The Terminator (1984)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 1984
	Director: James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar)
	Actors: Arnold Schwarzenegger (Total Recall, Predator), Linda Hamilton (Terminator 2, Dante's Peak), Michael Biehn (Aliens, Planet Terror)
	Country: USA
	Genre: Action, SF
	Conditions of visioning: 27.10.2012, Blu-ray, Home cinema
Synopsis: In 1984 Sarah Connor, simple waitress in a diner, becomes suddenly the target of a killing machine, while another man wants to protect her and pretends to come from the future.
Review: This is the kind of movie everybody thinks to have seen, but actually mix it up with the better known, better done and more expensive sequel. In the same category you can find Mad Max, Rambo and maybe Friday 13th. I hadn't seen The Terminator since the times of VHS, but I remembered it pretty well. If it were not a pillar of modern Science-Fiction like Alien or Star Wars, it could look like a simple cheap B-movie of the 80's. Indeed the screenplay is utterly simple, the acting average, the special effects very dated and the music could have been composed nowadays on a mobile phone. But don't get fooled, the movie is dead serious and doesn't contain any of the lightness and jokes of the sequel Terminator 2. It is very intense and scary at time, no wonder that the legend says that James Cameron wrote the script after waking up from a nightmare in which a killer robot from the future was hunting him! In the interviews on the Blu-ray you learn that he actually started to write the script while he was alone in his hotel room in Italy, a foreign country, which makes him closer to Kyle Reese (sent from the future to a foreign time period) than to Sarah Connor. The action is perfectly filmed by the young Cameron for his first movie, and you can already see the hints of how he became one of the most renowned directors in the past three decades, even if he made only a few movies. The dialogs are sparse but go to the point. I was making fun of the music but it has been composed and recorded in a garage for almost no money, which is quite an achievement. The quality of the HD transfer for this edition is very good, and you can appreciate the image details and the slow-motions, for example during the mythic scene in the disco called TechNoir. I found that the music and sound effects didn't sound very good nor loud, which annoyed me a little.
Rating: 8/10