Review for The Terminator

Introduction

It seems the world is gripped by Terminator fever once more, as the latest movie hits cinema screens around the world. Terminator Genisys is the fifth film in the franchise, apparently the first in a new trilogy to reboot the story (which you can do with its Timey-Wimey time travel conceit and with a cameo from a former Doctor Who). The general reception of the film and the critical coverage has been about as I expected. This is why I take this chance for a quick double dip review of the original film, without a sixty-seven year old killer cyborg in... The next in my ongoing quest to get my favourite films in HD is 1984’s The Terminator.


In the atomic wasteland of the future, the remnants of mankind battle the machines for survival. Under the leadership of John Connor, they strike a decisive blow against Skynet, the defence mainframe that decided that the human race should be eradicated and engineered the nuclear holocaust. In its hour of defeat, Skynet desperately sends a Terminator back through time to kill Sarah Connor, the mother of John, before he is even born. To protect the innocent Sarah, a sole warrior is sent back after the machine to Los Angeles, 1984. It`s a race against time as Kyle Reese tries to find and protect Sarah Connor, while the Terminator systematically hunts her down, destroying all in his path.


This is the second outing for The Terminator on Blu-ray, although to date it’s the only version released in the UK (It recently got a repackaged re-release to tie-in with the Genisys theatrical release but it’s the same disc). The first release in the US didn’t get the greatest acclaim for its transfer, but in an attempt to rectify the first’s flaws, this second disc has garnered some controversy of its own.

Picture

The Terminator is presented in 1.85:1 widescreen 1080p resolution, and it looks pretty good. The image is clear and sharp throughout, and detail levels are impressively high and consistent, black levels are excellent in a film that takes place predominantly at night, and the contrast is good as well. 1980s film stock was notoriously grainy which leads me to suspect that The Terminator has gone through some significant post-processing to get to Blu-ray, as what we have here is a light, naturalistic layer of film grain, but more consistent with a film from a later generation. Ironically it just doesn’t feel grainy enough, although watching the film is still an organic and vivid experience. Never does it look DNR’d.


The more contentious issue might be the colour timing, as it seems tweaked for this release. In all my viewings of The Terminator, on TV, VHS, and DVD, I remember it as a machine blue experience. Not so much on this Blu-ray, which has had its colours shifted from the blue more towards the green. It’s not a radical change, more a subtle alteration; blue skies are still blue, flesh tones are still natural, and the colour palette still feels genuine. It’s just the stronger blue overtones have been tweaked downwards in order to maximise the detail on screen, and I have to say it has worked. There is so much more texture and depth to this film now that for me I think the colour timing change is a positive move, although purists may disagree.

Sound

Purists will also be put out by the lack of the original mono audio, and I have to admit that I’m one of them in this instance. The Terminator comes with DTS-HD MA 5.1 Surround English, DD 5.1 Spanish, DTS 5.1 French, and DD 2.0 Portuguese and Thai. Apparently there’s also a Japanese audio track on here accessible from a Japanese menu. There are subtitles in these languages and many more. It’s a powerful, expressive, surround track, which throws the action around the speakers with abandon, bullets flying every which way, cars screeching across the soundstage, and Brad Fiedel’s iconic soundtrack comes across with full effect. But even for me, the surround track felt overcooked, artificial, and not organic at all. Every effect that came from a surround speaker felt deliberately placed there, and at times the overwrought nature of it felt distracting. This is one instance that the mono track would have been appreciated. The next time I watch the film, I’ll have to remember to try the audio down-mixed.

Extras

The movie autoplays on disc insertion, and there’s no top menu, merely a pop-up menu. The film loops back to the beginning after the end credits and the copyright screen.

The disc is light on extras, offering Creating the Terminator: Visual Effects and Music lasting 12:58 SD, a 2001 compilation of interview snippets with the effects crew and Brad Fiedel.

Terminator: A Retrospective lasts 20:30 SD, and is the 1992 featurette that has a conversation between James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger on the film.

Finally there are 7 Terminated Scenes, running to 9 minutes.

All of these extra features were on the DVD release, and indeed you’ll want to hold onto that 2-disc DVD if you’ve still got it, for the other copious extra features which this Blu-ray lacks.

Conclusion

Just think about it. It’s the nineteen-eighties. The Soviet Union on one side, the United States on the other, glasnost and perestroika were just words, and nuclear brinkmanship and Cold War paranoia were the order of the day. Back then, for many people, it wasn’t a question of if the world would end in a nuclear fire, but when. Then in 1984 along comes this sci-fi movie that plays into that fear. And there’s no Terminator franchise at that point, Arnold isn’t a megastar yet, there are no catchphrases, no back-story, and no time travel convolutions to get your brain in a twist. There’s just this one, relentless, perfectly paced, lean, efficient, sci-fi thriller.


The original Terminator is still the best of the franchise. There’s no deadweight to it, no bloat, no daft attempts to broaden its target audience. It’s all about the action, the inexorable hunt. It makes the wise choice of dealing its exposition on the run, while the horrific images of the future come in dream like flashback form, no narrative, just brief glimpses of a nightmare world, disjointed and unnerving. And just like Jaws a decade before it, its efficiency comes from its budget, and the constraint of pre-CGI effects. It remains a fast-paced and human movie, saving the rear projection for the future sequences at first, and saving the practical effects, the extreme make-up, and the stop motion endoskeleton for the end of the film, by which point the audience is far too caught up in the story to worry about special effects technology.


The Terminator on Blu-ray is good enough to watch, but it’s not quite good enough to hear. Like so many of the films that I find myself getting on Blu-ray, I find that they’re just place-holders until a better, more definitive release comes around. When did I get so fickle about these things? I used to watch this film on a Pan and Scan VHS tape and never worried about the audio-visual quality... It’s still one of my favourite films of all time though, maybe that’s why.