The Terminator

Featuring an extreme case of mistaken identity, The Terminator demonstrates that sometimes having a common name doesn't make you anonymous. In fact, it can make you the center of attention and be downright deadly.

Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) is just an average person leading an average, almost boring, life. Working as a waitress, an exciting night for Sarah is one where her roommate goes out so she can spend a quite night at home. But as Sarah trudges through her daily life, a completely different scene is taking place in the future.

Machines have taken over and are at war with the humans in an attempt to exterminate them and have the entire planet for themselves. In an attempt to end the war before it even began, the machines decide to send a cyborg terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) back to 1984 to kill the mother of the leader of the human resistance. This is, of course, Sarah Connor. The humans find out about this plan and they send a soldier (Michael Biehn) named Kyle Reese back to the same time to protect Sarah Connor from The Terminator.

The Terminator, in an attempt to be thorough, goes on a killing rampage hunting down every Sarah Connor in the area and killing them. As more and more of them are killed, the police realize that somebody is murdering all the Sarah Connors so they locate Sarah and put her under protection. Luckily for Sarah, Kyle finds her and saves her from The Terminator (apparently the police are not very good at stopping cyborgs) and they must run from The Terminator, who is tracking Sarah and now knows that she is the one.

The Terminator is a good movie. Not great, but good. It does have redeeming qualities, like the performances. Nobody stands out as being that amazing performance that makes the movie, but overall the parts are well cast and the acting is very even. Arnold Schwarzenegger is, obviously, perfectly cast as The Terminator. What better role could there be for a body builder from a foreign country (who has such a heavy accent you can barely understand him) than a robot who doesn't have to do much more than run around and shoot big guns. At this early point in his career, Schwarzenegger was not a very good actor, but that didn't matter. He had the perfect screen presence for this film and it helped to make him the star that he is today.

Atmosphere and style were also big positives for this movie. The future segments that take place on the battlefield depicting the brutal war between the machines and the humans are dark and visceral and really help to convey a feeling of hopelessness for the humans.

But I did have one big problem with The Terminator -- how could the machines not know what Sarah Connor looked like? When The Terminator goes back in time to 1984, he uses a phone book to look up all the Sarah Connors in the area and then starts hunting them down and killing them, one by one. What sense does this make? The machines are smart enough to become "self aware" and build cyborgs that can travel back in time, but they don't know what the mother of the leader of their enemy looks like. I know, I've heard all the arguments, the main one being that the humans hid Sarah from the machines so they wouldn't be able to find her and they would have no idea what she looked like. But come on, they can keep her image completely hidden but not her name? Besides, couldn't the machines just send a bunch of cyborg soldiers into human headquarters and, at the very least, find a picture of her? Some may say this is just a minor plot hole, but for me it's a big problem. A lot of the plot rests on the fact that The Terminator doesn't know what Sarah Connor looks like and for me, that's too big a leap of faith to take.

More The Terminator Movie Reviews

Movie Review of The Terminator at Movie Reviews UK
The Terminator Movie Review and Information Page at The Internet Movie Database