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Rating: Null/10 (19 September 2003)

Terminator, The
½* out of five
(Possible spoilers throughout)
It has been a couple months since its theatrical release, but now I am finally set to see Terminator 3. In preparation, I re-watched the movie that got the franchise started. Admittedly, I saw Terminator once before, as a pre-teen whose intellectual capacity had not yet developed to the level necessary to understand a film with such profound questions about time-travel, humanity, and the man-made proliferation of killer robots. My brain was simply too puny to appreciate the film. Or was it? As it turns out, it was not.
The story is insultingly simple: Two men from the post-nuclear holocaust future travel back in time to the present day (1984) to try and alter the course of history. The bad guy (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a cyborg who is programmed to kill (or `terminate') the central character Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), whose son will grow up to become an influential human leader. Preventing the Terminator is the good guy, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), a human who is trying to protect his own race from total annihilation.
That's as complicated as it gets. There is only a superficial treatment of the time-travel questions, as it is obvious that writer/director James Cameron is using the plot as a flimsy pretext to showcase a worn-out tale of good guy vs. bad guy. Terminator has the potential to be a pumped-up drama that demands the viewer to ponder his or her own fragile existence. Instead, this potential is sullied--demolished might be the word--by Cameron's almost psychotic drive to pack the movie end-to-end with gunshots, homemade-bomb explosions, car chases, door kick-downs, punching, and brawling, the sum of which renders the plot completely irrelevant.
The Terminator also fails as a 'popcorn flick', not because of a lack of violence, but because of a lack of acting skill among the central characters. The bit characters (like Sarah Connor's roommate Ginger) do a horrible job performing their parts; this is forgivable however, because the viewer does not expect much from expendable characters. However, we cannot forgive Biehn's phony jacked-up let's-get-'em-before-they-get-us demeanor that is so over-the-top it makes me wonder how much PCP this actor was taking at the time. Nor can we forgive Hamilton's job as an innocent, frightened flower who unwillingly gets caught in the middle of the bloody battle between Terminator and Reese. Her amateur-hour rookie performance is simply too shoddy to accept. (Perhaps all this is forgivable considering the fact that the budget for this movie probably ran in the tens of dollars range-if that.)
I was, however, relieved to see some inspired acting on Schwarzenegger's behalf. Never before had I seen someone so devoted to the art of oak tree imitation. This man is certainly one of the great method actors in film history.
The climax takes place in (ahem) what looks to be a robot factory. After Terminator's severed, mechanical torso springs back to life (the sole moment which earned the movie its generous rating) and begins to pursue our heroine Sarah Connor (these Terminators just never stop), I was reminded of the last time I felt such a rush of adrenaline: last week, when I eagerly waited for my strawberry Pop Tart to toast.
At the start of the movie, the attentive viewer will notice a disclaimer written in tiny letters. It reads: `Please disconnect brain from body, and don't ask any questions.' But be sure to reconnect your brain at the end of the movie, so you can figure out what the hell you just watched.