In a 100 years, who's gonna care?

THE TERMINATOR (1984)

An Appreciation by Jerry Saravia

For relentless, exciting, edge-of-your-seat action sequences alone, "The Terminator" would fit the bill neatly as an adrenaline pumping action picture. Only James Cameron's 1984 sci-fi picture is more than that, it is a love story between two opposites who hold the key to the future, a future that is not so bright. And there just happens to be a killing machine in between them.

As with any appreciation for a film thirty years old that was extraordinarily influential (and where fantasist author Harlan Ellison rightly got his credit where it was due), there is nothing I can say about "The Terminator" that hasn't been said before. "The Terminator" led to four sequels (new sequel has Arnie back as the Terminator again), a famous catchphrase "I'll Be Back," and it put Arnold Schwarzenegger and director James Cameron on the map in a major way. When I first saw it in 1984, I approached the film as a gritty futuristic noir, namely Tech Noir (the name of a nightclub in the film), where a soldier from the future, the emotionally battered and bruised Kyle (Michael Biehn), travels to the past to prevent a cyborg killing machine (Schwarzenegger) from killing sweet waitress Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), the future mother of a resistance leader of a post-apocalyptic future. That is right, sometime in the near future, nuclear bombs are dropped and result in a world where the machines rule everything.

As relentless as "The Terminator" is, writers James Cameron and Gale Hurd also invest wisely into the developing relationship between Kyle and Sarah. Kyle and Sarah are two lost souls who have found each other through the unfortunate experience of a killing machine who makes Michael Myers look like a weak Mummy knockoff. Sarah can't get a date on a Friday night, can't balance her checkbook and has difficulty waitressing - she is not exactly prime material for the mother of a future leader. Yet that is what makes the character work so well - Linda Hamilton plays her as a soulful, caring woman who has found out her singular purpose. Kyle is a wreck of a man who has seen too much death and too little love - his world is grim and his visions of destructive machines and an array of skulls littering up roads is scary and poetic. The love story that develops lends the film weight and we root for them to survive the throes of the Terminator.

Schwarzenegger has the accurate look of a mean machine - his body language and his voice are as purposefully robotic as ever. When he kills innocent victims, as in the chilling scene where he shoots the wrong Sarah Connor, he brings fear into all of us because the murders are so realistically done. He is unstoppable and every scene of Arnie works up a feverish sweat.

Cameron's "Terminator" is not perfect but it is a lean machine of a movie, mutually scary, thrilling, poignant and quite funny (check out the two cops played by Paul Winfield and Lance Henriksen). It lead to bigger spectacles in its sequels and more epic action scenes, but nothing beats the original for its dark vision of a world where a family gathers outside in a nuclear apocalypse and watches a television that has a fire inside to keep them warm. What a vision, what a movie.