IMDb #214 Review: The Terminator (1984)

Source: Wikipedia

This blockbuster changed popular culture, and not just by reducing it to skull-littered rubble. It made James Cameron rich. It brought the general public to fear AI and computer scientists to blithely ignore those fears. Most amazingly, it taught Americans how to spell Schwarzenegger.

Our implacable Austrian cyborg hails from the grimdark future — yet another robot-ravaged wasteland, this time with Star Wars lasers. (Most of the practical effects hold up decently.) Through his perspective, which looks like Doom for the Virtual Boy, he hunts the mother of the human resistance, a klutzy waitress with eighties hair.

But she's not the hero. A human warrior, sent to the past by the waitress’s unborn son, arrives to rescue her from the robust robot and his hilariously efficient brutality.

She accompanies this wild-eyed, probably funky-smelling rebel from parking garage to police station to ratty motel. Being action movie protagonists, they engage in the three C’s of action movies: clubbing, car chases, and copulation. (Sorry, no synonym of "explosions" starts with “C.”) Time paradoxes are blithely ignored.

The killing machine follows in cold pursuit. He and the heroes play shotgun tag, which humans aren't very good at. Arnold tops shotgun with machine gun, pipe bomb with robo-bitchslap.

The girl flees Arnie’s spooky stop-motion skeleton into the nearest convenient denouement factory for tidy disposal of unstoppable villains.

And the future is saved!

Until the sequels.

Recommended for unexpectant mothers, Luddites hunting for metaphorical parallels (The Internet is Skynet! Panic!), and theoretical physicists looking for an even more baffling problem than reconciling general relativity and quantum field theory: straighten out the Terminator timeline.

107 minutes.