‘The Terminator: 40th Anniversary’ 4K UHD (review)

Warner Bros.

James Cameron needs no introduction, as he is responsible for some of the biggest blockbusters of all time, and with 2024 marking 40 years since he truly put himself on the map with The Terminator, it seems only fitting to take a look back at the movie that became instrumental in Cameron’s career taking off for good.

Spawned from a nightmare of a chrome skeleton emerging from a pillar of fire when the filmmaker was ill with a particularly bad fever, Cameron’s vision of the unstoppable killing machine would become not only an 80s movie icon, but one of the biggest pop culture icons of the 20th century in general.

During filming, Cameron relied heavily on guerrilla filmmaking techniques to make the most of the modest $6.4 million budget, making a habit of swerving the expensive and tiresome process of acquiring permissions to film on various Los Angeles locations.

This rogue approach only added to the frenetic nature of the film’s story, the filmmaking process mirroring the fast-paced cat-and-mouse narrative with a pacing so snappy it always feels at the brink of stumbling over itself.

As a counterbalance to the fast pacing necessary to underline the sense of extreme urgency, the film still spends enough time with its characters to not only make them compelling and relatable by having different archetypes play off of one another, it also gives fulfilling arcs to its main protagonist, Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor.

Going from a demure and insecure waitress to the future mother of the human resistance against the machines’ uprising, the third act of The Terminator saw the beginnings of the Sarah Connor whom Hamilton would revisit with spectacular results in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, leaving the arc of Hamilton’s badass but broken heroine Sarah Connor only second to the arc of Sigourney Weaver’s endlessly compelling Ellen Ripley.

Michael Biehn also makes an excellent effort here as the human resistance fighter from the future, a character that could easily have become an overbearing and unengaging exposition dumping machine, but thanks to Biehn’s ability to imbue action movie characters with an understated, sincere vulnerability, his Kyle Reese works well as the determined but woefully outmatched hero, making the character a beacon to human determination and willpower that perfectly juxtaposes the terrifying efficiency of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s emotionless cyborg assassin.

Naturally, as much as everyone did excellent turns as their individual characters, the largest lingering movie star that was made thanks to The Terminator was of course Schwarzenegger, as he would become arguably the biggest action star of the latter half of the 80s, continuing his superstardom into the 1990s, where the Austrian bodybuilder-turned-actor saw even more success.

Thanks to Cameron understanding how to make Schwarzenegger embody the ultimate antagonist, and Schwarzenegger by extension approaching his preparations for the role with machine-like focus, the T-800 would tirelessly stalk the streets of L.A., leaving no respite for his target and, in turn, the viewer.

As a contrast to the familiar sights of 1980s L.A., the futuristic sequences were inventive and unnerving, succeeding in making the viewer understand just how terrifying the T-800 truly is, giving the film a genre-defining flavor of cyberpunk terror that would shape how dystopian futures continue to be depicted in mainstream media.

When The Terminator premiered in 1984, the box office predictions had been lukewarm to say the least, but it ended up defying box office expectations, spending two weeks in the number one slot, and accumulating an impressive total $78.3 million when all was said and done.

Extras include deleted scenes with optional commentary, and archival featurettes.

The success of The Terminator ensured Cameron made a name for himself, something that was only further cemented by the even greater success of 1986’s Aliens, enabling Cameron to go on to create grander and grander visions of action spectacle as the years went on, including revisiting the world of The Terminator with 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, where he took both the narrative and his filmmaking to new heights.

While Terminator 2: Judgment Day is undoubtedly a more polished take on Cameron’s vision of a dystopian sci-if action vehicle, The Terminator remains a relentlessly tense and unsettling action thriller that never lets up in spite of its budgetary restrictions, galvanizing how important The Terminator was for shaping actions films in the years since its release.

Verdict: 10 out of 10.