PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1 *good,* (2) *superior*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*
On re-screening 1984’s TERMINATOR, I
noticed how dependent writer-director James Cameron was on an
FX-staple of American action-films in the eighties: vehicular mayhem.
This was a necessity, since the film’s budget was only 6.4 million,
a far cry from the budgets of most if not all sequels in the
franchise. And though all of the mayhem is well executed, it’s a
little on the pedestrian side. Still, certain action-scenes, like the
oft-referenced “precinct invasion,” exemplify Cameron’s genius
for portraying relentless, driving motion—be if of barreling
vehicles or blasting projectiles—and place him with America’s
best “masters of motion,” from Hawks and Witney to Lucas and
Spielberg.
At base TERMINATOR is an extended
chase-film, and thus the plot is stripped down to its essentials,
like a regular automobile being customized into a dune buggy. Thus
the audience learns almost nothing about its modern-day heroine Sarah
Connor (Linda Hamilton), only that she becomes the quarry of two
travelers from the future: human Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), who
wants to save Sarah, and the inhuman Terminator (Arnold
Schwarzenegger), who’s programmed to kill her. The future from
which both travelers hail is likewise sketchy: an apocalypse in which
the computer-system Skynet has created a hierarchy of machines to
supplant, rather than enhance, the rule of man. Skynet is overthrown
by a rebel-group led by John Connor, but the computer seeks to
reverse the tide of events by sending the Terminator back to
eliminate the womb from which John sprung. Providentially, future-JC
is expecting this, thanks to the intelligence given to him by his
future-mom, and he sends Kyle Reese through time as well, not only to
fight the cyborg killer, but also to make sure that John comes into
being in the first place. Cameron’s script labors to provide a
rationale to keep the time-door closed to any other tampering, which
rationale he himself had to demolish in the ensuing sequel.
Sarah Connor embodies a trope that
Cameron would use again in both ALIENS and TITANIC: that of an
inexperienced young woman who must emulate the heroic example of a
courageous man, even though his labors on her behalf end with the
male’s demise. To be sure, TERMINATOR is the only film in which
there’s another man stage-managing the courageous male’s
inevitable sacrifice. It wouldn’t be hard to read the narrative as
a thoroughly secular rewriting of the Christian trope of a heavenly
father sending his only begotten son to Earth, though Cameron has
shifted roles so that it’s the son sending the father to the
mundane world—and not only to die for a higher destiny, but also to
copulate with the son’s own mother. Of all the many stories in
which children are placed the position of choosing their own parents,
TERMINATOR may be the most audacious.
Though Sarah’s transformation from
“zero to hero” proves integral to the film, the Terminator is the
main star of this show. This cyborg-assassin might not have been the
first major “hardbody” in cinema, but he’s almost surely the
first who was harder on the inside than the outside. Even in 1984 it
was routine for filmgoers to observe that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
limited thespian skills made him the perfect fit for an affect-less
android, while his Germanic accent contributed to the stilted feel of
his delivery. Yet Schwarzenegger’s tight rein on emotional
expressivity is not the same as “not acting,” and his reserve
allows the audience to speculate on what a malevolent machine might
be thinking or feeling. Had Schwarzenegger never played this iconic
role, it’s hard to imagine the actor remaining a Hollywood
superstar throughout the nineties, to say nothing of his having a gubernatorial career. Though a sequel could’ve kept the stoic
cyborg in his role as evildoer, it’s a mark of the Terminator’s
deeper resonance that Cameron chose to place him on the side of the
angels.
TERMINATOR is a very good action-film,
but TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY—henceforth DAY for short—is more
than just “a sequel that’s better than the original.” In his
collection FILMS AND FEELINGS Raymond Durgnat speculated about a
possible “wedding of poetry and pulp,” and DAY provides its
audience with just such a consummation.
DAY is still a chase-film, though
Cameron finds time to interpolate an involved search-and-destroy
mission. He also “quotes” from TERMINATOR numerous scenes and
dialogue-passages, but here it seems less like recycling and more
like repurposing. There’s just as much vehicular mayhem as before,
but Cameron finds more inventive (and expensive) ways to stage his
“poetry-of-motion,” which maintains its drive regardless of
whether the action takes place in narrow confinements or in wide open
spaces. To be sure, the old style of visual violence is subsumed here
breakthroughs in CGI effects, which would soon usher a new era of
big-ticket Hollywood entertainments.
The setup wastes no time explaining how
Skynet, who was supposedly destroyed by the events of TERMINATOR, can
now send back a new improved Terminator, the T-1000, to a time-frame
eight years later, this time with the mission to extirpate young John
Connor (Edward Furlong). The JC of the future, nothing daunted, sends
back a reprogrammed T-1 Terminator (Schwarzenegger again) to defend
young John—this time presumably depending on his own memories to
decide what kind of “surrogate father” his younger self needs.
In the Old Testament, the “Sarah”
who mothers the race of Israelites has a husband as her ostensible
protector (even if he sometimes seems to be pimping Sarah out). But
Sarah Connor has no one to help her raise young John, and ironically
her search for such a co-parental figure ends up making her seem less
than motherly. Sarah apparently sleeps with a lot of men in her
search, thus mirroring a common predicament for single mothers, even
those without cosmic destinies. Young John for a time enjoys having
such a destiny, but when the authorities put Sarah in an insane
asylum, he’s even more pissed off than the average American kid.
Then the Terminators enter his life:
one a liquid-metal monster able to morph into assorted shapes, and
the other a laconic, gun-toting hulk programmed to protect John—and
to obey the orders of any version of John Connor. Young John, upon
discovering that his mother really wasn’t crazy, enlists the T-1 in
liberating Sarah—who, in the ensuing years, has become as much of a
hardbody as a mortal woman can be. In the midst of copious scenes of
fighting and shooting, Cameron devotes ample time to sorting out the
relationships between Sarah, John, and the Terminator, now also
called upon to learn the feelings of the beings he was created to
annihilate.
The search-and-destroy subplot, in
which Sarah and her allies seek to “terminate” the roots of
Skynet’s future existence, goes on too long, though it’s nice to
see the evil computer get a taste of its own medicine. By so doing,
Sarah and company are finally given the chance to obviate not only
the computer’s reign, but also the nuclear holocaust that it
unleashes—even though, as the famous coda indicates, this remains a
possible future for humankind, even with Skynet’s demise. And it is
must be admitted that without the subplot, it would be impossible for
the film to have executed its heartfelt conclusion—which yet again
involves another male sacrifice for the sake of the future.
This time Sarah, John and the T-1 enjoy
co-starring status, in that no one in the ensemble proves more
important than anyone else. Neophyte actor Furlong captures all the
impertinence and insouciance the character needs, and Hamilton
arguably improves upon her earlier performance, in that now she’s a
mother sometimes forced to turn against her own maternal instincts
for the sake of her child’s survival. Once again, Schwarzenegger
has to tread a fine line between mechanical precision and an
artificial intelligence’s fitful stirrings toward humanity.That
leaves Robert Patrick with the job of playing the role of an
affect-less cyborg-assassin like the first Terminator, though Patrick
also gets his share of “almost human” moments.
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