The Terminator (1984)
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Welcome to my new season dedicated to robots, cyborgs, androids and other more metallic things that go bump, crash and thud in the night.
The Terminator is a 1984 science fiction action film directed and co-written by James Cameron and distributed by the independent film studio Orion Pictures. It features Arnold Schwarzenegger as The Terminator, Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor and Michael Biehn as Kyle Reese. The film was followed by three sequels. The franchise has evolved to include video games and a television series.
The film takes place in 1984, introducing the concept of a “terminator”, specifically the titular character (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a seemingly unstoppable cyborg assassin who has been sent back from the year 2029 by a collective of artificially intelligent computer-controlled machines bent on the extermination of the human race. The Terminator’s mission is to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) whose future son, John Connor, leads a resistance against the machines. A human, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), is also sent back from the future by John Connor himself to protect her.
In 2008, The Terminator was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
Directed by James Cameron
Produced by Gale Anne Hurd
Written by James Cameron
Gale Anne Hurd
William Wisher Jr.
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger
Michael Biehn
Linda Hamilton
Music by Brad Fiedel
Cinematography Adam Greenberg
Editing by Mark Goldblatt
Distributed by Orion Pictures
Release date(s) October 26, 1984
Running time 108 min.
Country United States
Language English
Spanish
Budget US $6.5 million
Gross revenue Domestic:
$38,371,200
Worldwide:
$78,371,200
Followed by Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Cameron originally envisioned the Terminator as a small, unremarkable man, giving it the ability to blend in more easily. As a result, his first choice for the part was Lance Henriksen. O. J. Simpson was on the shortlist but Cameron did not think that “such a nice guy could be a ruthless killer”. According to him and co-writer William Wisher, Schwarzenegger was offered the role of the human soldier Reese. However, they realized that he would be better suited as the Terminator, which as a result became large and muscular. Michael Biehn was also on the shortlist for the Terminator, and not the hero Kyle Reese. The idea of a more average-looking terminator and Schwarzenegger as the hero would be revisited for the sequel.
Production was originally scheduled for Spring 1983 in Toronto, but after Dino De Laurentiis chose to option Schwarzenegger to film Conan the Destroyer, filming was delayed until March 1984 in Los Angeles.
Several scenes cut from the film are available on some DVD releases. The secondary police characters Vukovich and Traxler had several of their scenes cut, in one of which we see Traxler realize that Reese is right, and hand over his weapon as he dies. One particular scene, involving the destruction of Cyberdyne, inspired a very similar plot point in the sequel. In this scene, Sarah suggests to Reese that they find Cyberdyne Systems and destroy it before they can invent Skynet, preventing the war. At the end of the film, when Sarah is being taken away by the ambulance, two factory workers find the remains of the Terminator and decide to turn it over to Research and Development, with the camera zooming out to reveal the name of the factory: Cyberdyne Systems. These two scenes set up major plot points in Terminator 2, where the CPU and arm from the Terminator in this film are reverse engineered and used to create Skynet, and where Sarah, John, and the Terminator blow up Cyberdyne to prevent the war.
Director James Cameron has said that The Terminator was inspired by two episodes of the 1960s television science fiction series The Outer Limits – “Soldier” and “Demon with the Glass Hand” – both written by science fiction author Harlan Ellison. When Ellison threatened a lawsuit, Terminator production company Hemdale Film Corporation and distributor Orion Pictures gave him an “acknowledgement to the works of” credit on video and cable releases of The Terminator, as well as a cash settlement of an undisclosed amount.
In addition to Harlan Ellison, other writers have been pointed to as possible sources of inspiration for The Terminator, such as Philip K. Dick. Critic Zack Handlen, reviewing Dick’s 1953 short story “Second Variety”, wrote: “Cameron’s lucky [that] Dick died two years before [The Terminator] was released, or he might have had another lawsuit on his hands.” “Second Variety” was adapted to film in 1995 under the title Screamers, which also attracted comparisons to The Terminator.
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