The Terminator revisited many years later

I think that there are a lot of people that are revisiting Arnold Schwarzenegger's films these days since Netflix is putting a rather huge spotlight on him lately. Of course none of that would be necessary because Arnie is a massive part of the film world over the past 40 years anyway. I think that most people over the age of 30 have seen The Terminator at least once and if you were young enough at the time to see it when it had been somewhat close to its theatrical release date, I believe the experience would be so much better. It was a special effects marvel at the time but these days, like most anything made in the 80's, it looks very dated.

It's a decent movie and an important one in the grand scheme of a lot of people's careers, most notably Arnold and James Cameron.

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Something kind of important to note about this film is that in 1984, Schwarzenegger wasn't yet a huge name. He was on the up and up but it was actually this film and a couple of others that propelled him to being one of the most profitable and famous actors or all time. As much as I love Conan the Barbarian and consider it to be one of the greatest films ever made, The Terminator was a much bigger success and got the widespread notice of the world that Arnold needed in order to progress.

Going back and looking at it and trying to put yourself in the shoes of people dealing with the technology that existed nearly 40 years ago (there wasn't much,) It is kind of mind-blowing that they were able to make this movie for a mere 6.5 million dollars.

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if you get too overly analytical about it, some of the scenes that are closeups of Arnold such as when he is performing surgery on his own face, it is pretty clear that it isn't him. We hadn't seen many things that were as gruesome as this up to that point in time so I would imagine that they were pretty damn pleased with the puppet or whatever it was that they used for these scenes.

Later on, when all the flesh is removed and the Terminator is no longer played by a human actor, the walking cyborg almost certainly had to be meticulously implanted into each individual frame and that must have been extremely time-consuming.

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_{That's how big the model was. Pretty amazing huh?}

Here's another shot of them working with the first time the Terminator shows how truly unstoppable it is when it rises out of the wreckage of a rather conveniently placed fuel truck that he just happens to commandeer.

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All of this is very interesting to me because these days we actually can make these sorts of things look extremely lifelike, but that doesn't necessarily make the movies better. Just like in a lot of things, CGI has taken the place of actual creativity and overall film quality IMO has suffered as a consequence. Since we can portray basically anything on screen these days, people don't have to limit what they are going to exhibit at all and because of that I think that many films end up showing too much.

This movie has been pondered from almost any angle that you can imagine but one of the things that really sticks out to me is the Kyle Reese (the human sent back to the past to save Sarah Conner) and his being the father of John Conner, who is the person that leads the resistance in the future that results in the humans actually starting to win the war on Earth.

When you think about it, even in a science fiction sort of way where anything is possible, how is it possible in the future, where Kyle Reese meets John Conner for the first time ends up going back in time to become John's father by meeting Sarah for the first time? It's a chicken/egg sort of situation that is never really explained in the film and while it is touched base upon in future films, this aspect of the film is never truly made clear. In order for John Conner to rise as a leader of the resistance, Kyle needs to have ALREADY gone back in time in order to knock up John's mom. Without this having already happened, the future as is presented in the film doesn't pan out that way and John never rises as a leader in the first place because he doesn't exist.

Someone posted a copy of the original script where Sarah is talking into a microphone at the end of the film after the Terminator has already been dispatched and Kyle has already been dead for months.

SARAH
(continuing)
Should I tell you about your father? That's a tough one.
Will it change your decision to send him here... knowing?
But if you don't send Kyle, you could never be.
God, you can go crazy thinking about all this...
I suppose I'll tell you... I owe him that.
And maybe it'll be enough if you know that
in the few hours we had together
we loved a lifetime's worth...

There are other aspects of the film that perhaps I just missed in later editions such as why doesn't Skynet just endlessly send more and more Terminators back until they eventually get her?

To be fair Kyle does refer to there being "multiple futures" while being interrogated by police in the movie.

Then there is the question of the Terminator arm, which was the only thing remaining of the Terminator after it took a one-way trip through a hydraulic press, becoming the basis of why Skynet ever existed in the first place as is presented in T2.

No matter how you look at it, this movie was a pretty innovative thing for the time period and a remarkable film. The creators of it actually thought was going to be a B-movie and not the massive number 1 hit that it became. Arnold himself accidentally showed his disdain for the film while filming Conan the Destroyer at the same time as The Terminator. He commented when asked about some shoes in his Conan dressing room and what they were for by stating "Oh, some shit movie I'm doing, take a couple weeks."

Arnold has only 17 lines of dialogue in The Terminator and speaks a grand total of less than 100 words. I guess that was enough though, because his career really took off after that point and it's a good thing because the "not shit" movie that he was working on at the time, Conan the Destroyer was a massive flop that ended up killing the franchise and was panned by basically everyone.

I don't know if everyone will enjoy The Terminator if they are seeing it for the first time these days because yeah, it is dated. If you can watch it with eyes and imagine what it was like to see it 40 years ago though, I think it is a big part of cinematic history.