Humankind is in for an interesting couple of decades if classic science fiction cinema is anything to go by. As we await the scheduled reappearance of a granite monolith which may or may not explain The Mystery of the Universe (depending on your capacity for drug ingestion), we also face living out our days in an acid-rain drenched urban dystopia infiltrated by dangerous impostor humans (2019, Blade Runner). As for entertainment, Premiership football looks like taking an ugly turn when corporatised sport becomes a gladiatorial battle to the death (in 2018, according to Rollerball).
As if this wasn't alarming enough, by 2029 we'll be in the grip of a post-nuclear fight to the death with a race of super computers, our last throw of the dice being a jaunt back in time to protect the mother of our saviour, John Connor. So says James Cameron's The Terminator, which is being re-released in UK cinemas for a generation of cinemagoers who will not have experienced it in its proper glory, but will nevertheless have been exposed to its influence more often than they are probably aware.
Watching The Terminator on the big screen seventeen years after its original release - in a lovely new print with really excellent sound - is an oddly dislocating experience. The basic plot - Terminator 101 (Schwarzenegger) travels back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), the mother-to-be of the future leader of humankind, pursued by resistance fighter Reese (Michael Biehn) - is so familiar through the film's ubiquity as a video rental in the 1980s as to be almost a folk memory. So pervasive is it that I found myself wondering whether or not I had actually seen it before in its entirety - or perhaps I had experienced the movie in bite sized clips on movie programmes and pop nostalgia shows over the last fifteen years? I'm still not sure, to be honest.
Additionally, there is the not insignificant impact that the sheer existence of the sequel, T2: Judgement Day (1991) has on re-viewing the original. It's almost impossible to watch the extravagantly coiffed Hamilton hiding under a desk without thinking of the ass-kicking, pump-action rifle toting, borderline psychotic she would become. Worse is the realisation that T2 is actually less a sequel than an unsatisfying remake, albeit a much, much more expensive one. Aside from the small matter of the plot being reheated second time around, there are so many shot-for-shot similarities that the self-referentiality defence disappears up its post-modern derriere and one is left with a hollow, noisy shell that compares very badly with the economic and witty original.
There is something sad about the theatrical re-release of this tremendously entertaining picture being predicated upon its repackaging for home viewing on DVD with lots of shiny new bells and whistles. But that's progress. At the same time, it must be recognised that much of The Terminator's reputation is built upon its immense popularity during the video rental boom of the 1980s, and one supposes that there is something poetic in the fact that it is poised to do the same again for DVD. I suggest that the different formats - theatrical and domestic - are like the differences between the two Terminator films. One is raucous and a bit grungy but oddly warm, the other is wonderfully shiny but ultimately pointless and in an odd way a bit energy sapping in its relentless need to impress. It's the difference between loving cinema and consuming it.
Reviewed by John Atkinson
See what other kamera.co.uk readers thought about this film
