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The recent
re-release of The Terminator on DVD has given me an opportunity
to buy The Terminator on DVD with which to show off the fact that
I own a DVD player and can afford a copy of The Terminator on DVD.
Whilst watching the film and playing with the extra DVD bits I had the
following thoughts, which I am now writing down whilst listening to The
Big Bubble by The Residents, and later on The Commercial Album,
although I didn't write much whilst listening to that.
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On the left, an emotionless metal killing machine wearing
a dickie bow. On the right, when you were twelve in 1988, and you wanted
to rent a film from the local video library, this box (and those of Robocop,
Predator, and Commando) was the holy grail.
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1. The film contains the credit
"GMF Robots supplied and operated by: Ellison Machinery Co."
The film was apparently inspired by a couple of old episodes of The Twilight
Zone, 'Demon with a Glass Hand' and 'Soldier', both written by sci-fi
writer Harlan Ellison. Ellison is famous for his gloomy outlook on life,
and the short story 'I have no mouth and I must scream', and also for the
fact that The Terminator is based on two old episodes of The Twilight Zone
that were written by him.
2. My word, The Big Bubble is bizarre.
3. Although part of the mid-80s cycle of post-The Road Warrior,
post-apocalyptic sci-fi, The Terminator seems not to belong to that
genre. It seemed, to me, to be more reminiscent of John Carpenter's Assault
on Precinct 13. It has the same mixture of a low budget, fast cutting,
casual brutality, shotguns, electronic music and a night-time setting. It's
a shame that John Carpenter is mostly remembered as a horror director, and
not an action director.
8. I've always wondered why all cinema trailers have a deep-voiced
man doing the voice-over. The trailer for The Terminator on Disc
2 has a whiney-voiced man doing the voice-over. He sounds like the narrator
for a mid-70s nature programme. The effect is less than
awe-inspiring. I
now know why all cinema trailers have a deep-voiced man doing the voice-over.
5. Given that it's a robot, the Terminator seems to have trouble
holding its guns steady. The sequence in which it assaults the police station
is particularly odd. It strides purposefully through the darkened corridors,
spots a policeman, lifts its rifle, pulls the trigger, and the gun bounces
all over the place as it fires. Wouldn't a robot have a stronger grip, and
if not, wouldn't it be using both hands?
6. "Sugar melts and goes away but vinegar lasts forever"
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On the left, a supposedly dead policeman (at the bottom
of the screen) flinches, whilst on the right, a frame from a VHS copy
of the film for you to compare with the following two images.
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7. I wonder if Sarah Connor's hair was a conscious decision on the
part of the creators, or simply Linda Hamilton's real hair.
2. I had forgotten how distracting the scar on Kyle Reese's chin
is. It dominates every scene he is in. I found myself starting at it instead
of the rest of Michael Biehn's face. Thus, his performance was wasted, sabotaged
by make-up.
10. The copy on the back of the DVD box has the line 'In 2029, giant
super-computers dominate the planet, hell-bent on exterminating the human
race!'. The exclamation mark should not be there. It makes the whole film
seem camp.
11. The back of the box has an amateurish, out-of-place alternative
version of the Terminator logo, including the words 'retroactive
experament' (sic). Designers design - they should not be allowed to write
copy.
8. The film follows on from Star Wars and Alien in
that futuristic technology is presented as if it was commonplace to the
people to whom it would naturally appear so. Kyle Reese's admission that
he doesn't know how the time machine works is a neat and perfectly logical
way for the writer to avoid messing up.
9. Is the sequence in the gunshop, whisper it, satire?
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Note the image on the left - it's from one of the TV teaser
spots. It's the same, or as near as dammit, as the frame on the right
from the finished film, but before they added the laser
effect. The sound
is different, too.
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10. There are two Ford Pintos. One is parked in a garage at the end
of the film, and earlier on our heroes use one to escape a burning police
station. The Ford Pinto was released in the 1960s and was, unusually for
the American motor industry at the time, a small, economical car that did
double-figure petrol mileage. Other features were more conventional, however.
As the fuel tank was placed directly behind the differential, a rear-end
shunt led to the tank bursting open, spraying petrol over the hot exhaust
pipe and causing a raging fire, one that was inescapable due to the fact
that a rear-end shunt also jammed the doors shut.
Ford's response was to ignore the problem, reasoning that the cost of a
recall would outweigh the cost of compensation to the victims, and that
Ford's contribution to the US economy was more important the individual
lives - a policy of inescapable logic, common then and now, and one of the
reasons why Objectivism, Libertarianism, and Internet Politics in general
are amusing jokes first and viable and desirable political policies second.
11. Why didn't the Terminator follow them from the police station?
There must have been lots of police cars parked outside. And they would
have been faster than a Pinto.
10. Lance Henrikson was once young, although he looks as if he could
also be a Terminator, with his pointy black hair and pale face.
9. One of the deleted sequences on the DVD contains a short bit in
which some employees of Cyberdyne Systems (ironically, the factory at the
end of the film) find bits of the broken Terminator. They comment that it's
like nothing they have seen before, and that it might be 'Jap stuff'. Which
says a lot about how Japanese technology was perceived in the mid-80s in
America.
12. One common observation on the internet is that, if metal objects
have to be encased in organic matter in order to go through the time portal,
why don't the machines send back an enormous bomb in a block of cheese,
or in the stomach of an unfortunate human being?
I presume it's so that they don't accidentally blow up Cyberdyne Systems
in 1984, which would be amusingly ironic, eh?
One of the DVD special features is a short sequence deleted from the final
film in which Sarah tries to persuade Kyle to destroy Cyberdyne Systems
in 1984. Michael Beihn over-acts badly and this piece was cut. It neatly
anticipates the second film, something which the production notes point
out, but I thought of it first.
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On the left, James Cameron's drawing of Arnie, from one
of the trailers. On the right, some more of James Cameron's original artwork,
this time for a storyboard. Note the pre-Photoshop use of lens
flare.
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12. Given that John Connor sent Kyle Reese back in time to be his
father, how could he ensure that Reese would hit it off with Sarah Connor?
Was Reese the hunkiest soldier he could find? Or did he give him some
irresistible aftershave? Or was Reese ordered to impregnate Sarah Connor,
even if she wasn't in the mood? What if he had managed to kill the Terminator
right at the beginning of the film, at the Tech Noir bar, or if
the Terminator had somehow been destroyed during time travel? What would
have happened then? Was Reese ordered to take Sarah off into the mountains
and teach her how to survive? How was he going to prove to Sarah that
he wasn't mad, given that Sarah probably wasn't 100 per cent convinced
that the Terminator was from the future, and that Reese was telling the
truth about a machine-dominated world, until she had to fend off a metal
skeleton at the end of the film? What if one of the people accidentally
killed in the Tech Noir shootout had been Kyle Reese's mother?
What then?
You could go mad thinking about this stuff.
2. There are two 'Making of' documentaries on disc two. One of
them reveals that composer Brad Fiedel owned a Prophet 10, a big, expensive
synthesiser that cost $7995 in 1983. That's a lot of money nowadays, let
alone in 1983, and suggests either that writing the music for low-budget
direct-to-video films is extremely lucrative, or that Brad was renting
one, or borrowing one from a friend.
17. The fact that Kyle Reese is born in the future suggests the
possibility that he might be named after Kyle from South Park.
13. The first DVD, the one with the film on it, doesn't seem to
work with PowerDVD, a software DVD decoder. The MGM lion roars, we fly
through the Terminator's head, and then the whole thing freezes.
It works perfectly well with WinDVD, a competing software DVD decoder,
but I wouldn't advise you to buy WinDVD because their customer support
is dreadful and they charge $20 for shipping alone, which makes it more
expensive than a hardware decoder. At the same time, I wouldn't recommend
PowerDVD either, as their customer support people haven't even bothered
to answer me.
Therefore, I suggest you buy a hardware decoder card, or find a cracked
version of either piece of software.
This
option has the advantage of saving you money, and being more easily region-freeable
than a possibly region-locked decoder card. Furthermore, it tells the
companies responsible for PowerDVD and WinDVD to write a decoder that
works properly, and to pay attention to their customers.
1. I heard Rat Rapping, the novelty hit single by Roland
Rat, the other day. It was playing in the Computer Exchange on Tottenham
Court Road. It was actually not bad. Without Roland's rapping, it could
have passed for a contemporary rap single. It was followed by a very bad
song that had the chorus 'I'm just a teenage dirtbag, baby'. I think Iron
Maiden, the band, were mentioned in the song which, as I have said, was
very bad. Teenagers don't exist any more. People go from being kids, to
being adults, and there isn't an in-between state. Or could it be that
adult-hood no longer exists, and that people remain teenagers, if only
in an ironic way? Kiddypop - Sports Metal - Coldplay? Is that the progression?
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