Retrospective: The Terminator (Patreon)

Recently, my co-workers did an on-air segment where they speculated that A.I. could possibly develop consciousness. Given that one of our anchors seems to consider ChatGPT more human than the crew and producers, it was nice to revisit The Terminator, with its horror of cold, martial A.I.

Cameron, who's always been better at exposition than anyone in Hollywood, establishes that the rise of the machines was an emergent property of the military-industrial complex. The film's Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation point to an even deeper fear — that the remnants of humanity will not be its tenderness, but its high-tech bellicose crusade against life itself. Cameron has always been a softie, but in his first movie (let's ignore Piranha 2), he's also an angry luddite.

The Terminator, which at first looks like a noir-inflected slasher, gradually reveals its commitments. Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) is a working class woman with few concrete ties to contemporary American life. Her worth isn't even a mere byproduct of her motherhood of the savior (although it does play a bigger role than we'd maybe like). Like all persons, she matters simply because she is, because of what she can be. Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) crosses oceans of time to find her — again, not because of who her son is, but because of who she is. Get yourself a man who will time travel for you.

The tenderness of The Terminator aside, this is a phenomenally well-constructed movie. Cameron exercises great restraint, eking out bits of information at a time, choosing act breaks with spectacular finesse. If you want to study a first-time director, this is the movie to go to. Think less about the themes, and more of the motifs: objects/persons being crushed by wheels/treads, flesh intercut with steel, the two stalkers heading in the same direction, characters dashing through dead workplaces. I could probably write a book about this one. Don't ask me to do that though. I need to write a script in this vein instead. And if you tell me to get A.I. to do it for me, you're terminated, fucker.

I'm very tired.