My Review of "The Terminator"

The Terminator is a horror movie that came out in 1984. This is the movie that kickstarted a huge franchise. I've seen a lot of those sequels before this one and they were kind of hit and miss. It kind of sucks that I'm watching this for the first time after knowing all the spoilers from watching the sequels. Still, it sort of works out sort of like a Star Wars thing when you go back to the prequel after you know the story.

This movie starts off with the explanation of the future which happens to be in 2029. It's kind of crazy that we're almost at that time. The world is in a post-apocalyptic condition. Humans are being hunted by robots. There seems to be only a small group of humans left fighting the good fight.

What happens is that the machines have sent a terminator 40 years into the past. Meanwhile, the humans counteract this by sending a soldier of their own. The terminator has a target and that's a woman named Sarah Connor. The man the humans send back is Kyle Reese. Kyle's mission is to find Sarah and protect her from the terminator. Humanity's survival depends on it.

Anyone that's watched any of the movies afterwards probably already knows this story. They repeat it over and over in each subsequent movie in the franchise. That's why I kind of wished I had watched this movie first so that I would get a little more thrill from watching it.

This movie plays out like a typical slasher horror movie but with guns and instead of homicidal maniacs we have an emotionless cyborg. There's a lot of cool things they do with this movie. They play up the fact that people of the era obviously think that Kyle is absolutely crazy. It's also impossible for everyone to fathom anything as powerful as the terminator when they combat him.

They certainly play up the horror factor nicely because the terminator definitely seems unstoppable. There's a lot of really cool practical effects they use that amp up the excitement of the action sequences. I even love the mechanics of the robot later on in the movie. Some of the makeup and special effects don't really stand the test of time though. Seeing as they were done in 1984 still gives me some admiration for the time and effort into what they did. You can tell that they spent so much time getting everything in these scenes. With the high definition picture we have today, some of that movie magic has disappeared.

As a time travel movie, there are obviously a ton of holes in the story. If you can get over a lot of those and the wooden acting I say you can have a really good time. In certain scenes, I really felt like I was watching some sort of B-movie that should have been went straight to video. Then again I kept having to remind myself that this movie came out in 1984. This was state of the art at the time and admittedly some of it is quite impressive.

For the movie that started it all. I would say that it does a pretty good job at entertaining. Though, I don't have any nostalgic factor to make me revere this movie anymore than any movie out there I can't say this would be a repeat viewing movie myself.

Overall, it is a fun movie to watch especially if you like the franchise. I would say start off with this movie if you haven't seen any of the movies yet though. It's a one time viewing for me but I'm sure that's different for everyone else. I would have to give this movie a 6.5 out of 10.