Release Date: 1984
Director: James Cameron
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn
Tagline: "Your future is in his hands"
Random Trivia: Watching this film in my living room, high with the now-ex-GF. Terminator-vision shows a dump of the ROM assembly code for the Apple II operating system. You can recreate this if you have one (a Terminator or a AppleII).
Dadum dum dadum... Dadum dum dadum...
That tune has been with me since I was a kid. I have no fucking clue when or where I saw this flick for the first time. Not in theatres, possibly at home with the old man, who puts about as much faith in ratings-based-parenting as I do. This will be my first occasion seeing
it baked, fully or otherwise. It's also my first review for this site, so pat me on my back already!
Diving right in - I don't think I even need to describe story for this puppy. If you haven't seen it, you're not a movie fan. Holy shit! Something has come to me - this is the perfect time travel movie, as the 80s synth version of the theme takes you right back into the decade. Right up there with Back to the Future Part 2, which shows the future as only someone from the 80s could have imagined it. Anyhow - as good as this movie still is, Predator has held up better as far as aging is concerned. But fuck - it still rocks. Now the hair... Big hair. And cheese music. If it weren't for the movies, and a few late-breaking albums at the end of the decade, I've have this entire decade removed from my memory with a rusty ice pick.
Random thought: Sarah Connor's roommate for some reason reminds me of a backup girl from the 20 minute workout. Do you remember that show? Probably not.
Never mind. I dropped my Kraft Dinner in my Samosa. As you can tell, this review and coherency may not go hand in hand. Lets get back on track: Kyle Reese has arrived back in the 80s with the job of protecting Sarah Connor. Arnie is an evil Terminator, a killing
machine sent back in time by Skynet, a self-aware artificial intelligence which has overrun mankind after launching nuclear war. He's to kill Sarah Connor, mother of the future leader of the human resistance, John Connor. Edward Furlong is probably just a couple
years out of the womb, and Robert Patrick's liquid-metal T-1000 probably hasn't even been considered yet. Here we go. Sarah Connors are being picked off out of the phone book, one by one. That's quite ingenious actually, except for the fact that Skynet has developed a way to go back in time and couldn't fucking GOOGLE Sarah Connor's address from the 80s! I thought everything was online. 411 go the way of the dodo after Judgment Day? I guess so...
Ooh... shotgun. Unattended shotgun. Those always come in handy. Good snag Kyle, they obviously had Doom in your future time-line.
So let me get this straight - Kyle goes with the awesome shoulder-sling thingy for the gun... and NIKE FUCKING VELCRO??? Seriously just invent a way to travel through time with clothes, and avoid having to make awkward fashion choices/product placements such as this. Plus, you're less likely to fry your nuts.
The disco scene... is that a disco? Fucked if I know...
As baked as I am, the armor in the future scenes from The Terminator still looks like football pads to me. Kind of like the Road Warrior with some of the Great Humungus' minions (note to self: Review the Road Warrior). Still, the future scenes are awesome. Proof: we're still creaming our pants over a post-Judgment Day sequel in 2009.
The roommate is dead. Am I writing this in order? I remember really wanting that chick dead. I'm sorry Sarah, pick a roommate who is less fucking annoying. Fucking kill her, make it brutal, torture her mmkay thanks? And never, never shack up with anyone like that again. I guess it won't matter, since you wind up in a mental institution somewhere down the line, then dead from cancer in 1997, then on TV played by someone else in the year 1999 but airing a decade later.
Oh and while we're still on the roommate subject (or while I want to dwell on it):
Patty? Selma? Jub-Jub? She has a lizard for fuck's sake! If you have a lizard, you keep it in a tank, you don't let it wander around getting lizard shit everywhere.
Oeros... mmm, Oreos (clear-headed me's editorial note: Looking back at my notes, this is actually spelled Orea. Oreos were placed in front of me at this point. They were good).
Ahh, subtle foreshadowing. Someone is talking to a machine. Just like
later, when-
So apparently, when you cover your ear, the music playing in the background actually drops. Or so this movie would have us believe. This is apparently some sort of nefarious invention by Skynet.
Hello, Silverman. Doctor Silverman. I forgot he was in the first one,
I mostly remember him from T2, and as just about the only returning
actor other than Arnie in the not-as-horrible-as-you-think-it-is-but-still-could-have-been-so-much-more T3.
At this point I put down my notes and jumped back into the movie. Has there even been a coherent, finished review on this site yet? Will there ever be?
To summarize, The Terminator is a simple story of Boy Meets Girl, Girl
Almost Gets Killed by Time Traveling Cyborg, Boy Loves Girl, Boy Gets
Killed By Said Cyborg but not before Knocking Girl Up, Girl somehow
stops literal killing machine that military-badass boy couldn't.
And to top it all off, boy was sent back through time by his own, future, grown son.
Got it?
Good, because this is the easy one. The time-line doesn't really fuck
with your head until the sequels. Come to think of it, you don't even
need to be fully baked to ponder that shit and think "..."
Overall rating: Fully Baked (5 out of 5)
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