The Terminator: Limited Edition [Blu-ray] | DVD Review

It’s hard to imagine anyone needing or wanting to read a review of The Terminator; you’re either a fan – die-hard or casual – and have seen it at least once or twice, or you have no intention of ever watching this 27-year-old action flick. If you fall into the latter category, it’s your loss; The Terminator, apart from launching the career of writer/director James Cameron (Aliens, Titanic, Avatar, and a couple of others you may have heard about) and announcing the arrival of Arnold Schwarzenegger (Total Recall, True Lies, and a couple of others you may also have heard about) as the major action star of a generation, ushered in a new era of thinking-man’s thrillers where unrelenting action and ever-escalating tension do not mean that there’s no room for thought-provoking storylines. The fact that it spawned three sequels – and, rumor has it, a possible fifth film in the series with Schwarzenegger attached – is testament to its staying power.

For the uninitiated, The Terminator is the story of a cyborg (Schwarzenegger) sent back to 1984 from the future in order to track down and kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton, Children of the Corn, Dante’s Peak), the mother of the as-yet-unborn John Connor, who is the leader of the humans in a man vs. cyborg war in 2029. The humans, for their part, have sent back Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn, The Abyss, Planet Terror) to try and stop the terminator. You might ask how such a simple premise and what amounts to one extended – albeit awesome – chase sequence can be seen as a thinking-man’s action movie, and it’s a valid question. But when you think about how the cyborgs might have left history to itself and come out better for it, that’s where the philosophical implications come into play and leave you thinking about this film long afer the credits have rolled.

Cameron came up with the idea for The Terminator when he was seriously ill while editing Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (enough to make anyone ill…Zing!), his directorial debut for B-movie legend Roger Corman. Running a high fever, he had visions of a chrome skeleton crawling through fire, and the rest, as they say, is history. There’s a scene where the terminator tracks Sarah Connor to a nightclub called ‘Tech-Noir’, and that’s as apt a description as any for the style of the movie: high-tech film noir, a pulpy tale of a woman on the run from an ominous figure while a stranger tries to save her at all costs. With a solid suporting cast that includes Lance Henrikson (Aliens, TV’s Millennium), Bill Paxton (Twister), and veteran character actor Paul Winfield (Mars Attacks!) and featuring a driving percussive score that could have come from nowhere but the 80s, The Terminator defies the odds and holds up rather well, even almost thirty years later. That’s saying a lot!

On the surface, this Blu-book Blu-ray release from Fox may seem like quite the package, but in reality that’s all it is: new packaging. For reasons that are unclear ($$$), Fox (via MGM) has decided to re-package the 2006 Blu-ray edition of The Terminator into a neat little Blu-book format. The 25-page booklet includes articles on James Cameron and the film’s place in the annals of sci-fi/action filmdom, as well as mini-bios of Schwarzenegger, Hamilton, and Biehn, and a page of trivia. The disc itself is very well-put-together. The high-def transfer is particularly crisp for a film from 1984, and the 5.1 audio makes excellent use of the full spectrum, very often placing the viewer directly in the middle of the action, as in the nightclub scene. You just might duck when you hear the bullets whizzing past your ears from guns fired seemingly from behind you. It’s a shame, though, that there are so few special features:

7 Deleted Scenes

These are mostly just filler, except for a couple concerning Cyberdyne Systems and how they came to be involved in the future war between the humans and the machines.

Creating the Terminator: Visual Effects amd Music
This is a 13-minute featurette that goes into detail about the visual effects work in two key scenes, featuring behind the scenes footage and interviews with special effects supervisor Gene Warren Jr. and pyrotechnics expert Joe Viskocil, as well as an interview with composer Brad Fiedel, who discusses how he developed the musical style of the film with a lot of input from James Cameron. Based on Fiedel’s description of Cameron’s involvement, it almost seems like he could have scored the film himself.

Terminator: A Retrospective
This is a twenty-minute sit-down chat (circa 1991) between Schwarzenegger and Cameron, where the two discuss the film and the impact it has had on themselves and on the filmmaking business as a whole. As difficult as it is to watch The Terminator without thinking of those famous Schwarzenegger prank calls (go ahead and search “Arnie prank calls” on YouTube…you won’t regret it), it’s just as difficult to watch this featurette without thinking of all that’s happening right now in Schwarzenegger’s life. But that’s what happens when you’re a larger than life film star-cum-politician.

If you can get past the idea that an American company 45 years in the future created a killing machine with a thick Austrian accent, The Terminator holds up amazingly well for a 27-year old film. If you already have a copy of the 2006 Blu-ray release, though, don’t bother picking this cash grab up. But if you don’t, then this is certainly a film worth adding to your collection. After all, as Charles Manson once said in reference to NBC’s summer reruns of Must-See-TV (okay, it was on an episode of Family Guy), “If I haven’t seen it, it’s new to me!”

Movie rating – 4

Disc Rating – 2.5