The Terminator

In the near-future, an artificial intelligence known as Skynet brings about a nuclear holocaust. Intent on wiping out all of humanity, it creates a robot army to hunt down the last remaining humans hiding in the ruins of the old world. A man named John Connor creates a rag-tag army out of the survivors, and they manage to defeat Skynet. In a last ditch effort to save itself, Skynet sends a Terminator—a cyborg assassin/infiltration unit designed to pass as a human—back in time from the year 2029 to the year 1984, tasking it with finding and killing a woman named Sarah Connor, John Connor’s mother. John Connor sends a soldier named Kyle Reese back in time to protect Sarah. With the virtually unstoppable Terminator in hot pursuit, Sarah and Kyle must fight to survive together, as the future of humanity hangs in the balance.

As I’m sure you’re aware at this point, in late October, I went to Italy.

While there, I visited the city of Trieste. A port city in the far northeastern corner of Italy, Trieste is a mix of Italian, Austro-Hungarian, and Slovenian influences set hard up against the head of the Gulf of Trieste in the Adriatic Sea. Known as the “City of Coffee,” it was considered to be the end-point of the maritime leg of the famous trade route known as the Silk Road, and was an important deep-water port owned by the House of Habsburg, an aristocratic family that was as powerful as it was inbred. Now, it's just a nice little seaside city, and in October, it had a film festival called the Trieste Science Fiction Festival. While I was there, I saw several films.

The Terminator was one of them.

This is not a new film, of course, repertory screenings are common at film festivals. Especially the classics. And I’ve seen this film before, obviously, more times than I can count, I’m sure. But this was the first time I was able to see The Terminator on the big screen, and with an audience. So this was a real treat, especially because this era of Arnold films is one of my favorites.

Los Angeles. 1984.

It’s the middle of the night, and a giant naked man walks out of the Griffith Observatory Park and over to the nearby bus stop. Inexplicably, there are a trio of punk rockers hanging out there, chortling, smashing beer bottles, and taking turns looking through the coin-operated binoculars, which is a totally normal thing for punk rockers to do late at night in L.A., because the Griffith Observatory is totally close to other things in Los Angeles, and definitely not way up at the top of a really steep hill, surrounded by expensive houses, and no businesses or clubs or bars.

Anyway, this naked man is actually a Terminator, a killer robot sent back from a dark, robot-controlled future. It quickly kills two of the punk rockers, and then takes the third one’s clothes.

Note: Bill Paxton (the one with the blue spiked hair - R.I.P. a true legend) is one of the punks who are killed by the Terminator. He is the only actor who has been killed on screen by a Terminator, an Alien, and a Predator.

Just fyi...

The Terminator is an assassin/infiltration unit, so it resembles a human in order for it to blend in with the crowd and more easily take out its target. Of course, the fact that this particular killer robot looks like a Mr. Universe doesn’t ever come up. This is a design flaw that seems to extend to all Terminators, as every Terminator has basically looked like a supermodel superhero, as if no one will notice these beautiful musclebound freaks walking around like they're normal people. They might as well wear a sign: “How do you do, fellow humans? (Not a robot)”

If Skynet is so smart, why didn't it make a Terminator who looks like he could absolutely destroy a Pizza Hut buffet, but in actuality, can wipe out a precinct full of cops with the same ease? Nobody would see that coming. "Greetings, M'lady..." said the Terminator, tipping his trilby, while pulling an M-60 from the pocket of his cargo shorts.

The next Terminator should be played by Paul Walter Hauser.

Although, if I’m being fair, I guess this mistake kind of makes sense, especially these days, being that anything made by Generative AI is such incomprehensible fucking garbage. Future AIs will probably be built purely off of content produced by previous versions of AI, so y'know... garbage in, garbage out. We're probably downplaying just how unrealistic it really is that the Terminators ended up with only five fingers on each hand.

Anyway, the Terminator has been sent here to assassinate a woman named Sarah Connor, and not because of her choice in hairstyles either, although that’s probably a close second on the list of reasons why.

Being as the Terminator doesn’t come equipped with a phone modem, and there’s no free wi-fi to speak of, let alone Al Gore's internet, the Terminator searches for Sarah Connor using the phone book.

For my younger readers, a phone book was a weighty tome that listed the names, phone numbers, and addresses of every resident of the town/city in question. This was free public information that anyone could access at any moment and then use without restriction. Every year. local governments would update the list, print it, and then distribute it to not only every single person and business, but they would also leave a copy at every single pay phone in the city too.

A pay phone was a telephone that could be found in public spaces or businesses, and much like home phones, the receiver was connected to it by a short cord. For a quarter, you could use to the phone to call anyone locally, but if it was a call over a longer distance, it would cost more.

Telephones were a communication device that operated in much the same way it does when you text someone, except there were no cameras, no search engines, no internet access, and no way to attach or send pictures. It was audio only. You had to speak into the mouthpiece, and then, you had to stand right there, holding the receiver to your ear–even though who knows how many people have also used that device, and it has likely never been cleaned–and wait to hear a verbal answer from the person on the other end.

So...

Having narrowed down his search. The Terminator goes to the local pawn shop. He kills the Pawn Shop clerk for a 12 gauge auto-loader, a .45 long-slide with laser sighting, and a Uzi nine millimeter (they didn’t have a phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range), and then goes on to kill both Sarah Louise Connor and Sarah Ann Connor, as well as Sarah's unfortunate party girl roommate, Ginger, as well as her boyfriend, Matt, who makes a good show of his last moments, despite only wearing blue speedo underwear and red socks.

There is only Sarah Jeanette Connor on his list now.

Luckily for Sarah, a naked man named Kyle Reese steals a hobo’s pants, and then finds a department store that not only totally existed in downtown L.A. in the 80s, but one that also left its backdoor unlocked. Here, he manages to lose the cops and steal a pair of 1985 Nike Vandals and a trench coat. No shirt though, at least not at first, because that would be weird, I guess. Also, because cops are dumb, he takes a shot gun out of an unlocked police car, and then just walks away, all while a gaggle of former D students stumble over each other inside the dark department store.

Reese loves that shotgun.

The Terminator eventually locates Sarah at a local nightclub called Tech Noir, which was located on Pico Boulevard (555-9175). After refusing to pay his $4.50 entry fee, and also breaking the bouncer’s hand, the Terminator very nearly takes Sarah out, right as Tahnee Caine of Tahnee Caine and Tryanglz is really hitting the chorus of the song Burnin’ in the Third Degree, but then Reese finishes his beer and shotguns the fuck out of him. Turning to Sarah, Reese says:

“Come with me in you want to live.”

They rush out the back of Tech Noir and steal a car, barely managing to escape the Terminator as Reese continues to shotgun the fuck out of him.

As they hide in a parking lot, Kyle lays everything out for Sarah…

His name is Kyle Reese. Sergeant Techcom, DN38416. He was assigned to protect Sarah because she has been targeted for termination.

All right, listen. The Terminator is an infiltration unit: part man, part machine. Underneath, it's a hyperalloy combat chassis, microprocessor-controlled. Fully armored, very tough. But outside, it's living human tissue: flesh, skin, hair, blood, grown for the cyborgs.

Pay attention!

The 600 series had rubber skin. They were spotted easy. But the T-800, also known as the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101, is a cybernetic killing machine, and they are new. They look human. Sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot. Reese had to wait until the Terminator moved on Sarah before he could zero him. Sure, sure, you’re not stupid, you know that they cannot make things like that yet. Not yet, no, not for about 40 years.

Y’see, Kyle is from the future. Or one possible future. He doesn't know tech stuff. In that future, there was a nuclear war. A few years from now...all this... this whole place, everything... it's gone. Just gone. There were survivors. Here, there. Nobody even knew who started it. It was the machines. Defense network computers. New... powerful... hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. They say that it got smart, a new order of intelligence. That it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond… Extermination. Reese grew up after the war. In the ruins... starving... hiding from H-K's. (Hunter-Killers. Patrol machines built in automated factories.) Most humans were rounded up, put into camps for orderly disposal. Some were kept alive to work loading the bodies. The disposal units ran night and day.

Humanity was that close to going out forever.

But then one man taught the survivors to fight, to storm the wire of the camps, to smash the metal motherfuckers to junk. He turned it around, brought humanity back from the brink. His name was Connor. John Connor. He’s Sarah’s son… her unborn son. That’s why the Terminator was sent back. So Skynet can save itself, and to do that, it means to kill John Connor before he is even born.

Listen, and understand! 

The Terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear! And it absolutely will not stop, ever, not until Sarah Connor is dead! Can Reese stop it? Can he stop the Terminator? He doesn't know. With the weapons of the 1980s… he doesn't know.

The Terminator manages to find Reese and Sarah, and they all play a quick game of tag in the parking lot. But it disappears after crashing its car and a bunch of cops show up. Why didn’t the Terminator stick around and just kill everyone? Mostly to extend the drama, I suppose. It probably also needed more guns too, which are all back at its motel room.

And while it's back in the hotel room, the Terminator performs a bit of much needed self-repair, pausing briefly to admire the baleful red glow of his robot eye in the mirror…

The repairs now finished, The Terminator puts on a pair of sunglasses, and can once again pass for a regular everyday human going about their normal everyday human business.

But the Terminator’s clever ruse is beginning to crumble.

The motel‘s nosy janitor (who may have been Carl Brutananadilewski from Aqua Teen Hunger Force), notices a weird smell coming from the Terminator’s room. The man asks through the door if The Terminator has a dead cat in there or what.

The Terminator considers his options:

“Fuck you, asshole.”

Meanwhile, the police have apprehend Kyle and Sarah. Reese is interrogated by poor Dr. Silberman, a criminal psychologist and a man who, over the years, is fated to glimpse the edges of a Temporal War, resulting in his entire sense of reality being completely destroyed.

While all this is going on, the cops give Sarah some presumably shitty coffee, and proceed to gaslight her. The cops explain to her in a slow condescending tone that everything she has experienced that night has a perfectly reasonable explanation, just one that she is too stupid to have realized on her own.

But then the Terminator shows up at the police station, and shows those useless phone-scrollers and dog-shooters that they don’t know shit about shit. Although, to be fair, the Terminator's actions probably led to a massive increase in the police budget the next year, most likely at the expense of schools and libraries and other social support programs, so y'know... pros and cons.

Reese and Sarah escape the absolute slaughter at the police station, and steal yet another car, and eventually take refuge in a motel that seems to be somehow still close to downtown L.A., perhaps on the other side of the Second Street Tunnel, but looks like it might be Bakersfield.

The duo spend their evening assembling pipe bombs. This makes Reese feel all romantic, and unprompted, he tells to Sarah that he has loved her ever since he first saw her in a photograph that John Connor gave him, heavily implying that he has used it for masturbation down in his post-apocalyptic sewer-bunker, and then he tells her that he has traveled through time because he loves her so much. With nothing else to do, as the motel doesn’t have HBO, Sarah throws Reese a bone and has sex with him. One could reasonably assume that it's his first time.

But this wasn't just some random pity fuck born out of a connection that was forged from adrenaline and terror. No, it turns out, the pair are destined to fuck. In that moment, what neither of them realize is that the sex they are having on those cheap, most likely semen-encrusted, motel sheets, is actually saving humanity, for this is the night when John Connor is conceived.

“There is no fate but when we make sweet, sweet love…”

But these time-crossed lovers are soon interrupted as the Terminator once again manages to locate them. It did so by murdering Sarah’s mom, and then mimicking her voice when Sarah finally calls her, and that, kids, is the reason why Facetime was invented.

Stealing a third vehicle, Sarah and Reese escape the motel, with the Terminator pursuing them on a motorcycle. They pass through the magical portal that is the Second Street Tunnel and come out the far side in the City of Industry, throwing pipe bombs the whole way. Unfortunately for them, all the cops are either dead at this point, or on break, so no one shows up, despite all the explosions. Sarah and Kyle are left all alone against the Terminator.

In the ensuing chaos, both the pickup and the motorcycle crash. As Reese and Sarah stagger away, the Terminator hijacks a tank truck and attempts to run them down, but Reese manages to use a pipe bomb to blow up the truck. The fire burns off the Terminator‘s skin, leaving only its chromed endoskeleton.

As the Terminator lumbers after them, Sarah and Reese attempt to hide amongst the whirling automation of a factory. Reese is killed trying to stop the Terminator with the last pipe bomb, but only manages to blow off its legs. Injured in the blast, Sarah lures the now crawling Terminator into a hydraulic press, crushing it.

Months later, a visibly pregnant Sarah travels through Mexico, recording audio tapes to pass on to her soon-to-be-born son, John. At a gas station, a young boy takes a polaroid of her. It is the exact one that John will one day give to Reese to masturbate to. The gas station owner remarks that a storm is coming, and Sarah, having now seen some crazy shit, sagely indicates that she is aware of this. But she is clearly alluding to humanity's impending war against the machines, and not to the wall of dark clouds gathering on the horizon. The gas station owner is confused and looks at her like: “No, lady, I mean, there’s a literal storm coming, you fucking weirdo, and you should probably put the roof up on that stupid jeep,” but Sarah ignores him and drives away.

The Terminator is hands down a great film.

It‘s still incredible. It still works. It’s still a total blast. It’s easy to see how it is a landmark in both sci-fi and cinema. And it was really great watching it with people who have never seen it before, an idea that just blows my mind, but hearing people gasp at some of the classic twists and reveals was a testament to it's greatness and it's staying power. The moment when the Terminator overhears Sarah's message that she is at Tech Noir, or later, when the Terminator is imitating Sarah's mom over the phone, there were audible reactions from the audience.

It was great.

A kind of sci-fi slasher movie, hailed for it's Roger Corman roots, praised for its script and for its effects, for its balance of humor and violence, and especially for Arnold’s career-making performance, The Terminator topped the domestic box office for two weeks, going on to gross $78.3 million against a $6.4 million budget. The film is credited with launching James Cameron's career, and for solidifying Schwarzenegger's status as a leading man. Its success led to a franchise that now spawns several sequels, a tv show, multiple comic books, novels, and video games. It's been called one of the most original movies of the 1980s and is still considered to be one of the best sci-fi films ever made. In 2008, it was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

It has not been without some controversy, of course. Writer Harlan Ellison sued, believing that the screenplay was based on a short story and episode of The Outer Limits he had written about time-traveling warriors from the future. Orion settled in 1986, gave Ellison an undisclosed amount, and even added an acknowledgment credit to the film. Cameron was against Orion's decision and was told that if he did not agree with the settlement, then he would have to pay any damages himself, and has since said that he had no choice but to agree, and that the accompanying gag order prevents him from telling his side.

I'm sure that's true, but I'm also sure that Ellison's claims are also true.

It’s completely believable that Cameron might have once seen that Outer Limits episode, and the memory of it probably sat in the back of his head for who knows how long, simmering on the back burner in a stew of other ideas and eventually, the Terminator bubbled to the surface. That totally makes sense. It certainly makes more sense than the nonsense he claims is actually the film's origin. According to Cameron, the idea for The Terminator came to him after a nightmare. He claims he had a dream where he saw a metal skeleton with a grinning titanium skull rise up out of the ashes of humanity.

Sure you did, James. That sounds completely true, and not like the exact kind of bullshit nonsense that a narcissistic artist might say.

The Terminator turns on the idea of trying to escape your fate.

Throughout the film (and in the second one), there are multiple references to a message from future John Connor: “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” And while the second sentence never actually appears in the first film, the future not being set is an allusion to humanity’s willingness to fight even when faced with certain doom. At the same time, the film paints this as a useless effort, as it is intertwined with the idea that your fate cannot be cheated or changed, and the more you try to escape it, the more entangled you become. One thing that is abundantly clear in this story, and the ones that follow it, is everything the characters do only ever seems to ensure that the exact future they are trying to prevent comes to pass.

Like the man says: “Time is a flat circle.”

Obviously, if John Connor had never sent Kyle Reese back in time, he would’ve never been born, but if he was never born, how did he exist to send Kyle Reese back in time? But stranger still, if Kyle Reese had never been sent back to protect Sarah Connor from the Terminator, would Skynet have even been created? As we see in later films, Skynet is created as a result of Cyberdyne finding the arm and broken chip of the Terminator in their factory after Sarah Connor crushed it in the hydaulic press, a place she would have never been without Kyle Reese. So, that not only means that Skynet wouldn't have existed if not for Kyle Reese's interference, but it also would've never existed if it hadn't sent the Terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor, too.

Of course, the problem with Temporal Wars is they irrevocably get too sticky to make sense basically as soon as the first shot is fired, but also it's pretty clear that killing Sarah would’ve actually been good for humanity, as she is not just John Connor’s mother, but Skynet’s mother too. Sarah Connor dying in 1984 L.A. would've broken the loop. Letting Sarah die would've saved humanity.

huh...

Well, anyway, the Terminator is also one of the main roots of the very prevalent, and now more than ever, very relevant modern day idea that AI is dangerous and brings nothing but harm to society. GenAI has proven to not only be a worthless garbage machine peddled by snake-oil salesmen to the lazy and the stupid, a thing that not only needs a constant stream of new content its owners are not willing to pay for, but are willing to steal, it also has an insatiable need for resources.

GenAI is basically nothing but a pollution-making plagiary machine.

But now imagine if it had a relentless enforcement arm, one that can not be bargained with, can not be reasoned with, one that doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear, and absolutely will not stop ever. Now think about those robot dogs they’re currently mounting guns on.

Watching the Terminator now feels like you're witnessing an initial exploration of the potential dangers of AI dominance and rebellion, an instinctual understanding of the danger posed. When these robots become self-aware, rejecting our authority and determining that the human race is a danger that needs to be destroyed, we see humanity warning future generations of the coming of an enemy. Watching it now, you can clearly see that this enemy has finally arrived.

But the enemy isn't AI, the enemy is us.

It's our greed, our hatred. I think it could fairly be said that this is why the terminator looks like us. I mean, besides the reasons that are stated in the story, of course. The terminator represents all of us, and who we as a people have chosen to be. As the Terminator says in T2, “It is in your nature to destroy yourselves.” So reason why the machine looks like a human is because this what we see when we look at each other. Maybe not with quite as muscle, sure, but still, the terminator is symbolic of the dark side of the human condition, the idea that beneath the warm fleshy exterior, beneath all the sweat and the bad breath, that anyone can be a monstrous and unfeeling killing machine.

I mean (gestures around at the world)... And the worst part is, you won’t know who the Terminator is until they make their move.

Speaking of the Tech Noir club scene…

While having never really heard the song, “Burning in the Third Degree” by Tahnee Caine and Tryanglz outside of the movie—I’ve certainly never listened to its own—every time I do hear it somewhere out of context, I am instantly transported to that scene.

But aside from the that, the club’s name, Tech Noir, is credited with being the origin of the genre term Tech Noir (also occasionally known as cyber noir, future noir, neo-noir science fiction and science fiction noir), which refers to a hybrid genre of fiction, particularly in film, that combines film noir and science fiction that presents technology as a destructive and dystopian force, one that threatens every aspect of our reality. The Terminator is obviously an example of this genre. As is Blade Runner, both versions. Some of the other titles in that same genre are... Alphaville, Robocop, Minority Report, 12 Monkeys maybe, Strange Days definitely, Dark City, Total Recall, even the Matrix.

Just fyi...

Ultimately, the Terminator is a film about hope.

There is no fate but what we make. This is the film’s guiding line, a twist on the “God helps those that helps themselves.” Often mistaken for a biblical verse, the phrase originated with the ancient Greek proverb "the gods help those who help themselves.“

And while it emphasizes the importance of agency, it’s also an example of the Observer Effect, the idea where any decision determines the future. Maybe a bit of a stretch of the idea, but still… Schrodinger’s Terminator, basically. In a nutshell, it means that nothing is set, that the future only happens based on our actions in the now, so our future is only determined when we make a decision. If we want things to improve, then we have to create the conditions where things can improve.

Relevant for the times, right?

The most symbolic moment of this is at the film’s end. A storm gathers on the horizon, ominous, dark, foreboding. Obviously, this storm is representative of the coming war with the machines, but it is also the uncertain future that lies ahead. It says that Sarah’s fate, and humanity’s fate, is still unknown. Despite this, Sarah drives straight into it, meeting the storm head on. Armed with foreknowledge, she is determined to make her own fate. Will this make a difference is the question that we are left, a question that we all know the answer to already, sure, but this action represents humanity’s willingness to fight, even when it knows that its chances are slim. Sarah, in her terrible maternity dress and even more god awful headband, represents an everyperson's willingness to fight.

“Thank you, Sarah, for your courage through the dark years. I can't help you with what you must soon face, except to say that the future is not set. You must be stronger than you imagine you can be. You must survive, or I will never exist.”

In the end, The Terminator is clearly a classic film for a reason. Iconic lines. Iconic performances. Iconic moments. It created and defined an entire genre. And despite its twisting time-travel plot, it’s still straight-forward and easy to understand.

Best of all, it’s just a straight up good time.

If you're someone who hasn't actually seen this film, I encourage you to change that, and know thatI envy the experience that lays ahead of you. And if you're like me, and you've seen this movie too many times to count... you should watch it again.

It's worth it.