This week’s movie was The Terminator from 1984.

“In the year 2029, the ruling super-computer, Skynet, sends an indestructible cyborg back in time to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, before she canfulfill her destiny and save mankind.”

I have to say, movies from the 1980s had a lot of style and character and they didn’t just depend on Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) to tell a story – they depended on real effects, lighting, camera angles, and characters to tell often unimaged stories. The Terminator is another such movie, with a completely new and different story. Who would think of a machine that looks human, sent back in time to murder a young woman?

I mean. Early Sarah Connor was not the absolute badass we know today. Early Sarah Connor worked at a diner in a pink uniform while young children stuffed ice cream into her apron. Early Sarah Connor had a pet iguana, lived with her best friend in an apartment, and was dateless on a Friday night. She drove a moped to work. She was absolutely a prime example of a “normal” woman in the 1980s.

Sarah responds better than a lot of people might to the initial violence and change of life trajectory the arrival of the terminator entails. And as Kyle rattles off about his rank and serial number and tries to give Sarah a basic rundown of everything going on, she doesn’t freak out as badly as some people might. She does bite Kyle to try and get away but she still reacts pretty calmly to her new situation.

But then we get flashbacks of the future, courtesy of Kyle Reese, the warrior from the future, sent back through time to protect Sarah Connor. The future shows a variety of different machines and the lengths the humans have to go to in order to fight back against the machines, as well as the cost of that fight. When we first see Kyle Reese, he’s naked and has a ton of scars all over his mostly visible back, which was another thing this movie did very well – it’s one of the few movies I can think of that doesn’t shy away from male nudity.

The Terminator also showed a lot of the reality of living in the 1980s, before we had computers for everything. There were no cell phones, no internet search engines or maps, and when the payphone is out of order at the pizza place Sarah goes to, she then has to find another open public establishment in order to use their payphone. She probably didn’t even know where the closest police department or other emergency services buildings even are and that impacts her decision to go to a dance club, as it was the only place she could find that was open and had a phone. And then her first instinct is to call the police, which results in her eventually winding up at a police station and the deaths of everyone in that police station that night.

This is such an interesting movie with an interesting premise and fantastic characters. The soundtrack is fantastic and I enjoy every rewatch I do of this movie.

Overall, this is a really good movie that holds up well against the test of time, so long as you allows yourself an imagination and don’t expect the 1980s to look like our world today. I definitely rate this as a high four on my rating scale. I’m glad I own it on dvd and I rewatch it frequently.

The Terminator. Directed by James Cameron, performances by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, Linda Hamilton, and Paul Winfield, Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM), 1984.