Every week Apple offer a film for rental at a discounted price of 99p on iTunes. For several weeks, the selections were pretty poor. Then last week saw a quality jump, with Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake.
Would this week continue the improvement? The answer would be a resounding yes, as to coincide with the DVD release of Terminator: Salvation, we’ve been treated to James Cameron’s 1984 classic, the original The Terminator.
In the future, a post-apocalyptic war rages on, as small pockets of human resistance fighter struggle for survival. The predators intent on their destruction are man’s own creation, machines. Robotic soldiers pursue what remains of our race, the genocide of an entire species almost complete. One man (Arnold Schwarzenneger) is sent back, through time, to before the civil war began. He begins tracking down all the Sarah Connors in the phonebook eliminating them one by one. Someone else is also sent back.
Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) is an ordinary woman, with a dead end job, and a life going nowhere. When the news reports a serial killer is hunting down people with her name, she tries to find a safe place. But there is no safe refuge from this killing machine, and he tracks her down. The second man sent back comes to her rescue. Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) has to convince Connor that she holds the key to mankind’s survival, and together they must evade both the police and an unstoppable cyborg killing machine.
You’ve all seen Terminator, you don’t need my opinion on the story. Does it still hold up today? Thematically, it’s still just as relevant. Our dependence on technology to live continues to increase unabated. Large corporations still hold far too much power and exert too much influence. Our paranoia towards the secret experiments conducted by the men and women in political power hasn’t decreased in the last twenty-five years. The action is as exciting as ever, the sub-par acting to be expected from an 80’s action movie.
The effects, great at the time, obviously are incomparable to today’s standards. The stop-motion effects particularly have aged badly. Whereas in a horror film like The Thing the jerky look of this technique give the alien creatures a suitably creepy, otherworldly feel, in a movie based on a premise of then futuristic technology it does let the movie down a bit.
Unfair criticism, as i said it was good for the time. After all, no amount of cutting edge technology and CGI could make Terminator: Salvation anything more than a big let down. Definitely worth a pound of anyone’s money, if you haven’t seen it for a while give The Terminator a watch, and remind yourself why we are all looking forward to Cameron’s Avatar next month.
The Terminator is available on iTunes at the discounted price until Midnight Monday 30th November, and on DVD and Blu-Ray now.
Bazmann – You can follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/baz_mann
