2024-09-01 04:14:09
There is a tantalizing moment halfway through the movie’s revelation James Cameron, Terminator (1984). Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), The resistance soldier from the future who has returned to 1980s Los Angeles warns heroine Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) than a cyborg (Arnold Schwarzenegger) He wants to kill her. This Terminator, she warns, is “part man, part machine” and is controlled by microprocessors. “He’s got sweat, bad breath, everything.” Sarah says she’s not stupid, she knows “they can’t do things like that.”
“Not for another 40 years,” Kyle replied.
Well then, It’s been 40 years. And although the cybernetic T-100 of Arnie remains a pipe dream, there has never been a better time to evaluate to what extent Cameron’s chrome vision of the future makes sense today. After all, this was the film that made Schwarzenegger, who had made his name in the movies of Conan the Barbarian, in one superstar world. Terminator gave rise to multiple sequels, often with diminishing returns, but its own status as Defining classic of 1980s action cinema has been insured for a long time.
Its history has the hangover of a Greek tragedy. The cyborg attempts to assassinate Sarah Connor before she can conceive their son, John Connor, the rebel leader whose destiny is to defeat an army of self-aware robots. The story of Arnie’s casting is itself a film myth. The director had developed the idea for the film after falling ill and having a “fever dream” about a metal skeleton emerging from a fire. He initially thought of Lance Henriksen (who had appeared in his previous film, Piranha II) for the role of Terminator, and even did some artwork with Henriksen dressed in metal.
“Jim prepared an airbrush drawing, a fully painted concept of Lance Henriksen with the skeletal face and the red eye,” he recalls. producer and co-writer Gale Anne Hurd. “Literally, that was before we even got the film financed.” Henriksen would eventually appear in the film but as one of the disbelieving detectives, as well as earning a spot as an android in another Cameron blockbuster, Aliens.
Orion Pictures, which eventually took over co-financing, suggested to OJ Simpson (then at the height of his fame in Hertz commercials) as the best option, an idea that Cameron quickly dismissed. More usefully, Orion also recommended Schwarzenegger to play the hero Kyle Reese. Initially wary, Cameron and Hurd warmed to the actor after meeting him for lunch at a posh Los Angeles restaurant and discovering they couldn’t foot the bill. “What star would work for someone who can’t even foot the lunch bill?” Hurd recalls thinking. Instead of walking away, however, Schwarzenegger said that had had exactly the same experience earlier in his career. From that moment on, the filmmakers and the actor, who played the villain, got along very well.
Schwarzenegger’s first appearance, when the Terminator appears in Los Angeles before a surprised garbage man as naked as Adam, gave the film an immediate mythical force. Shortly after, this is followed by that amazing shot in which he contemplates Los Angeles at night, as if he were the master of everything he observes. former bodybuilding champion He plays a serial killer who feels no mercy, no remorse, no fear, and yet audiences quickly embraced him. It only has 17 lines, but one of them, “I’ll be back,” is the line that defined his career.
The film, which was once labeled as low-quality science fiction by its snobbish detractors, it now has the approval of everyone from genre aficionados to academics. Earlier this summer, a conference at Bangor University, attended by Hurd herself, featured talks on everything from “Gender and technology in the franchise Terminator” until “Sarah Connor’s feminist legacy.”
“I think that Terminator It’s a fantastic movie for reflect on the Reagan era, las Reaganomicsthe Strategic Defense Initiative and all the changes in American society: the growth of multinational companies, personal computing, the genetic engineering and all these things,” explains Professor Nathan Abrams, the conference organizer and a longtime lecturer on the film.
Co-organizer Dr. Elizabeth Miller notes that Sarah Connor was a groundbreaking figure in 1980s action films. “She has nothing beyond the capabilities that an ordinary woman would have, and yet she is the central figure,” he says. “She’s not Wonder Woman, but the whole plot revolves around her.”
Sometimes scholars overlook the humor Cameron brings to the material, a lightness that contrasts well with its apocalyptic themes. Some scenes (Sarah’s raunchy phone conversation, Schwarzenegger’s computer-generated swearing) could be lifted straight from fraternity comedies as Porky’s (1981). Other moments macabre (Terminator kills Sarah’s roommate and her boyfriend) would fit perfectly into slasher films like Nightmare in the Deep of the Night (1984), who were gaining followers at that time.
“Jim and I” We argued a lot about tone. “We wanted the movie to be intense, pretty relentless action, but you have to break that up,” Hurd says of the script’s comedic interludes. “Regardless of how dark the world is, or how dangerous it is, I think that It is important to always inject humor.” In fact, Hurd and Cameron were fans of the Ealing production company’s comedies, particularly The man in the white suit (1951), and they talked about them while working on the script.
Other influence was Mad Max (1979), by George Miller, from which they took the idea of weaving complex plot lines into fast-paced action scenes. “It’s very difficult to make a movie where everyone is standing around talking about things that the audience needs to know at that moment. You really need to communicate that information, but everyone is going to buy popcorn. They’re not going to go get popcorn in the middle of an action sequence or a car chase.”
One of the enduring pleasures of the film is the way Cameron draws elements from Roger Corman’s exploitation films in which he and Hurd were exposed to radical aesthetic and intellectual ideas. He managed to be both corny and cultured at the same time.
Although Cameron had a small army of special effects technicians and makeup artists (led by the renowned Stan Winston), I was filming in Los Angeles with limited resources. He later told the BBC that for one important shot where Arnold was not on, he recruited a junior employee to stand in for him. Cameron only had an hour before he had to return the camera, so He covered the young assistant’s shoes with black duct tape to match the Terminator’s boots, and thus got his close-up. “They’re actually Randy’s loafers with black duct tape on them,” he observed, referring to what many fans have always believed to be Arnie’s large feet.
It may be a genre film dystopianbut it also contains something of the same romance which, a decade later, made Titanic was so appealing to teen audiences. “I went through time for you, Sarah. I love you. I always have,” Kyle tells the young California waitress. Like Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack in Titanic, Kyle is an elegant and selfless figure, willing to give her own life to keep her beloved alive.
Why Biehn didn’t gain wider recognition remains a mystery. While Titanic made DiCaprio the biggest star of the time, Terminator failed to make its likeable and charismatic male lead a household name. Perhaps it can be called Boris Karloff syndrome. If you mention Universal’s 1931 horror classic, Frankensteinfew film buffs remember today that Colin Clive played the lead role of Henry Frankenstein, but everyone knows the name Karloff.
Terminator It was a huge box office success and had a spectacular afterlife on VHS, beginning in 1985. A gun-toting, sunglasses-wearing Schwarzenegger appeared on the cover. “He is the one who will not die in the nightmare that will not end,” read the text in capital letters on the back cover.
With this type of marketing, it’s no wonder that Arnie will take the cake.
Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), Cameron’s sequel, was another triumph Big budget: slick, expansive, and featuring the killer robot Schwarzenegger miraculously transformed into the good guy in the movie. It had none of the B-movie grittiness that was sometimes found in the original. However, that grittiness was what made the first film so special. It was a movie of exploitation dirty whose classic status was confirmed in 2008, when the Library of Congress selected it for its conservation in the United States National Film Registry (Terminator 2 would achieve the same distinction in 2023).
Not long ago, Hurd happened to visit the Pentagonthe headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense. In some offices, Hurd was surprised to see signs Terminator. “It turns out that it is a movie that has endured and it stays in people’s consciousness,” says, with obvious understatement, the producer (whose credits since then include everything from The Walking Dead, from AMC, to blockbusters like Aliens (1986), Armageddon (1998) y Hulk (2003)).
It’s not just senior US defense officials who think that Terminator remains relevant. The inventor and tycoon Elon Musk is another ardent fan who has picked up on the film’s prophetic warnings. I ask the producer if, 40 years ago, she and Cameron were really scared the dark side of artificial intelligence or whether Schwarzenegger’s Terminator idea was just another idea for a genre film.
“There are several factors that influence it. First of all, Jim and I were greatly affected 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), by Stanley Kubrick, and the spectre of HAL (the computer with a mind of its own from the film). There’s a reason we called the nightclub in the film ‘Tech Noir’. It’s that we considered that the film had a perspective of warning about the future of technology, If we don’t pay attention, Jim and I knew that artificial intelligence and robotics were going to develop. No one doubted that, and we wanted people to be aware of the consequences. Once you open Pandora’s box, you can’t put it all back in.”
Once the box is opened, the film seems more current than ever.
In the 1980s, Hurd says, “people loved the movie as a roller coaster, as entertainment. But now you add the context that Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence, everyone is talking about robotics. If people aren’t worried about the extermination of humanity, they’re worried about losing their jobs.”
Terminator was re-released in some European cinemas in a 4K restoration. “He’s back,” the new poster predictably proclaims. a family picture of Arnie with those sunglasses, but the truth is that, since 1984, it has never really gone away.
* Of The Independent from Great Britain. Special for Page/12.