I'll be back. We were warned...
scr James Cameron, Gale Anne Hurd, William Wisher Jr
with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn, Paul Winfield, Lance Henriksen, Bess Motta, Rick Rossovich, Bill Paxton, Earl Boen, Shawn Schepps, Dick Miller, Marianne Muellerleile
release US original 26.Oct.84 ; UK original 11.Jan.85; UK reissue 16.Mar.01
Orion 84/US 1h48
See also:
TERMINATOR 3 (2003)
TERMINATOR SALVATION (2009)
The story is deceptively tricky: During a future war between mankind and machines, a murderous robot (Schwarzenegger) comes back to the 1980s from the future to kill the mother of the as-yet-unborn leader of the human rebellion. He's followed by a freedom fighter (Biehn) who tracks down the leader's mother-to-be (Hamilton). Meanwhile, two L.A. cops (Henriksen and Winfield) try to figure out who's causing so much mayhem across the city.
In comparison to today's much more packaged thrillers, this is a surprisingly vicious little film, filled with indiscriminate, un-PC killings and a rough-edged feel that makes it utterly compelling. There's real heart and soul here, along with Arnold's best-ever performance--as a mindless killing machine. Hamilton's performance as Sarah Connor is terrific, but really springs to life in the 1991 sequel.
The breakthrough, yet now very cheesy, special effects still work, thanks to the decent story, which grabs us right away and carries us to the end with rollercoaster action sequences and clever time-travel twists. But the biggest surprise is that, despite nearly 17 years of copycat films and astonishing progress in special effects, this essentially small film still holds up very nicely indeed. And it's worth looking out for in a cinema if at all possible.
| themes, language, violence, brief nudity |
| 16.Feb.01 |
