Who is Sarah Connor and why do we care about her? It takes about 40 minutes to find out that she apparently she breeds good children. A lightning storm sends two beings from forty years in the future, one for her protection, and one for her destruction.
The story is pretty basic. We learn of a post-apocalyptic future in which a defense system constructed with a Cold War backdrop becomes too smart, interprets humans as a threat, and retaliates with a full nuclear attack. I'm not sure why the computers survived a nuclear holocaust, but apparently they did in force, and have spent the decades following hunting down the survivors who have formed guerrilla-warfare resistance. There are Terminator cyborgs who have titanium, robotic innards, but look like humans on the outside in order to confuse their enemies and make them hard to spot (except by dogs who know what cyborgs smell like as they should).
One of these Terminators (played by the elephantine Arnold Schwarzenegger) travels back to the 1984 present in order to hunt down Sarah Connor who will play a major role for the distant future. In her defense comes Sgt. Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), who volunteered to come back to save her for the sake of his cause. What follows is an action-packed thrill-ride to save Sarah, and at the same time destroy the Austrian juggernaut.
The special are awesome. There was some really, really good action sequences in this film, and Arnold is really terrifying as a villain. Anyone that outweighs me by 100 lbs. and has biceps larger than my head will always be a good bad-guy. Also, surrounding the gravity of the main characters and the central plot is an entire cast of goofy characters with hilarious one-liners. When Sarah, Reese, and the Terminator weren't on screen I was laughing my ass off--it was really well written.
For what it was The Terminator is a good movie. I know it was an action movie with car chases, gun slinging, and Arnold's chest, and that I should not take it too seriously, but this film raised more questions than it answered. Many more. I do not pretend to know anything about time travel, but I do know that logically the timeline of the movie did not work. Sarah even addresses this, but it is never explained, and that makes me more upset than if it was not acknowledged at all. The writers knew it didn't make sense, but didn't bother to solve the problem. Also, I'm not sure why, if people in the future have the ability to bend space and time, would they use this amazing technology to go back in time in order to save a woman who does not directly do anything to help their cause, and did not instead use it to make preventative measures so that the defense system was not created in the first place. Spoiler: Further, throughout the movie we see the Terminator take beating after beating without being seriously hurt. This should raise this question at the end of the film: If a nuclear bomb is not strong enough to destroy the machines in the future, then why should home-made plastique do the trick?
Like I said, though, you shouldn't over-think this movie. Enjoy the action, and enjoy the knowledge that you see as much of Mr. Schwarzenegger as Arnold's mistress.
2.5/4
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