I Hate 1984: 'The Terminator'

by Joseph Golden

When James Cameron was directing Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (check it out, it's better then you'd think), goes the anecdote, it was rumored that the investors where so unhappy with his progress, they were going to yank him. To finish under budget, ahead of schedule, and hopefully still employed, Cameron filmed during the day and snuck back into the studios at night to edit the day's work. This stress, exhaustion, and sleep deprivation left him hallucinatory, punch-drunk, and prone to waking nightmares where an unstoppable cyborg killing machine from the future hunted him relentlessly.

That something worthwhile came out of the thankfully short-lived Piranha franchise is a shock only topped by the fact that The Terminator (and its unthankfully long-lived franchise) was nothing more then a byproduct, a happy, career-cementing, icon-creating, multibillion-dollar accident. The script (like a machine itself) would be a work in progress for years, refined, reedited, toned down, built up, until finally it was the leanest, tightest most efficient product it could be: a pre-post-apocalyptic retroactive abortion sci-fi concept pushing every character in the movie into the worst 24 hours they had ever experienced. (Even the time-travel angle and all the headaches such overthinking induces are shouted down by Kyle Reese in the police interrogation room, when Dr. Pullover V-Neck Sweater starts asking technical questions of our handcuffed hero, who screams, �I don�t know! I didn�t build the fucking thing!� It's as if Cameron were screaming at the eggheads in the audience, �This is as thinky as it gets so shut up and enjoy the wound effects!�).

Every boy I grew up with ached to be suicide commando Kyle Reese (life-sized adventure person Michael Biehn, in a role that would lock him into a lifetime of short-cropped hair and Kevlar), with his puppy-love crush and his masterful control of a 12 gauge. Linda Hamilton�s proto-slacker Sarah Connor (Hamilton, at the time a complete unknown who was probably hired on the spot at her audition the second Cameron saw her soul-dead eyes) would lay the ground work for every woman I would every find attractive: foot-soldier waitress job, shitty taste in men, and a slutty roommate. The relationship between the two heros and their unborn son is a Moebius strip of Military hierarchy and family dynamics: My commanding officer is my-older-then-me son, my baby�s daddy hasn�t been born yet. All these are the treats of a movie made by a man who knew the best shit happened offscreen (a future war that you only get a brief and almost spoiling glimpse of, a military commander and world-saver who is only talked of and never seen, Arnold yanking some hippie  away from the public phone to get to the phone book�-the punchline of the scene not his single minded intent or brutality, but the hippie in the background whining, �Hey, man. You got a serious attitude problem.�)

All Cameron�s instincts and patience would be literally blown away by the next two should-have-never-been sequels in which Sarah Connor would become a psychotic Contra and then an offscreen victim of a heart attack or something; John Connor would become the irritating Edward Furlong and then the forgettable Nick Stahl; the villain would become the admittedly cool Robert Patrick, with his boy-next-door-serial killer appeal, and then some supermodel whose name I never learned how to read let alone spell; and Arnold would become increasingly bored and very, very rich.