The Terminator

The sci-fi genius of James Cameron is a classic genre now. The battle for the future that is being fought today with Arnold Schwarzenegger in his best role. Each frame of film is soaked in a wonderful atmosphere and the tension could be cut by a knife. Iconic moments await on every corner and Cameron’s sense for detail is also incredible (the little joke about cigarettes, the close up of the careering truck). The screenplay is faultless and believable in the sense that it doesn’t contain anything too unreal. The special effects are excellent for the time and everybody’s acting, headed by Arnold, is immaculate. Just add the best theme music of all time and we get a unique movie experience. (19/11/2006)

Before The Terminator, James Cameron was an unknown aspiring director who did not offer any guarantees of box office success. He had just finished filming the routine B-movie Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, which did terribly at the box office, and he also worked as an assistant director on several projects, the most significant of which was Carpenter's Escape from New York, where he helped create the special effects. However, Cameron dreamed of a grand, uncompromising, and gritty sci-fi film. His script caught the attention of Orion Studios, and he was able to start filming. The result was a dark action sci-fi film with the successful casting of the rising action star Arnold Schwarzenegger as the cyborg. Originally, the studio suggested Schwarzenegger to Cameron for the role of the soldier later played by Michael Biehn, but Cameron understood the advantage of Schwarzenegger's dog-like, emotionless face, which perfectly suited the character of a nerveless cyborg. Additionally, the film featured dynamic editing by Mark Goldblatt, a clever camera that captured some shots from the cyborg's point of view, and atmospheric music by Brad Fiedel. The character of the cyborg was created by Stan Winston. Cameron decided not to spare the audience and filled the story with corpses. All these ingredients together meant huge box office success and the birth of a hit that launched Cameron's stellar career and confirmed Arnold Schwarzenegger's status as an action star, for whom The Terminator became a defining role. The script included, among other things, an elaborate time loop and a few interesting scenes from the dark future. Overall impression: 75%. (18/01/2008)

Suffocating and adrenaline-fueled sci-fi that time's tooth can't seem to gnaw away. Arnold probably will never inspire as much respect and fear again. Moreover, without this series, temporal paradoxes and the entire science fiction genre would be completely different today. Ideas like the one about a robot that has to change the past in order to alter the future occasionally come up, but fitting them into the right screenplay is already a form of cinematic art. (02/04/2006)

After his debut in Piranha 2, where he was more of a puppet in the hands of an Italian producer, John Cameron found himself in Terminator and despite the low budget delivered a technically proficient action flick that is a perfect image of 1980s tastes, with the hard-bodies cult of the period, typical synthesizer sound and violence that is you no longer see in today's impotent times. (18/09/2015)

It's said that "behind every great man is a woman spinning the foos men", but it's often more likely that behind every great man is a woman editing his scripts. Cameron was socially on the level of a ten-year-old boy at the time of The Terminator, which is consistent with Peter Jackson's mental age when he made his early films. But he had Fran Walsh on hand to create some sort of people out of the characters in the script. Cameron didn't have that luxury, and that's why everyone here is behaving the way an eight-year-old thinks adults behave. While this can actually be a big plus in many other films, unfortunately it doesn't fit here in this otherwise brutal, dirty urban horror, where an unstoppable absolute evil presses on through a rain-soaked anonymous big city full of strange creatures in pursuit of a hapless victim unable to rely on the basic principles of how to stay safe. Broad daylight? Don't care. Club full of people? Don't care. Police station? Don't care. It Follows before It Follows. An emotionless Schwarzenegger shot from behind in leather pants and jacket calmly slaughtering a police pigsty with automatic weapons is an absolutely iconic cyberpunk sequence. (18/10/2022)