Pure Chrome Musculature

Rating: 10/10 (21 February 2010)

Some movies age sadly, some with style, and some do not at all. James Cameron, as director of the first two cinematic installments of the Terminator franchise, admits how the focal ideas of this tale are gravitating towards the works of author Harlan Ellison, who delivered numerous stories for the sci-fi series Outer Limits, back in 1963. James Cameron was 13 then, and this television program surely must have given him quite a few retina stigmas and a lot of quality fiction to chew on. After all, quality science-fiction really should be able to offer you a fictional language and a collection of ideas you find intriguing and entertaining at the same time, and this exactly is what the Terminator movie was doing, - in fact, does still - back in-, and from- 1984.
Prior to that date, popculture robots were good fellers, cute sidekicks, friendly household appliances, or similar mechanical constructs of the sort that are seeking your bidding and amusement, ready to carry out your commands without hesitation. The Terminator movie rejected this view utterly, creating the then-fresh idea of sophisticated machinery that gets conscious of itself and recognizes its creator as something the world would be more easily manageable without. Machine sends a cyborg assassin back through time with the agenda of eliminating the current leader of the human Resistance. Though the ancient tale of the Golem may come into mind, the idea of intricate and "evil" machinery is unknown to the popular culture of the early 80's.
"Evil?" Why would The Terminator be "evil?" It is not. It is carrying out a Command, which is to eliminate the future leader of The Resistance. Yet, from a human point of view, - did you have any other sort of view than that so far? - evil is the capacity to harm without remorse. Since The Terminator has no awareness of such a vague concept as remorse, because remorse has no function nor relevance in spite of carrying out its mission with efficiency, the titular character indeed becomes the worst nightmare human can face: a nightmare that knows no mercy, simply because it does not know mercy, indeed.
Fortunately, it was Arnold Schwarzenegger who could cement the extremely rare Popculture-Demigod status with his paradigmatic portrayal of the cyborg assassin, the T800 Terminator, as originally Cameron wanted a Terminator figure that blends in more easily. He wanted Lars Henriksen, among others - this concept became realized in the Aliens, two years after The Terminator.
If one wants to be honest AND a Terminator geek at the same time - and let us want that, for a moment - then it is safe to state that a Terminator movie simply is not a Terminator movie without Schwarzenegger, since the heart and soul of the entire franchise is Schwarzenegger, as he is methodically-, thoroughly clears out an entire police station with a shotgun, wearing cheap sunglasses, T800 haircut and a black leather jacket.
The Terminator movie gains a pure-musculature continuation via its 1991 sequel Judgment Day, as director James Cameron has a masterful sense of what to offer-, what to show to deliver an installment that has no other agenda than to entertain with fresh and inventive elements he found, as result of going on with the story. This time, the T800 model becomes a good guy, while the main baddie is coming for you through the introduction of the state of the art T1000 model, the perfected cybernetic organism. As of now, the T800's assignment is to protect the leader of the Resistance from the death clutch of an even more efficient cyborg assassin, a construct Cameron uses to deliver inventive, state of the art special effects, revealing narrative brilliance and related playfulness at the core.
The T2 movie is a cybernetic rat race really, orchestrated-, and operated by the simple conflict of the urge of Termination and the confronting urge of Termination-Prevention: the idea is as grateful as it is elegantly simplistic, and Cameron has a whole lot to tell about how good of a time he has with all the significant elements he brings to the fray. The T2 movie does everything with the largely abused term: action packed-, and THEN does some more with it. The reason the movie remains an accomplishment of truly slick qualities, is the accumulated result of Cameron's sense of how to give an extremely sharp character to a scene "simply by" throwing in masterful elements that can't help but support a set via their mere presence and their slickly chosen functionalities.
In the exceptionally memorable chase sequence, for example, Arnold rides a good, old fashioned Harley Davidson bikebeast, removing the obstacles in his way via his favorite good, old fashioned shotgun, reloading it in a way that gives male viewers an immediate extra layer of hair to the chest via every buckshot implemented. Meanwhile, the state of the art T1000 model bids in radical proportions when the moment whispers lies about a second of peace, just to be shattered utterly-, and quite literally. Not to mention how Edward Furlong invents the "Emo" subculture without having any knowledge about that.
T2 delivers decently from a storytelling point of view as well, as the primal portrayal of the bond between the exceptionally strong mother figure and her son eventually invites the narrative to a satisfactory emotional culmination the whole franchise could settle idle upon, with

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Arnold giving you the thumbs.

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The Terminator tale goes on of course, to entertain its fans further on, but the franchise is yet to see an actor and related character who surpasses-, or even approximates the gravitational pull of the so far unrivaled canvas presence Arnold Schwarzenegger stigmatized the Terminator mythology with.
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