Linda Hamilton plays Sarah Connor, the target of termination, a young waitress/college student whose life is destroyed when a cyborg starts chasing her.  At first, she plays Sarah as an unspectacular woman, who is just going through the motions of life.  She appears a tad fragile and vulnerable, but there is also a hint at the strength that is to come.  Then all hell breaks loose.  She is quite effective as a frightened woman whose world is torn apart, and she shows her tenderness when she very subtly brings to life the emotionally dormant Biehn.  Finally, in the end, her strength breaks through the surface and she kicks some cyborg butt (although not as much butt as she kicks in the sequel; see that for a very strong departure of character).  A

Arnold Schwarzenegger convincingly embodies the soul-less, one-track-minded hydraulic killer.  In one scene Biehn perfectly describes the terminator: "He can’t be bargained with.  He can’t be reasoned with.  He doesn’t feel pity.  Or remorse.  Or fear.  And he absolutely will not stop.  Ever.  Until you are dead."  The terminator is like a force of nature: the hurricane, tidal wave, earthquake from which you cannot escape.  We believe Arnold as a machine.  We see it in his eyes, and in his precise movements, and in his inexpressiveness.  Arnold was originally in mind for the Biehn role (per studio request), but Cameron wouldn’t have it, and Arnold was more enthusiastic about the cyborg role.  Arnold would be featured in two more Cameron films: T2 and True Lies.  A++

Lance Henriksen was already a Cameron regular, having been in Piranha II; he would later star in Aliens.  Henriksen was initially in mind for the role of the terminator.  Cameron at first wanted an actor who didn’t stand out physically; Size Doesn’t Matter, and all that.  Henriksen finally got to play a cyborg (excuse me—artificial person) in Aliens.  In Terminator, he’s Paul Winfield’s lieutenant/foil, a sarcastic comic relief character, all the more effective in that Henriksen is deadpan through most of his scenes.  B

Paul Winfield plays the sympathetic police captain, and the actor makes the best of his small role.  In one scene, he’s chewing a piece of gun, drinking a coffee, and smoking a cigarette, then he starts to light another cigarette, having forgotten the one in his other hand.  He also has one of the most retrospectively laughable lines in the whole film: "You’re perfectly safe; we’ve got over thirty cops in this building."  B

Earl Boen plays criminal psychologist Dr. Silburman, another actor making the best of a small role.  Boen has a relaxed sleaziness that gives the impression that Silburman has been doing his job for quite a while and has some kind of perverse pleasure in getting into the minds of psychos.  Boen reprises his role in the sequel.  B

Bill Paxton makes his debut as a Cameron regular in a brief scene, as Young Unnamed Punk.  What can be said about his riveting performance?  The way he emotes such lines as "Nice night for a walk, eh?" and "Fuck you, asshole!" are astounding.  Paxton would go on to star in Aliens, True Lies, and Titanic.

Screenplay / Plot: One of his most original story concepts, and certainly his most compact (his only feature under two hours).  The idea came to James Cameron when he was in Italy, after he had been fired from Piranha II.  He had a nightmare image of a cyborg, its legs ripped off, trailing cables behind it, eyes glowing red … relentlessly chasing after a young woman the only way it could: by crawling after her.  Around that image, he built the story of The Terminator.

The first forty minutes of the film is told mainly through action and imagery.  There is dialogue, but the dialogue is of far less importance than the behavior of the three main characters.  First we are presented with two strange men (Michael Biehn and Arnold Schwarzenegger) who both appear from lightning storms; we’re not quite sure who is the bad guy and who is the good guy, or maybe they’re both bad.  We don’t know.  Then we are presented with a waitress, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), of whom the two strange men are in pursuit.  We know nothing of Biehn’s and Schwarzenegger’s intentions, other than that they are in pursuit of Sarah Connor.  This whole section could be realized as a silent film; it is very cinematic and visual.  It is what Hitchcock referred to as "pure cinema."

Then comes the exposition scene (the scene that answers the question: what the heck is going on?), 10-12 minutes of important and critical backstory, all related intensely by Kyle Reese (Biehn) to Sarah during an intense, high-speed car chase.  Ten minutes of a character telling you his life story: rarely has it been so intense and exciting.  It is in this scene that we discover what Schwarzenegger truly is: a cyborg, programmed to terminate the life of Sarah.

The "pure cinema" buildup and the car-chase exposition—those are a couple of the high-lights in this imaginative script.  Afterwards, the tension builds tighter as the terminator relentlessly tracks down the heroes.  The action scenes are not as intricately choreographed as those Cameron would create in future films, but in Terminator they are nevertheless visceral, raw and powerful.  Tender moments of character revelation are balanced well within the story framework, and when Kyle and Sarah fall in love, it is the natural progression of their characters—it is not forced.  In fact, this is one of those rare moments in cinema when the sex-scene (at first seemingly exploitative) ends up being a critical plot point. There are also witty moments of irony; for instance, in one scene, an answering machine message is saying, "Machines need love too," while the terminator, a machine, is killing Sarah’s roommate.

Also noteworthy is how Cameron makes use of a horror genre plot device toward the end of the film: the false ending.  In fact, he uses two false endings, and both serve as intense shock moments, as well as creating a darker feeling of despair for the heroes.  First, the terminator is seemingly destroyed by a tanker truck explosion, only to rise from the flames as a "hyper-alloy combat chassis, fully armored, very tough."  Then, the endoskeleton is seemingly ripped apart by a pipe bomb, only to rise again and crawl after Hamilton as a crippled cyborg.

The script was written by Cameron so that he could sell his abilities as a filmmaker.  Since he was adept at special effects, the script had to be sci-fi.  However, he could only raise so much money, so the entire film could not be set in the future.  Thus, he used time-travel: injecting an element of the future into the present.  This plot device allowed him to use visual effects sparingly.  Also, due to the lack of budget, it is not the effects and action sequences that drive the story; rather, it is plot movement and character identification—two areas in which Cameron excells in this script.

Although Kyle, at one point, says, "The future is not set," the end of the film suggests the inevitability of future apocalypse.  We are allowed to glimpse Kyle’s past (our future) on two occassions: a nuclear-winter landscape riddled with human bones.  It is truly a nightmarish future, one which we hope our world isn’t headed toward.  "There is a storm coming," a man tells Sarah at the end of the film, and she responds, "I know."  Her voice is filled with a new-found courage, and she heads off down the road, toward inevitability.  A+

Suspense Moments / No-Win Scenario: In several of Cameron’s later films, he would use a powerful plot device called the "no-win scenario"—put the main character(s) into the tightest corner and watch them claw their way out.  There is no single such scene in this film, but it could be argued that this entire film is one long no-win scenario.  How do you stop an unstoppable killing machine?  How do you get away from something whose only reason for existence is to hunt you down and kill you?  The suspense is created by the near-invincibility of the antagonist; the terminator isn’t evil, but it’s so incredibly deadly and single-minded.  The idea that it has no soul, and therefore no compassion, suggests something beyond evil … and perhaps even more terrifying.  Suspense is further created by the fact that the heroes can’t rely on anybody or anything for protection: modern weapons don’t seem to have too much of an effect on the cyborg, really intense and possibly effective weapons like bazookas are unavailable to the heroes, the authorities don’t believe the heroes, and even if the police did believe, it doesn’t seem too likely that they could reliably protect the heroes (witness the police bloodbath scene).  The only option available to the heroes, it seems, is for them to run.

The police bloodbath is probably the closest thing to a no-win scenario.  We have our vulnerable protagonist, Sarah, safe within the confines of a police precinct, protected by thirty cops.  She’s well protected and has nothing to worry about, right?  But then the terminator shows up and starts killing cops left and right, while closing in on her position.  The tension is high, and this is a powerful scene, but it ends too quickly.  Sarah is suddenly rescued by Kyle and they escape through a back door.  There is no sense of our heroes being face to face with death, and ingeniously cheating their way out of it.  It’s too easy, and therefore not as satisfying as a no-win scenario.

On the other hand, the Tech-Noir confrontation is a study in screen suspense.  The terminator arrives at the night-club, and it is the first scene in whice the three main characters collide.  Tryanglz "You’ve Got Me Burning" plays in the club (source music) as the terminator enters and breaks the hand of a bouncer who has a problem with the fact that the terminator didn’t pay the cover charge.  Sarah sits paranoid and alone at her table.  She looks behind her, probably for Kyle Reese, whom she saw fol lowing her earlier.  As she turns back around, she accidentally knocks over her drink.  She reaches down to pick it up, at the exact moment that the terminator walks by, glancing in her direction.  This moment of deus ex machina allows Sarah to remain unnoticed for a few moments longer, which in turn allows the scene to be drawn out that much more.  At this point, the audience is torn.  We want Sarah to live, but at the same ti me, we want the terminator to find her, because that will make for a more exciting sequence.

She sits back up and looks over at the bar.  The crowd clears for a moment and she sees Kyle Reese, sitting at the bar.  Kyle looks directly at the camera, a point-of-view technique which allows us to feel Sarah’s fear: she is staring into the eyes of the man whom she believes wants to kill her.  She’s wrong; Kyle is her savior, but she doesn’t know that yet.  We are further frustrated because we want Kyle to do something, but he just sits there and looks guilty.  The sequence starts to gradually slip into SLOW-MOTION, and Brad Fiedel’s score starts to slip in beneath the Tryanglz song.  Sarah’s tension is cinematically drawn out.  Meanwhile, the terminator reaches the end of the dance club, and it turns around for a second sweep.  Instantly, the terminator locks on to Sarah at her table.  Its head pivots forward slightly.  There is an impression that it has changed modes from SEARCH to KILL.  Time slows down even more, and Fiedel’s score overpowers the source music, as the terminator moves toward Sarah.  Sarah looks up at the big man approaching her.  In the terminator’s point-of-view, she appears small and fragile.  The terminator starts to pull out his gun.  Kyle, at the bar, sees what’s happening and pulls out his shotgun.  The terminator aims at Sarah.  Kyle has to push a woman out of his way before he can aim; this little bit adds to the frustration of the audience—Will Kyle save her in time?  From Sarah’s P.O.V., we look right into the barrel of the terminator’s handgun, and the frame is entirely washed in red, since the laser sighting is aimed directly between her eyes.  She is staring into her death.  There is a moment to contemplate this until Kyle finally saves her, and the nightclub is turned into pandemonium.

Chase Sequences: There are two major car chase sequences in the film.  The first occurs after the Tech-Noir Shoot-Out.  The terminator chases Kyle and Sarah from the nightclub and into an alley.  Kyle and Sarah get into Kyle’s car.  The terminator commandeers a police car and proceeds to sweep the streets in search of them.  Meanwhile, they are busy dodging several police cars hot on their trail.  There’s a little driving on the sidewalk, and some driving against traffic.  Curiously, there’s barely any bystanders; you’d figure that there would be people walking the streets of L.A. at night, but not in this film (the filmmakers likely couldn’t afford too many stunt extras).  Also, there’s no fancy helicopter or crane shots.  Everything’s land-level, jerky, and the cuts are swift, which gives the sequence a gritty, raw, unchoreographed realism.  The coolest part of this chase occurs in an alley—Kyle brakes suddenly, causing the pursuing cop car to skid into an awkward angle while braking, then Kyle reverses and rams into the cop, which further skews the cop’s vehicle.  Later on, the dynamics of the chase become somewhat hard to believe, as Kyle aims and shoots at the pursuing terminator with only one arm, while driving with the other.  Also, Kyle barely looks at the road while he’s driving, and he keeps taking his other arm off the wheel in order to chamber more rounds into his endlessly loaded shotgun.  You could argue that he learned to drive and shoot like this while fighting Hunter-Killers in the future, but it’s still a bit hard to swallow.  The power of this sequence doesn’t come from the dynamics of the chase, however; it comes from the conversation happening inside the car.  Kyle is telling Sarah all about the future war, about Skynet and the terminators, and about why she has been targeted for termination.  This riveting monologue is the most exciting aspect of this first car chase.

The second chase is shot in the same style.  This time, Sarah’s driving a truck they stole, while Kyle leans out the window and throws pipe bombs at the terminator, who is pursuing on a motorcycle.  They weave in and out of cars and big trucks, and a lot of the action happens in a tunnel, wherein the pipe bomb explosions echo strongly.  At one point, the terminator’s relentlessness is illustrated perfectly when he runs out of ammo on his Uzi, throws it away, pulls out a much smaller weapon—a handgun—and continues firing at Sarah and Kyle without missing a beat, and without any discernable change in expression.  Midway through the chase, the terminator wrecks, and is immediately hit by a semi-truck.  Partly injured, it kills the semi’s driver, limps into the cab of the semi, and orders the other occupant to "Get out."  Meanwhile, Sarah and Kyle have also wrecked, and they proceed to evade the pursuing semi on foot.  It is quite an image: two small humans running down a road while behind them approaches a huge semi, the driver of which has glowing red eyes.  This device of switching vehicles in mid-chase Cameron would also apply to the sequel.

Love Story: The love story in this film sneaks up on you.  You’re not really expecting it to happen, mostly because Kyle and Sarah rarely show that kind of attraction toward each other at first.  Yet when it happens, it seems like it was inevitable.  They are two lost souls, who haven’t found what they’ve been looking for, until time and space bend and they are given a chance to meet.  They fall in love under extreme circumstances—life and death, time travel, future apocalypse and all that (or to quote Webster: "Love mix'd with fear is sweetest")—but it feels like it’s the real thing, and it’s tragic when Kyle dies.  In the film’s epilogue, when talking about Kyle, Sarah says, "the few hours we spent together, we loved a lifetime’s worth."

Mise-en-Scene (Lighting, Costumes, Production Design, Character Movement) / Cinematography: The Terminator, visually, is a very dark movie, with most of the film taking place at night-time.  Only nine minutes of screen time are presented in daylight.  The name of the nightclub in which the three characters collide is "Tech-Noir," and it is a name that also characterizes the style of filmmaking Cameron was attempting.  "Tech" since this story is science-fiction, a genre which hypothesizes future, as-yet-unrealized technology, and "noir," the french word for dark, a word which describes not only the lighting of the film, but also the mood of the film and the story content.  The Terminator isn’t the first film that could be classified as Dark Science Fiction; it follows in the vein of such recent Ridley Scott classics as Alien and Blade Runner.  The term noir is generally reserved for films of the detective genre: low-lit films with a sombre mood, hard-boiled dialogue, and a story which shows off the darker, grittier side of humanity.  This description very nearly fits The Terminator: it is low-lit, it has a sombre atmosphere, the dialogue has the occasional hard-boiled edge to it ("Come with me if you want to live"), and the story shows off the dark, gritty ramifications of an out-of-control technology.  In the years to come, and with much bigger budgets at his disposal, Cameron would continue to solidify his lighting style, eventually arriving at very hard blue lighting for night-time sequences and a solid, near-blinding whiteness for daylight scenes.  The fixation with blue lighting is evident, though subtly, in The Terminator, as the night-time sequences have a slight blue tinge to them.  Cameron also uses red and purple lighting schemes in this film.

Cameron’s cinematographic style in this film never draws attention to itself; there is no over-use of any stylistic gimmicks, such as deep-focus shots, long takes, or extreme, awkward angles.  He sometimes uses low-angle shooting, mostly with the terminator, to enhance the cyborg’s presence, and in one scene involving Ginger’s death, the camera seems to creep, at dog-level, toward her.  Cameron rarely uses master shots with actors; he rather likes to push in on their faces for an almost uncomfortable, forced intimacy.  While this may be awkward, it is cinematically effective for the scenes in which it is used.  For instance, when Kyle Reese is describing the future war to Sarah, the camera is so tight on his face that we feel that we are uncomfortably close to him.  That is precisely how Sarah feels, packed in a car with a potential maniac, hunched down in her seat, her face only inches from his.  Cameron is very effective at creating a strong point-of-view link between the protagonists and the audience, which is necessary for films involving suspense.

One technique Cameron would continue to use in later films is the device of showing action through video images.  The second half of Reese’s interrogation by Dr. Silburman is seen on a black-and-white television screen, the interrogation having been recorded earlier onto a videotape.  The lack of any cinematic aestheticism to the recording gives the interrogation a raw, documentary-like feel to it, and adds realism to the film as a whole.  Cameron would also use video images in presenting the terminator’s P.O.V. shots—these shots are completely dominated by the color red, and have overlying white textual and graphical information to imply the terminator’s thought processes.  This technique allows us to get inside the cyborg’s head, and see for ourselves how cold and inhuman it really is.  It is a technique that would be used by later filmmakers to present the point-of-view of an alien or robotic being, such as John McTiernan’s Predator and Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop.

Cameron, an artist, always takes an active involvement in the design of elements of his films.  He was the principal designer of the terminator endoskeleton, as well as the futuristic hunter-killer machines.

(One interesting note: in the police bloodbath sequence, the terminator is seen firing at police officers with an automatic rifle in one hand and a shotgun in the other.  This two-gun technique would later be used extensilvely by the characters in John Woo’s films, such as The Killer, Hard-Boiled, and Face/Off.  I doubt that this technique started with The Terminator I’m sure some other action filmmaker used it before.  However, this shows that Woo didn’t start this trend, either.)

Special and Visual Effects: There was no effects breakthroughs in this film; in fact, most of the techniques used in this film were quite old.  For the lightning storm shots, animators used a rotoscoping technique to paint the arc lightning onto the shots (the lightning storm scene in this film, as well as in the sequel, is the inspiration for the name of Cameron’s later production company, Lightstorm Entertainment).  For the future war sequences, models of the Hunter-Killers were filmed, and then integrated onto the live-action set using rear-screen projection (a technique by which you project previously filmed footage onto a huge canvas in the background of a set).  For full-frame shots of the endoskeleton in the finale, stop-motion animation of a scaled-down endoskeleton puppet was integrated optically with the live-action plates.  Close-ups and medium shots of the endoskeleton were accomplished with the use of a full-scale endoskeleton puppet rig created by Stan Winston, with whom Cameron would work on such later films as Aliens and T2 (Stan Winston is also one of the co-founders of Digital Domain, the effects house Cameron initiated in 1993).  Winston also created a terminator "Arnold" puppet, for use in the eye-extraction scene, and in later scenes in which the terminator’s skin has peeled off in places and its underlying hydraulics are visible.

Music: Brad Fiedel’s finest scoring achievement.  The music was most likely composed and performed by Fiedel solo on his synthesizer; no orchestra needed.  The techno nature of the score integrates perfectly with the storyline and the raw, dark, noir-ish visuals of the film.  In the chase and action scenes, the music has a seductive yet erratic rythym, nearly dancable.  Fiedel makes use of the Wagnerian technique known as "leitmotif"—the linking of a melody or musical phrase to a particular character or story element.  It is a technique few modern film composers use.  Most composers (such as Alan Silvestri, Michael Kamen, James Newton Howard, and James Horner) create two or three themes for a given film, and they use these themes to give certain moods or feelings within the context of the film.  The melodies have little thematic relevance; they serve more of an atmospheric purpose.  Fiedel, in this score, linked each character with a melodic phrase.  Four low beats, grouped together as a phrase and repeated, represent the terminator—it is an inhuman, dread-inspiring heartbeat.  It is a simple musical phrase; however, as in Jaws, sometimes the simplest are the most effective.  We hear this theme nearly every time we see the terminator.  (There is one moment, however, when we hear the music without seeing the cyborg.  It is when Sarah is in a quiet, deserted parking lot at night, and she thinks she sees someone following her.  She has a moment of paranoia, and Fiedel uses the non-relevant yet effective terminator theme to emphasize her paranoia.  When we, the audience, realize that it is Kyle Reese who is following her, the music switches to his theme, a faster-paced, higher-toned, rhythmic phrasing.)  Reese’s theme, while at first mysterious, will later take on an air of benevolence as Reese’s heroism is revealed.  Sarah’s theme, a simple guitar melody, is used to introduce her character at the beginning of the film, and is never used again.  The film itself has a more complex melodic theme, not linked to any character, which is used only at the beginning and end titles.

Themes: In this film, Cameron introduces the theme most common to all of his work, that of trusting blindly in technology.  The reason that nuclear devastation wipes out most of the population of Earth is because the United States Government trusted blindly in a new technology known as the neural-net processor, a learning and adaptive computer system.  "It was the machines, Sarah," Reese explains.  "Defense network computers.  New.  Powerful.  Hooked into e verything.  Trusted to run it all.  They say it got smart—a new order of intelligence.  Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side.  It decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination."

The concept of nuclear devastation would also appear frequently in Cameron’s films.  In this film, it is a concept that is referred to from Reese’s memory.  In later films, such as Aliens, T2 and True Lies, we will actually witness a nuclear explosion.

Budget: This film was realized on a $6.5 million budget.  There were no elaborate sets in this film, and special effects were kept down to as few shots as necessary.  Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t a superstar at this point, so they didn’t have to pay him too much, although he did likely get more than the other actors.  It was quite an achievement for the filmmakers to realize a film not only with action elements (multiple shoot-outs and car-chases) but also science-fiction elements (a futuristic landscape, robots and laser-weapons) on such a small budget.  The budgets for Cameron’s later films, however, would never again be this low.

Success: The film grossed around $40 million domestically, another $40 million foreign, but its impact lasted much longer than its theatrical run.  On video, then on cable television, and finally on network television, The Terminator would continue to build a fan base.  It was named one of the top ten movies of 1984 by Time magazine.  It inspired a Dark Horse comic book series.  Arnold Schwarzenegger became a major action star because of the film, and he would go on to superstardom by the early nineties.  James Cameron was recognized as a major filmmaking talent, and was immediately awarded the directing chores on the sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien.  Finally, after seven years, in 1991, Cameron and Schwarzenegger would reteam on the sequel, which would gross nearly seven times the amount of the first film.

Special Edition: There is no director’s cut available of the film, but there are several scenes in the screenplay which never made it to the final cut.  These scenes will be listed at a later time.