What’s new to say about this 1980s SF classic stainless? Both James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger have extensively told behind the scenes of this film which forged their personal legend for each. Let’s remember the essential: the director, passing through Rome for his previous film (“Piranhas 2”), dreamed one night of half a robot that nothing can deflect from its deadly objective. The story is almost too good to be true (Cameron had already staged a machine with a human face in his short film “Xenogenesis” in 1978) but believable nonetheless. Brought to life on screen, the culmination of a mythical finale, her vision is unquestionably a waking nightmare: even the Terminator’s target, Sara Connor (Linda Hamilton), flees, moaning and crawling, as if she tried to extricate himself from the dark meanders of a toxic sleep.
A monster from elsewhere that roams our world
As for Schwarzy, first suggested by his agent to Cameron to play the nice Kyle Reese (finally played by Michael Biehn), he believed the film’s potential was average, to the point of publicly qualifying it as “crappy” on the eve of filming. In addition to its modest B-series tinsel (light camera, hand-made special effects), which contrasts with the debauchery of means that will characterize its sequels, what is striking on seeing “Terminator” again is its knowingly maintained proximity to the genre. from the zombie movie. Notwithstanding its advanced technology, here is a humanoid monster endowed with unalterable conditioned reflexes and a bodily envelope that is on the contrary fallible, a monster from elsewhere who wanders in our world, dejection-symptom of our own excesses.
The sequel after the ad
When George Romero’s Living Dead evoked both America’s Fourth World and the Third World, James Cameron’s Terminator announces the worst of a society alienated by nuclear power and technology. A scene, which one might think is anecdotal, clearly “zombifies” the man-machine: we find him, haggard, bruised, licking his wounds in a shabby hotel room. An employee knocks on the door, alarmed by the smell of putrefaction it gives off. So Terminator sends him to graze, wounded in his pride. Human despite everything…
Saturday April 22 at 10:35 p.m. on TCM Cinéma. American science fiction film by James Cameron (1984). With Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, Linda Hamilton. 1h43. (Multicast and On Demand).
