Fuck you, asshole

No 308 - The Terminator
Director - James Cameron

What I love about this film is that it is so simple. Couple are on the run from an unstoppable killing machine. They can run and they can hide, but eventually it will catch up with them. If we dismiss the wibbly wobbly time travel stuff and temperarily ignore the future war element, what we have is a good old game of cat and mouse. But what a cat, what a freaking awesome cat.

The Cyberdine Model 101 Terminator is, in my opinion, Arnie's greatest role. It plays to his strengths in that really he doesn't have to do much except stomp around, kill people and be intimidating. Arnie can do all of these things with ease and his character is terrifying for it. Whilst it might not make a lot of sense for a robot to speak with an Austrian accent, Arnie's stilted delivery and awkward movements are perfect for the jerky artificial robot he portrays and he looks fake. He just doesn't look real. It took me ages (surprisingly ages) to figure out why... The eyebrows, he aint got none. He is just perfect otherworldly freaky deaky casting. The accent isn't even that much of a problem as I reckon The Terminator probably says about 17 lines throughout the film.
Model 101 is not a very chatty beast. He prepares to silently shoot and smash stuff until the job is done. Though, saying that his occasional lines are totally iconic. None more than "I'll be back". According to Mr Doc, this line is actually fluffed and that the script initially said "I'll come back." It just goes to show how easy it is to create accidental moments of great genius.

Really, the human characters don't have much of a chance against the Robot enemy. Both in terms of their actual struggle for survival, but also in their struggle for being interesting. Sarah Connor is not the hardened fighter of T2. She is a confused young woman, scared and thrown utterly out of her comfort zone. She doesn't have much of interest going for her, not even the 80's kitch rubbishness of her housemate Nancy who just spends the film dressed in the most 80's clothes imaginable and dancing to the most 80s electro imaginable. Good old The 80s.
Kyle, meanwhile has an interesting story. The twisty turny way that time travel works means that at least his story is interesting. It is just that he... isn't....
Even in the flashbacks (flashforwards...) showing the war against the machines, Kyle comes off as a pretty bland character. Just a pretty bland character firing lasers at giant robots (which always makes people look cooler than they are).

What is impressive though is how long they manage to stave off the Terminator. Despite being up against an unstoppable beast and despite having to face death destruction, insanity (Earl Boen's Dr Silberman is the only human character to appear in all three Terminator films (viewing Salvation as a different franchise)) and the entire ruddy police force.
They escape the Terminator and even seem to kill him by exploding a tanker. ONLY THEY DON'T as the metal endo skeletons emerges from the flames.

If you thought Arnie was awesome in this film (and I do) then he has nothing on the stop motion skeleton. Firstly the robot looks really freaky, but mostly The Terminator is scary because of his dogged persistance.
This is the same when he is a Schwarzeneggar or a stop motion animation, it is just that as an endo skeleton, that perserverence is more visible. Where Arnie might be able to scalpel out his eyes or cut into his arm in order to keep going (the 80's prosthetics are a bit naff), here we have the robot torso dragging itself along the floor by its one functioning arm.

You can blow that robot up to absolute shit and it will still come and get you.

That is the most worrying part of the film.