Source: LDDB.com
Play the Theme if You Want to Live
Sarah Connor is the most important woman in the world.
You'd never know it to look at her, but the young woman who shares an apartment with her girlfriend, keeps an iguana named Pugsley, and works as a waitress at Big Bob's Burgers, is humanity's best hope. Because one day, she'll give birth to a son, a boy, named John Connor. And John Connor will smash the machines.
In fact, when the movie starts, this has already happened. John Connor and the human resistance has stormed the SkyNet facility and made a horrifying discovery. The SkyNet intelligence network has figured out time travel, and in a desperate bid for survival, it has dispatched a killing machine, a Terminator infiltration unit, to 1984. Back to a time before there was a John Connor. Back to a time when there was only Sarah. Back before she became the warrior who trained her son how to fight. Back when she was just a young waitress at a greasy spoon who had trouble balancing her checkbook.
A young sergeant in the resistance named Kyle Reese volunteers for what is certainly a suicide mission. He enters the time displacement chamber, armed with nothing more than his wits, and follows the Terminator back to Los Angeles, before the bombs fell. His job is to find Sarah and protect her from the unstoppable killing machine tasked with her destruction. Let's hope, for our sakes, he can manage or we're in for a world of hurt.
"Most Paranoid Delusions Are Intricate, But This Is Brilliant!"
The Terminator almost didn't get made. The idea, according to writer/director James Cameron, came to him in a fever dream: the fires of nuclear annihilation, and a metal-reinforced skeletal arm reaching out of the flames. From this image, Cameron and co-writer Bill Wisher mashed out a treatment about a young woman, her would-be protector, and the unstoppable cyborg programmed for their destruction.
Cameron shopped his script around to every production company he could find, but received nothing but rejection after rejection. The story was too 'horror' for the science fiction crowd, but relied too much on science fiction elements to ignite the horror guys. Plus, Cameron didn't have much of a resume -- his only other film experience was writing and directing Piranha II: The Spawning for Roger Corman back in 1981...and even then, he'd been fired from the production. Cameron's agent even read the script, told him it was terrible, and suggested he work on something else. Cameron fired his agent, but that still left him with a story no one wanted.
Cameron finally managed to sell the script to Gale Anne Hurd, a production assistant he'd met working for Roger Corman. She offered him a dollar for it. Cameron accepted on the condition that if she found someone willing to finance the picture, he'd be the one to direct. Hurd found a willing buyer at Hemdale willing to put up the six-and-a-half million dollars needed to produce the movie, and the result was one of the most financially-successful low-budget films of all time. The Terminator earned four million in box office receipts on opening weekend, and went on to gross nearly ten times that during the course of its US theatrical run. Suddenly, James Cameron had Hollywood cache. So too did a certain Austrian bodybuilder who turned a 27-speaking-lines role into a career-making performance where he murdered Lance Henriksen, Paul Winfield, Dick Miller, Brian Thompson, Rick Rossovich, and Bill Paxton.
"What's Wrong With This Picture?"
Depends on your perspective. This version of The Terminator is presented on one double-sided CLV disc in its original 1.85:1 widescreen ratio, and it looks just fine. Amusingly enough, you can tell the picture was sourced from an original theatrical print, because you can still see the 'cigarette burns' in the upper-right corner, indicating an upcoming reel change. I actually enjoy seeing these kinds of artifacts, because with the way movies are shot and distributed digitally today, you never get them. The digital and analog tracks both carry the original Mono soundtrack, and it sounds fine though it won't put your home theater system through its paces the way the later 1995 remastered release will.
Honestly, I prefer the look of this version to the '95 remaster or the DVD. The Terminator is a dark, gritty film shot for the most part in dark, gritty locations in California. If you mess with the picture quality too much, you get something that looks much nicer than it feels like it should. Those background details which jump out in later transfers make the dirt too clean, if that makes sense. There's something inherently 'right' about this version, a feeling I don't get when watching it on more modern formats. This is absolutely down to personal preference, and people who prefer the clarity of the Blu-ray aren't "wrong". But later prints of this film were struck from pre-theatrical interpositives, meaning they look cleaner but lack that grain and grime (and cigarette burns) of this edition.
For my money, if you want to experience The Terminator the same way you would have in an early 80's movie theater, this 'disc is the way to go. If you're looking for the sharpest quality and best sound, you can grab the 1995 'disc, with its THX-remastered audio and video, the same transfer which was used to make the 2001 Special Edition DVD.
This is a bare-bones disc, which contains only the movie itself; no theatrical trailers, no TV spots, no commentary track, making-of features, or deleted scenes. You get Closed Captioning if you want it, but that's about it. It's just the movie. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop.
Ever.
Until you are dead.