Prophecies of Doom: a review of The Terminator

Prophecies of Doom: a review of The Terminator

Some films age like wine. It's hard to believe that Director James Cameron's  inspired fever dream, The Terminator, is 34 years old. Its lean script, staccato editing and direction, and its human driven storyline are what gives it the staying power to outshine most of today's sci fi films even with technologies like CGI, motion capture, and 3D-motion photography at their disposal. But what makes Terminator a cut above other speculative science fiction films is the fact that almost all of its projections have come to pass like the flying unmanned "Hunter-killers" in the film that today we call drones that are dropping bombs in Afghanistan; there's the A.I. network called Skynet in the film that "gets smart" and there is Google's new technology Alpha Go that they claim is a "learning computer;" there's the Terminator in the film and there's the United States' defense agency called DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and the Atlas robot chassis they created that can climb and run on a treadmill; combine the Atlas with Google's Alpha Go designed brain and voila, instant Terminator. Then you have Facebook having to "unplug" 2 of its A.I. systems after these systems started talking to each other in a secret language they created. This coupled with government projections that in a couple of years 6% of U.S. jobs will be taken over by these smart systems and existential warnings from the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking on the threat A.I. poses to civilization. Then there's Sophia (look her up). And let's not even begin talking about self-driving cars which are already being used in France and that we will be sharing our streets and highways with in the next year or 2. Taking all this into account, plus the fact that even owning an electric typewriter in 1984 was a luxury, The Terminator is--in my mind--one of the most important films (and probably THE MOST accurate theatrical prophesy that has come true) ever made, even more so than Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterpiece. 

Stripped down to its titanium skeleton, the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a cyborg from the future that travels back 40 years in time to kill a waitress (Linda Hamilton) to prevent her from giving birth to a boy who will one day destroy them and save mankind. Throughout all of this, there's a love story involving Sarah Connor and the soldier--played by Michael Bien--whom her son, John, sends back in time to protect from the Terminator

Terminator remains, even after all these years, James Cameron's best movie. It has the perfect atmosphere; most of the action is at night. The big `70's cars in the Terminator's chase sequences are reminiscent of the big cars in The French Connection's chase sequences. Unlike T2, where there's some setup between action scenes, Terminator's action scenes erupt out of nowhere. I could go on and on but the bottom line is that Terminator will be around long after most of today's science fiction rip-offs are obsolete.