and
dismantling Michael Biehn' s career as a leading man in the process.
The perfect image of mal e heroism i n the fl m is a robot, and it is the
woman who survives, triumphant, pregnant and alone.
Cameron' s predilection for strong women continued in hi s later
flms. His sequel to Alien made the strength of Sigourney Weaver' s
Ripley the centre of t he flm. Her instinct for survival, and that of the
little girl, Newt, exposes the superfciality of the military ethic. Al of his
flms, Aliens, The Abyss, Terinator 2, True Lies, feature weak, neurotic
men and strong women.
The Stanford professor might add that The Terinator is also ' rad'
in a different sense. It is anti- establishment, distrusting the traditional
paternalistic role of the police. It is anti-capitalist; it is made clear that
the disastrous nuclear annihilation was the result of a collaboration
between big government and big business. And the name given to the
defence system, Skynet, is an obvious reference to the Star Wars system
and the destabilising efects even of military projects that are
'
ostensibly
defensive. The flm is pro-gun control . The terminator is able to arm
himself with an awesome array of frepower directly of the shelf,
provoking one of the script' s moments of dry humour. The scene
exposes the absurdity of such half-measures as the ffteen-day wait on
buying a handgun, when machine-guns can be carried away immediately.
Furthermore, the defender might add, the fm eschews the usual
blind adoration for technology that is traditionally at the heart of the
science fction genre. In this story of a planet almost destroyed by the
overweening power of its technological development, one of the
recurrent themes is the fallibility of technology at every level. The
nuclear war began because the defence network became conscious
( at 2 . 14 a. m. Eastern Time on 29 August 1 997) and began to defend
itself. In smaller ways, throughout the fm, we see that our machines
never seem to work as they should. Phones are broken, and even when
Sarah Connor gets through to the police she is put on hold. The entire
T H E T E R M I N AT O R . .
telephone system as a means of communication is presented as fatally
corrupted. When Matt rings Ginger with a cod obscene phone-call he
speaks to Sarah instead, a mistake that is tragically repeated when the
terminator imitates Sarah' s mother over the phone to Sarah in the
motel. Sarah' s answering machine is the vehicle frst for being stood up
by her date and then for alerting the terminator that Sarah Connor is
still alive and in hiding at the Tech Noir nightclub. Even the phonebook
becomes the tool of a murderer. Ginger' s personal stereo is partly
responsible for her death: it prevents her from hearing the terminator in
her apartment.
Some literary professors might even argue that The Trinator is a
serious work of art because of its religious theme. John Connor shares
his initials with that other redeemer of mankind, Jesus Christ, and the
The tel ephone
system i s fatal l y
corrupted
5 0 S F I M ODER N C LA S S I C S
f is an obvious allegorical conflation of the Nativity with the story of
Eve and the serpent. Reese is a version of the annunciatory angel who
impregnates Mary as well as informing her of the glad tidings. The
terminator is a Herod, slaughtering the Sarah Connors instead of the
frst born, and he is also a Satan, who by attempting to destroy humanity
perersely brings about its salvation ( the paradoxical story Milton tells in
Paradise Lost). So The Terminator must be serious, mustn' t it ?
But The Terinator resists being made comfortable and reasurring.
Its politics are darker and more ambiguous than such well- intentioned
but misguided defences suggests. There is a tendency, especially viewed
from a misleading British context, to interpret a distrust of the police
and the military as necessarily left wing. But in the United States there is
a quite separate right-wing anti- authoritarian tradition, an individualism
which sees almost all forms of social organisation and control - police,
army, federal government, tax collection, even printed money - as
creeping forms of communism which are neutering the pioneering spirit
that built Aerica. This conviction can move beyond political belief to
become a pathological psychological condition, one that Richard
Hofstadter famously labelled 'the paranoid style in American politics' in
his celebrated book of that name. Te darkest expression of this was
seen in the Oklahoma City bombings, frst thought to be the work of
foreign terrorists, then discovered to be the product of a right-wing
subculture which considers itself to be at war with the American
government on behalf of the true spirit of America.
The law enforcement offcers in The Trminator, as well as the
ordinary people they serve, have become weak and incapable of
defending their own way of life, which is itself alienated and parasitic
(as with Sarah' s flatmate, Ginger, who even listens to her personal stereo
during sex) . In the face of the nuclear threat and the challenges of
technological change, individuals are relinquishing the responsibility for
their own future. Cameron admitted to being dismayed by interviews
with high school kids after the T screening of the nuclear drama, The
Day A/er, who said that they now accepted nuclear war as inevitabl e:
THE TERMINATOR
In The Terminator the fact of nuclear war is thrown away, with the
complete understanding that people will buy it. I t' s just part of the
fabric of the story. On the other hand, i t tried to say that you take
responsibility for your own life, and for the life of society. The
terminator looks like death, and if you want to read into it, it's a
death image. Linda Hamilton's character faces t hat image of death,
or fate, and survives.
All that has resonance, I hope, with the dark premonitory
character of Reese's future-flashbacks, as I call them, and with the
final image of driving of into a storm. I t' s fate vs. will.
Cameron' s fable of a disastrous breakdown in society, a future
confict in which success wl depend on te individual' s wl, bolstered
by years of training and' a personal armoury, owes more to survivalism
than to socialism. Sarah Connor' s defeat of the terminator is a
Nietzschean assertion of superiority She survives because she has fought
for her right to rule, unlike the other Sarah Connors and the enfeebled
police force. Far from being a representative of any recognisable form of
feminism, Sarah i s the embodiment of something s. tranger and more
primitive, the woman defending her child, the tigress fghting to defend .
her cub, which is also the future of mankind. It could be argued that
even Sarah Connor has been corrupted by her life as a working woman
and a fun- seeking sexual adventuress. She only becomes a match for the
terminator when she has been impregnated by Reese and placed in
touch with a more ancient femaleness. Once she has become a mother
( and the pro-choice lobby would presumably claim that she has become
a mother at the moment of conception) , she is able to fght.
Pro- gun control? In the consciously mythic fnal sequence, before
Sarah drives off on a road to somewhere that is half-Bethlehem, half
Armageddon, we see her bright, silver handgun nestling on her lap
against her rounded pregnant stomach, soft and hard, rounded and
phallic, nurturer and killer, brougt together in an image that would be
appropriate for a portrait of the Madonna in the chapel at the
headquarters of the National Rfe Association.

These matters could remain richly inchoate in The Terminator but
for the sequel, where the budget was so much higher, the politics had to
be made clearly balanced and acceptable. Cameron was a Hollywood
insider by now, and the once dark issues are brought into the light and
urbanely defused and satirised. Rather than buy his weapons from a gun
shop, the newly programmed terminator avails himself of Sarah
Connor' s secret arms cache in the hispanicised south of California.
' Excellent, ' the terminator comments on seeing the ranks of machine
guns . This might seem dangerously like a legitimisation of crackpot
survivalism, but Cameron permits us to laugh at the excessiveness of it
all . Schwarzenegger picks up a ridiculously large machine-gun. 'That' s
defnitely you, ' comments little John Connor. Later i n the flm, the script
itself anxiously makes the feminist point that the Stanford professor
Li nda Hami l ton i n
Terminator 2
T H E T E R M I N AT O R
might have inferred from the frst fm, as Sarah Connor attacks a male
scientist, and all males scientists, for creating the bomb and all those
other technological horrors, when they are unable to perform the true
creative act of making a baby. The feminist point is made, but also
undercut as we are shown that she is ranting, and as her son calls on her
to be more constructive. Is it pro-feminist with a sense of humour? Is it
exposing feminist cant? Whatever. Ad that' s the way it' s meant to be.
terinator 2 is a nice flm i n which everybody is saved, including
Jesus, as, in a last-minute alteration to the story, the father lays down his
life so that the son doesn' t have to suffer after all. But The Terinator
retains its uncomfortable darkness, as unrelenting as the detached arm
and torso of the smashed terminator, dragging itself after Sarah. We
want what we like to be light and bright and civic-minded like
Terinator 2, so why is it that The Terinator stays with us ? Wlliam
Hazlitt explored this unsettling issue in his great essay on Coriolanus
( frst published in 1 8 1 6) . For poetry read cinema:
The cause of the people is i ndeed but little calculated as a subject
for poetry: i t admits of rhetori c, whi ch goes into argument and
explanation, but i t presents no immediate or distinct images to the
mind, 'no jutting frieze, buttress, or coigne of vantage' for poetry 'to
make its pendant bed and procreant cradle i n. ' The language of
poetry naturally falls in with the language of power. The imaginati on
is an exaggerati ng and exclusive faculty: i t takes from one thing to
add to another: i t accumulates ci rcumstances together to give the
greatest possi ble effect to a favourite object. The understandi ng i s a
di vi di ng and measuring faculty: i t judges of things not according to
thei r immediate impression on the mind, but according to thei r
relations t o one another. The one is a monopolising faculty, which
seeks the greatest quantity of ultimate good, by justice and
proportion. The one is an ari stocratical, the other a republican
faculty. The princi ple of poetry is a very anti-levelling pri nci ple.
I t aims at effect, it exists by contrast. It admits of no medium.
B F I M ODER N C LAS S I C S
I t i s every thi ng by excess. I t ri ses above the ordinary standard of
sufferings and cri mes. It presents a dazzling appearance. It shows
i ts head turretted, crowned, and crested. Its front is gi lt and blood
stained. Before it ' i t carries noi se, and behind it leaves tears. ' It has
its altars and its vi cti ms, sacri fi ces, human sacri fi ces. Ki ngs, pri ests,
nobles, are its trai n-bearers, tyrants and slaves its executioners. -
' Carnage is its daughter. ' - Poetry is ri ght-royal. It puts the i ndi vi dual
for the species, the one above the infinite many, might before ri ght.
A l i on hunting a flock of sheep or a herd of wi ld asses i s a more
poetical object than they; and we even take part wi th the lordly beast,
because our vanity or some other feeling makes us disposed to place
ourselves i n the si tuation of the strongest party . . . . We had rather be
the oppressor than the oppressed. The love of power in ourselves
and the admirati on of it i n others are both natural to man: the one
makes him a tyrant, the other a slave. Wrong dressed out i n pri de,
pomp, and ci rcumstance, has more attraction than abstract ri ght.
Wen Judy Garland says goodbye to Bert Lahr at the end of The
Wizard of Oz, she admits that she misses the way he behaved when he
was terrifed. The reprogrammed terminator of the sequel who doesn' t
kill people and dies to save humanity may be sweet, but any honest
flmgoer preferred the homicidal cyborg who murdered women and
policemen. This apparent perversity of response is one of the dark
pleasures of flmgoing, in which we respond to vitality rather than
morality. It' s why we nice people enjoy watching Jimmy Cagney slam a
grapefruit into Mae Clarke' s face in Public Enemy, a flm that paraded
itself as an indictment of gangsterism. But when the brilliance of Malcolm
McDowell' s performance, and our emotional distancing from his victims,
makes us enjoy the beatings and rapings of A Cockwork Orange, it is time
to start worrying. But worrying about what ? Stanley Kubrick? The whole
irresponsible potency of the cinematic image? Ourselves?
As for the flm' s religious allegory, it should be remembered that
John Connor shares his initials with James Cameron as well as Jesus
Christ.
T H E T E R M I N AT OR
7 Watchi ng The Terminator
The frst hour of The Terinator divides into twenty-fve scenes. Wth the
imaginary Stanford professor replaced by a notional frst-time viewer, the
effect might be something like thi s.
1. The Los Ageles 2029 caption is seen over a desolate, post-holocaust
landscape, an amusing enough visual j oke. We see some fying ships
shooting ray guns, isolated skirmishes, in a sequence that was not,
incidentaly directed by James Cameron. The special efects are
nothing startling, even for 1984, but we're mildly curious. There is
an introductory text. We don't usually pay much attention to these
clotted explanations of why Kng John happens be on the throne or
why we are in a galaxy long ago and far away, but the statement that
the war will be fought ' not in the future but our present. Tonight'
is a surprise.
The credits. There' s nobody we' ve heard of except for that
Schwarzenegger person who was in Conan the Barbarian. What' s a
terminator?
2. Back in the future, no, it' s the present. A truck is lfing garbage.
A dull few seconds and then some fashes of electricity. A naked man
standing up. A muscleman. Is this a gay flm? He looks purposefl and
walks forward to look out across Los Angeles. Now he encounters some
punks and demands their clothes . A great scene, grisly and horribly
fnny. The sudden extra violence makes us wonder who this man is.
We' re sitting up now. It' s starting to l ook good.
3. A police siren, an alley, another naked man. Smaller. He's hurt,
smoking. Ae they together? He is chased by the police along small
streets. By now we've guess sed that the two men are from the fture
world we saw at the begining. What are they up to? He grabs a rife
from an unattended police car. This is promising. How are the to men
B F I M O D E R N C L A S S I C S
going to meet up with each other? He rips a page out of the phonebook
with the name Sarah Connor.
4. Linda Hamilton, with a B-movie hairstyle, on a motorscooter. Arriving
at a burger restaurant, she clocks in as Sarah Connor.
5. The big man breaks into a car, punching the window out with his
hand. This i s more like it.
6. Some rather tired sitcom-style harassment of Sarah in the burger bar.
She spills a drink over a customer and a boy slips an ice cream into her
apron. Is there a point to thi s? It seems a little second-rate.
7. The big man enters a gun shop. This is another great scene, as he
acquires a preposterously large armoury. What can he want all that for?
Dick Miller ' s lines are snappy and there is the sudden killing at the end.
8. The other man saws the barrel off his single rife. What' s he up to?
9. The big man, looking for a phonebook, tugs another large man away
from it without even looking at him. From off-screen: ' Hey, man, you've
got a serious attitude problem. ' We' re starting to enjoy the
Schwarzenegger scenes. He' s looking for Sarah Connor.
1 0. A car drives over a toy truck in a suburban street. Schwarzenegger
approaches the front door of a house and asks for Sarah Connor. Is he
really going to kill this ordinary-looking woman? Yes .
1 1 . Taking a break at work, Sarah i s shown the item on the news.
1 2. Reese is stealing a car next to a construction site. Flash-forward to a
battle with the Skynet craft. Reese is one of the combatants. The
sequence is exciting, brutal. This is no sanitised view of future warfare.
T H E T E R M I NAT O R
Almost everybody is killed. He wakes up back at the building site and
drives away.
1 3 . Sarah is in her apartment with her friend Ginger, getting ready to go
out. The silly j oke about Matt ' s dirty phone-cal to the wrong woman. A
poorly acted, overstated scene.
1 4. Our frst view of the police detectives, who seem sleazy and
incompetent. We are taken by surprise by hearing about the second
Sarah Connor murder. This is getting exciting.
1 5. Back to the apartment where Sarah has been stood up. Why is this
airhead so important? She heads out to a movie on her own. She' s being
followed by Reese.
1 6. The police again and the press. The murders followed the listing in
the phonebook. Our Sarah is next on the list. Aren' t the police going to
protect her? They prove incapable even of contacting her. The police
chief is drinking bad coffee, smoking, taking pill s. They phone her
apartment but Ginger is in bed with Matt and they don' t answer.
1 7. Sarah sees the news on T in a pizza restaurant. The phone doesn' t
work. She walks out and, noticing that she' s being followed, ducks into
the Tech Noir and Reese wals past. She phones the police. Athe lines
are busy.
18. Arnie is approaching the apartment buildig. We've seen our share
of slasher movies and we know what ' s going to happen. Mer kl g
Ginger, Arnie hears the answering machine: it' s Sarah, giving away her
location. There' s going to be a showdown.
19. Sarah has fnally got through to the police. They tell her to stay
where she is, that she' ll be safe. She puts the phone down and Arnie
B F I M O D E R I\ C L A S S I C S
arrives at the club immediately. A exciting gun battle, culminating in
Reese blasting Arnie through the window. He gets up unhurt. Is this just
going to be another Haloween rip-off? Reese reaches his hand out to
Sarah and says simply: ' Come with me if you want to live. ' Reese and
Sarah escape down an alley. Arnie jumps on their car and punches
through the windscreen. They throw him off and become involved in a
car chase, while Reese shouts out an explanation about the terminator,
who has purloined a police car. We know what sort of flm we're in now.
Ater a chase in a car-park, Reese and Sarah are caught by the police and
the terminator is nowhere to be seen.
20. We' re in the police station. Are we safe for a while? Sarah meets an
absurd movie psychiatrist.
2 L The terminator is climbing into his room. His face is damaged, his
hand paralysed. Badly injured, he reaches for a scalpel and slices into his
arm. We aren' t cheated, we get to see the pullies and levers. The hand is
working once more.
22. Reese is interrogated by the psychiatrist who asks the questions
we' ve been wanting to ask, about why he didn't bring ray guns along and
all that stuff.
23 . The terminator turns his attention to his wrecked eye. He grabs the
scalpel, to anticipatory groans from the audience. Is he really going to?
Are we going to see it ? He is. We are. He plunges it all the way in. We're
not spared anything. He puts on sunglasses ( the manufacturer' s name
on the frame is Gargoyle) . He picks up to large guns. He' s not going
to storm the police station, is he?
24. Back to Reese' s interrogation, which is being viewed on a video now,
by the police, Sarah and the psychiatrist. Reese says that the terminator
will fnd her. That' s what he does. Nobody can stop him. The detective
T HE TER M I N AT O R
lies her down on his couch, covers her with his j acket and tels her that
she is safe. Aer all, what could happen to her in a police station?
25. The greatest scene in the flm. The psychiatrist leaves the station and
takes us by surprise by passing the terminator who is on his way in. (A
example of Cameron' s ruthless sense of humour: the one character that
we would actively like to see get blasted, the psychiatrist, escapes by
pure chance. ) Then the terminator delivers the classic ' I'll be back' line.
The long pause afer he has gone may remind us of the moments in Jaws
when we are waiting for something terrible to happen. What is the
terminator going to do? Then the car crashes through. Can this really be
happening? He wanders through the police station blasting policeman
after policeman. In Cameron' s words, recalling the two great set-pieces
in Films and Filming:
Ah, the disco, the police station and all that - they clearly reflect a
warped childhood! Maybe it's because I got a lot of speeding tickets
when I was a kid - it's my catharsis . . . . I t' s not intended to make
some grand statement about a pOlice state or whatever. But it may
relate to the idea of the terminator in all of us, and the fact that some
people allow the machine to take over a little too much and that's
what makes them boring bureaucrats or officious little police
officers. So when Arnold comes into the police station there's an
irony there that tickled me as I wrote it.
It' s a glorious slapstick sequence, that makes you laugh because of
its excess and famboyance and lack of shame. Are we really allowed to
enjoy all these cops getting blown away? Reese and Sarah sneak out the
back and escape in a stolen car. The terminator shoots at them but they
get away. The screen fades slowly to black and we slump in our seats a
little. Exactly an hour of the flm has passed, and it is our frst chance to
pause for breath.
60 B F I M O DER N C L AS S I C S
Even a summary of these scenes gives a favour of the flm' s
momentum which is increased by suddenly dragging us forard more
quickly than we expect . From the murder of the frst Sarah Connor
straight to Sarah watching the report of it on the news . The police
reacting to the two Sarah Connor killings when we didn' t know the
second one had occurred. And Cameron gives us a start by impossibly
but efectively telescoping the time scheme of events as the terminator
catches up with Sarah. For example: he hears Sarah' s voice on the
telephone answering machine warning Ginger, saying she is at the Tech
Noir and that she will phone the police again. Cut to Sarah talking to
the detective who tells her to stay put and that a police car is on its way.
(Who will get there frst, the police or the terminator? ) Cut to the
terminator entering the Tech Noir.
In the Tech Nai r
The summary also demonstrates Schwarzenegger ' s dominance of
the flm. Cameron rightly obsered that it was a flm that took audiences
pleasurably by surprise. It was better than they had expected and its
reputation quickly spread by word of mouth, the best advertising a flm
can have. Of the frst twenty-fve scenes, there are seven really good
T H E T E R M I N AT O R
ones, of the kind that you might tell people about afterwards, and they
all feature Schwarzenegger: the encounter with the punks, the gun shop,
pulling the man out of the phone booth, the gun battle in the Tech Noir,
the auto-surgery on the arm and the eye, and the battle at the police
station. They are all, in their diferent ways, funny. Sometimes the
humour arises from other characters - Dick Miller in the gun shop,
the big man telling the terminator he has an attitude problem - but
we laugh because of Schwarzenegger' s impassivity. One of the best
comic tactics in cinema is that of letting things happen around you.
Oliver Hardy did it, and so did Cary Grant. By contrast, nobody
laughs much at the tired jokes about the police psychiatrist or Sarah' s
pet reptil e.
The dullest scenes are those involving Sarah, but this serves the
story equally well . We feel we ought to be scared on her behalf, and
we are a bit, but we also want to see the terminator again and we also
think she' s better of being driven out of her vapid daily existence.
Like Cameron' s other screen heroines, Sarah Connor only becomes .
chic when she is in combat gear and carrying a gun.
Most of what people remember about The Trinator comes from
this frst hour of the f. What remains is more conventional, and
Cameron' s principal challenge was to sustain the extraordinary
excitement he had created. To the extent that he succeeds, it is because
of his remarkable economy of means. The rest of the flm consists of
what are in effect three sequences: the interlude between Sarah and
Kyle; the long chase culminating in the factory, and the highly effective
kicker featuring Sarah in the Mexican gas station where we lear how
Reese' s photograph of her was taken. This second half is more routine
than the frst, yet it is when the flm is at its most formulaic, in the fnal
chase in the factory that Cameron can show his trump card: Stan
Winston' s brilliant model of the cyborg' s endoskeleton. This model is
both terrifing and comic, with its dead man' s grin. Just at the moment
when the fm is starting to seem cheap, Cameron shows us the only
expensive special efect he had.
BFI M O D E R N C LASSI CS
8 Afterl i fe
The absence of a major publicity campaign accompanying the release
of The Terinator was itself an advantage because there was no hype
which critics and @mgoers felt impelled to resist. Despite having been
immediately acclaimed and having become a commercial success, it had
the air of a B-picture underdog, of a cult @m. Audiences felt they were
discovering it for themselves. It was a meeting of minds between the
flm-maker and his audience. James Cameron had known what he was
doing. Audiences recognised what he had done and applauded him for
it. Dan Scapperotti, reviewing the @m in the May 1 985 issue of the
American SF flm magazine Cine!antastique, spoke for almost everybody
when he hailed a flm that ' manages to be both derivative and original at
the same time' and rej oiced that 'not since Road Wrrior has the genre
exhibited so much exuberant carnage' . He concluded with perfect
foresight:
The Terminator i s an example of sci ence fi cti on/lorror at i ts best,
intelligently integrating today' s hi gh tech special effects wi th a
vi able, fri ghtening story. Cameron's no-nonsense approach wi ll make
hi m a sought-after commodity in an industry that has discovered bi g
bucks i n thi s type of entertainment.
The parodic, schlock movie critic from Dallas, Joe Bob Briggs,
hailed the flm ecstatically: 'We' re talking drive-in heaven. ' The flm was
taken seriously as well. Time magazine selected it as one of the ten best
flms of 1 984, describing it as ' the smartest looking L night town movie
since The Driver' . The reception in Britain the following year was equally
favourable. Julian Petley' s review in Monthly Film Bulletin began:
Not to be confused with the Exterminator series, whi ch is made to
seem very small beer indeed, The Terminator announces itself as a
deli ri ous, ri p-roaring, all-stops-out mating of Mad Max 2 and Blade
T H E T E R M I N AT O R
Runner: a union which grafts the tremendous momentum of the
former on to the elaborate mise en scene of the later.
Petley praised the flm' s script, special efects, design and the
performance of Schwarzenegger. He ofred no criticisms at all.
The flm Was also lucky in being released at a time when it could
beneft from the newly burgeoning video market. In video rentals for
1985, the flm was second only to Krate Kid.
The Trinator's reputation has remained high. It was scarcely
controversial, for example, when Esquire magazine selected it as 'the flm
of the eighties' . Apart from the fm' s obvious qualities, for which it had
been widely praised, the flm' s longevity was aided once more by the
budgetary limitations under which Cameron had been working. He had
been forced to suggest the fturistic world, rather than show us its
imagined technology in detail, and even the brilliantly realised cyborg
itself was only shown to us in glimpses'. There were few of the then
state-of-the-art computer graphics that date so quickly (the graphics
seen on the computer screens in 2001 and Alien are good examples of
what now seem amusingly primitive) .
Cameron was immediately questioned about the possibiity of a
sequel. He responded pessimisticaly because by then he had fallen out
badly with the producers who owned the rights. But as Cameron and
Schwarzenegger both became major forces in the flm industry the idea
became commercially irresistible and it became possible once more
when Cameron was able to buy the rights back.
Trinator 2: Judgment Day is a story in itself. By contrast with its
predecessor, it made uSe of innovative but highly costly special effects.
Yet, against many expectations, it showed that a flm costing more than
twce as much as Heaven's Gate could be a major fnancial success .
It also forms the crucial evidence for the surviving reputation of the frst
flm. The greatest compliment that Trinator 2 pays to its predecessor
is that it does much more than simply carry on the story In a subtle and
sophisticated way it recapitulates and comments on it. Cameron was
B F I M O D E R N C LAS S I C S
aware that Terinator 2, with a budget almost twenty times greater than
its predecessor, had to be comprehensible to an audience who had never
seen The Trinator. He also knew that a large part of his audience had
seen The Trinator repeatedly on video and that they would pick up on
the tiniest references.
The very frst caption of Terinator 2 - ' Los Angeles 2029' - is
itself a shock, simply because it is the same caption that began The
Terinator. Is this succession or recapitulation? This pre-credit sequence
repeats a series of motifs and devices from the original : the cyborgs and
fying ships, the ramshackle vehicles, the killings. Cameron is
demonstrating his faithfulness to the original, but also showing how
much more he can do this time around. Fans of the flm knew about the
limitations there had previously been in what Cameron could show us.
The initial display of conspicuous consumption, with more ships, far
more soldiers, and a whole army of cyborgs, promises us more than we
got before. Cameron then surprises us again. In the original, John
Connor was like Jesus in flms like Ben-Hur - too important for us to see
directly. Now we see him conducting a battle - paradoxically a battle
which, as a result of what happens during the rest of the fm, wlnever
take place.
The frst appearance of the terminator is once again a conscious
reconstruction, down to the disturbance of the stray newspaper sheets
on the ground in anticipation of the arrival. The scene is recreated in a
pleasurable way but with more detail, more special efects and, as the
scene progresses, the tongue frmly in the cheek. Even the frst
appearance of the terminator' s computer display i s a joke. Te bar-room
tough blows smoke in his face and the caption appears: ' scan carcinogen
vapour' .
After the terminator of the Reagan years, this i s evidently the
kinder, gentler Schwarzenegger of the Bush administration. In the frst
flm, he obtained his clothes by killing a punk in a vigilante act. Now he
strolls into a Country and Wester bar, itself a venue of cartoonish
toughness. The cowboy parody is overt, and when the camera pans up
T H E T E R M I N AT OR
his leather-clad body when he purloins the bar owner' s sunglasses
and screeches away to the sound of blues music, we' re meant to laugh
and cheer.
Many of the slighter references to the previous f are slyly comic.
The grisly psychiatrist, Silberman, flls in a group of his students about
the institutionalisation of Sarah Connor: ' She believes that a machine
called a terminator, which looks human of course, was sent back throug
h
time to kill her. ' A student responds : 'That' s original. ' This is, one
a

sumes, an unusually easygoing James Cameron joke about a scenario

which was accused of many things, but never of excessive originality.
Grimly, we realise that Sarah has become Reese. She is now the
one who is treated as mad, burdened by the pain of knowledge. Like
Reese she is trained to kill but also tormented by dreams of the future.
Terminator 2
And later when she heads down to the hispanic world of California' s
southern border, we notice that she now speaks fuent Spanish,
compared with her inability in the fnal scene of The Terinator even to
ask for petrol without a phrasebook.
Terinator 2 contains visual references to its predecessor, ofen of
6 6 B F I M O D E R N C LAS S I C S
the most frivolous and enjoyable kind, in almost every scene. The
camera focuses on the motto of the LD, 'to serve and protect' , with
equal irony, whether it is at the moment when Reese steals a shotgun or
when the TI OOO steps out at the house of John Connor ' s fosterparents.
We recognise the truck driven i n pursuit of John Connor as a full- size
version of the one that was crushed by the terminator' s car before the
murder of the frst Sarah Connor. As before, the frst encounter between
the two time travellers, ends with Schwarzenegger being thrown through
a window.
The lengthy explanations delivered by the terminator to John are
a conscious recapitulation of Michael Biehn' s notoriously indigestible
explanations in The Terinator but Schwarzenegger is trumping Biehn
by showing that he can do them better. He has the considerable
advantage of delivering them without expression, much as Leonard
Nimoy' s Mr Spock was able to do. He is also given some better lines.
In response to the question of who sent him, Schwarzenegger is able to
say: 'You did. Thirty-fve years from now. ' Many of the jokes depend
on shared memories . The terminator tells John that he can' t go home
because that is the place where the TI OOO would try to reacquire him.
Really? 'I would, ' he replied. A funny response, but funnier for those
who remember that ths is precisely what he did in the previous flm.
Slasher horror is now made comic.
Other echoes of The Terminator relate to the humanisation of the
terminator in Terinator 2. Aer the famously laconic role in the frst
flm, John instructs the terminator in teenage slang - no problemo; chill
out; dickwad; hasta la vista, baby - thus parodying Schwarzenegger' s
penchant for catchphrases as well as providing hm with them.
In a more sustained way, memories of the frst fl form an
implied counterpoint to events in the second flm. Cameron obviously
expects a large section of his audience to be so familiar with The
Terinator that they can register the constant ironies or contrasts.
When, i n what may be the best moment of Terinator 2, the terminator
imitating-John speaks to the Tl OOO-imitating-John' s foster-mother, we
T H E T E R M I N AT O R
recognise it as a variation on the phone-call between Sarah Connor and
the terminator-imitating-her mother. Only here John is saved from giving
his whereabouts away
Sometimes the references show Cameron consciously raising the
stakes. What could be safer than the police station in The Terinator?
The answer is a high-security mental hospital. The psychiatrist seems
once more to be leaving j ust as the murderous terminator arrives. Wil
he get away with it again? At the last moment, gratifngly, he is taken
hostage by Sarah and forced to face up to the reality of the terminators.
Where a cowering Sarah was previously dragged to safety by Michael
Biehn, here she manages most of the escape by herself. When Michael
Biehn came to see the sequel, he must have smiled rueflly at the
moment in the asylum scene, when Schwarzenegger is given Biehn' s own
best line from the frst f: ' Come with me, if you want to live. ' Except
that Schwarzenegger is given much more time in which to say it, one of
the benefts of star power.
Cameron is aware of his responsibilities as the director of a
hundred-million-dollar proj ect that needs to appeal to everybody. So we
get a chance to see Arnie toting an even larger gun than he had in
The Terminator but we can, if we wish, also reassure ourselves that it
is parodic. Wth almost chg skill, Cameron sets out to redeem
everything that might have seemed dark or irresponsible in his original
f. When Sarah attempts to assassinate Dyson - and thus prevent h
inventing the technology that wl cause the nuclear holocaust - she
becomes the terminator (just as the terminator is becoming human) ,
even down to the orange dot of her laser sight on the back of his head.
We didn' t care much about the murders of the wrong Sarah Connor but
we are now made to feel what it might be to kill someone you don't
know.
Later in the same scene, the terminator is even allowed a
redemptive version of the stripping of the fesh from his arm that we
finched at before. Now he is doing it, in praiseworthy fashion, as the
only means of convincing Dyson of the truth of their story. During the
B F I M O D E R N C LAS S I C S
shoot-out at the Cyberdyne headquarters, the terminator is even given a
chance to deliver the ' I'll be back' line in a new, reassuring context, as
Sarah and John are trapped in the exploded building. Ad sure enough
he crashes back into the building with a police van, not to kill but to
save. Presumably only considerations of time prevented him removing
one of his eyes and donating it to a local home for blind orphans.
The fnal chase is a sustained reference to the chase at t he same
climactic point of The Terminator. The Tl OOO' s fnal line, like the
terminator' s, is ' Get out' but is delivered now not in the cab of a lorry
but in the cockpit of a helicopter in fight. The chase is a parody in a
variety of ways, and this time the lorry is carrying liquid nitrogen,
appearing to freeze the terminator rather than to burn him up.
In the fnal battle in the factory Sarah is given Arni e' s phrase,
' Fuck you' , where it is used, redemptively once more, as an assertion of
maternal fdelity rather than of inhumanity. The terminator seems to
have been destroyed, as Reese was at the end of The Terminator, and on
a frst viewing we expect that Sarah will triumph and blow the Tl OOO
i nto the vat of molten metal. But j ust as we have already seen that, i n
thi s alienated modern world, a computer is a better father than the
candidate furnished by the authorities, so he is al so a better hero and he
returns at the moment when Sarah runs out of ammunition. The curious
moral seems to be that just as humans had so abnegated their
responsibilities that they handed over the responsibility for their defence
to a computer defence system, so they need a computer to save them as
well . In the fnal recapitulation of the frst flm, Sarah presses the
destruct button, but this time not as an act of .assertion but as an
acquiescence in the heroic self-immolation of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Terminator 2 i s a skilful entertainment, and confrmed that James
Cameron is a master of the sequel. Perhaps he was educated by the
experience of having his Rambo: First Blood, Part I script rewritten by
Sylvester Stallone. Cameron' s Aliens and Terminator 2 are both excellent
examples of how to be both faithful and unfaithful and original, notably
superior to such sequels as Predator 2 and Die Harder. But the sequel is
T H E T E R M I N ATO R
a smaler thing than The Terinator. In the fnal scene, the terminator
staggers forward afer his doughty victory against the TI OOO: 'I need a
vacation, ' he says, in the fnal relinquishing of any pretence that this is
not Arnie, winking at us with his one functioning eye. Amusing as he is,
the terminator in Terminator 2 has become a sitcom character, more
Herman Munster than Boris Karlof, with his dry delivery of a line, his
bemused attempts to master the oddities of suburban American life, his
sententious ' but seriously' moral s: ' It is in your nature to destroy
yourselves. '
Among the shocks experienced on returning from Terinator 2 to
The Terinator is that it is about fesh as well as metal. The terminator
isn't just burned away at the end of the flm. He gradually decays and
disintegrates from scene to scene, removing pieces of his body,
decomposing. Terinator 2 humanised the idea of the cyborg, made
him civic minded, just as its star Schwarzenegger had made himself
admired as a public fgure above and beyond any of his individual flms.
But when President Schwarzenegger has entered the White House,
The Terinator will still be there, unforgettable, untameabl e: the endo
skeleton in his cupboard.
As for James Cameron himself, his career after The Terminator
cannot help but seem a falling-off, but fom his perspective what does
this matter? Wen he began flming, he was a failing B-movie director
on the edge of oblivion. Wile his critics sit at home writing about other
people' s flms, James Cameron is in Hollywood with a fat production
deal and fnal cut. Here, as in so many other ways, The Terinator
achieved what it was meant to achieve.
7 0 B F I M O D E R N C LA S S I C S
Credi ts
THE TERMI NATOR Assi stant di rectors Speci al vi sual efects
USA
Betsy Magruder, Thomas Fantasy I I Fi l m Effects,
1984
I rvi ne, Robert Roda (product i on supervi sor)
lesl i e Hunt l ey
Di rector
Screenplay
James Cameron
James Cameron, Gal e Rear screen
Anne Hurd projecti oni st
Producti on companies
Geral d McCl ai n
Ci nema '84, A Greenberg
Additi onal di alogue
Brothers Partnershi p, A
Wi l l i am Wi sher Jnr, Opti cals
Paci fi c Western Producti on,
Ray Mercer and Company,
A Euro Fi l m Fundi ng Ltd,
Photography (effects) I mage 3, laurel
Feat ure, An Ori on Pi ctures
Adam Greenberg Kl i ck, Phi l Huff,
Rel ease
(consul tant) Mark Sawi cki
Colour process
Executive producers
CFI ; pr i nts by Deluxe Matte arti st
John Dal y, Derek Gi bson
Ken Marschal l
Colour consultant
Producer
Peter Si l verman Graphi c ani mati on
Gal e Anne Hurd
efects
Second unit Ernest D, Far i no
Producti on executive
photographer
Bruce M, Kerner
Chuck Col wel l Editor
Mark Gol dbl att
Producti on co-ordi nator
Speci al vi sual efects
Kathy Breen
photographer Associ ate edi tor
John Huneck Mi chael B. l oecher
Producti on manager
Donna Smi t h
Process photographer Art di rector
Aust i n McKi nney George Costel l o
Locati on manager
Joseph A. Li uzzi
I nsert photographer Set decorator
Anne Coffey Mari a Rebman Caso
Post-producti on
supervisor
Camera operator Set dressers
Donna Smi th
(second unit) Ci ndy Rebman, Greg Wolf
Sean Mcli n, Al ec
Second unit di rectors
Hi rschfel d Sceni c artists
Jean-Paul Ouel l ette,
Amy McGary, Kri sten
(effects) Stan Wi nson
McGary
T H E T E R M I N ATO R
Speci al effects Motoman robots Make-up
supervi sor operated by Jefferson Dawn, (second
Gene Warren Jnr Yaskawa El ectri c Ameri ca uni t) Kyl e Tucy
Speci al effects Musi c Title desi gn
co-ordi nator Brad Fi edel Ernest D. Fari no
Ernest D. Fari no
Musi c consultant Supervi si ng sound
Speci al effects Budd Carr edi tor
Roger George, Frank Davi d Campl i ng
DeMarco Musi c post-producti on
co-ordi nator Sound recordi st
Pyrotechni cs and fi re Robert Randl es Ri chard Li ghtstone
effects
Joseph Vi skoci l Musi c editor So
u
nd re-recordi sts
Emi l i e Robertson Terry Porter, Davi d J.
Termi nator speci al Hudson, Mel Metcal fe
effects Songs
Stan Wi nston (creator) , 'You Can' t Do That' by Sound effects edi tors
Shane Mahan , Tom Ri cky Phi l l i ps Gi l Marchant, Ji m Kl i nger,
Woodruff, John ' Photopl ay' by Tahnee Ji m Fri tch, Greg Di l l on,
Rosengrant, Ri chard Cai n, Pug Baker, Jonathan Horace Manzanares, Gary
Landon, Bri an Wade, Cai n Shepherd, Mi ke Le Mare,
Davi d Mi l l er, Jack Bri cker ' Bur ni n' i n the Thi rd Karol a Storr, Rob Mi l l er
Degr ee' by Tahnee Cai n,
Termi nator mechani cal Mugs Cai n, Dave Amato, Sound efects
effects Brett Tuggl e, Ri cky Phi l l i ps, Mayfl ower Fi l ms,
El l i s Burman Jnr , Bob performed by Tryangl z (synthesi sed) Robert
Wi l l i ams ' Pi ctures of You' by Jay Garrett
Ferguson, performed by
Termi nator stop motion 1 6mm Foley arti sts
Peter Kl ei now, ( model ) ' I nti macy' by Li nn Van Hek, Gordon Dani el , John Post
Doug Beswi ck Joe Dol ce, performed by
Li nn Van Hek Producti on assi stants
Models Scott Javi ne, (set) Deborah
Mi chael Joyce Costume desi gn A. Heber t , George Parra,
(supervi si ng) , Gary Hi l ary Wri ght, (supervi sor) (speci al vi sual effects) Don
Rhodaback, Paul Kassl er Deborah Everton Bl and, Jane A. Pahl man,
( second uni t) Terry
GMF robot operated by Costumer (second unit) Benedi ct, (costumes)
El l i son Machi nery jul i a Gombert Vi rgi ni a Hartman
B F I M O D E R N C LA S S I C S
Stunt co-ordi nator
Ken Fri tz
Stunts
Gary McLarty, Frank
Orsatt i , Peter Turner, Tom
Hart, Gene Hart l i ne, Hi l l
Farnswort h, Tony Cecere,
Jeff Dashnow, Mar i on
Gr een, Ji m Stern, Jean
Mal ahni , J. Suzanne Fi sh
Ani mal s
Bi r ds and Ani mal s
Unl i mi ted
1 07 mi nutes
9, 633 feet
Arnol d Schwarzenegger
Terminator
Mi chael Bi ehn
Kyle Reese
Li nda Hami l ton
Sarah Connor
Pau l Wi nfi el d
Traxler
Lance Henri ksen
Vukovich
Ri ck Rossovi ch
Matt
Bess Motta
Ginger
Earl Boen
Silberman
Di ck Mi l ler
Pawn shop clerk
Shawn Schepps
Nancy
Bruce M. Kerner
Desk sergeant
Franco Col umbu
Future terminator
Bi l l Paxton
Punk leader
Brad Rearden, Bri an
Thompson
Punks
Wi l l i am Wi sher Jnr. , Ken
Fri tz, Tom Oberhaus
Policemen
Ed Dogans
Cop i n alley
Joe Farago
T anchorman
Hetti e Lynne Hurtes
T anchorwoman
Tony Mi relez
Station attendant
Phi l i p Gordon, Anthony
J. Truj i l l o
Mexican boys
Stan Yale
Derelict
AI Kahn, Leslie Morri s,
Hugh Farri ngton, Harriet
Medi n, Loree Frazi er,
James Ral ston
Customers
Norman Fri edman
Cleaning man
Barbara Powers
Ticket taker
Wayne Stone
Tanker driver
Davi d Pi erce
Tanker partner
John E. Bri stol
Phone booth man
Webster Wi l li ams
Reporer
Patri ck Pi nney
Bar customer
Bi l l W. Ri chmond
Barender
Chi no ' Fats' Wi l l i ams
Truck driver
Gregory Robbi ns
Motel customer
Mari anne Muel i erleile
Wrong Sarah
John Durban
Sentr