Cinema
'Terminator': a cyborg looking through the phone book
31/07/2026 - 07:02 h.
1 min
There are many movies I haven't seen. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the tragedy, until confinement I hadn't seen Dirty dancing (what a marvel) nor Pretty woman. I wanted to take advantage of this series of articles to efficiently fill some of my cinematic gaps. In an era of massive audiovisual supply and absolute atomization of channels, I cure my FOMO on deferral. This week I saw Terminator for the first time and these are my notes:
Notes I'm writing while watching 'Terminator' (1984) for the first time this week:
- From technoir to technoir and I shoot because it's my turn (workable rhyme). Set 10 years after Blade Runner, it shows a world where machines have won and the remaining humans are dressed like the lepers from Ben-Hur.
- The Terminator is a cyborg that looks human, and as layers are peeled away, the underlying mechanical horror emerges. It's like when you discover a coworker is more loyal to the company than to you.
- The Terminator's voice in the original version seemed too tame to me. Of course: Arnold Schwarzenegger has nothing on Constantino Romero.
- Terminator is a very realistic model: it sweats and even has bad breath. It's indistinguishable from a human... if you overlook the fact that it doesn't blink. How much eye drops must have been used during filming.
- James Cameron is Canadian. I like to think he filmed what for him are normal, everyday working days in the United States.
- It amuses me greatly that it's the same person who directed Titanic. From both films, we learn that the best thing to do in a desperate situation is to have a nail that will save us when things get really bad.
- The real villain of the movie is an artificial intelligence called Skynet. It could perfectly be a chat from the 2000s, and it's a real international logistics and e-commerce company, predating the saga.
- I find it endearing to see a cyborg looking for Sarah Connors in the phone book (the gesture of tracing a list with a finger has been lost). Lesson? Data privacy laws make it harder for machines to carry out the final massacre (don't worry, we're geolocated by mobile now).
- There are other markers of the era, like the teased hair of the young women and the scene where a couple makes love listening to music from a Walkman (if you didn't do it that way, you wouldn't get pregnant, I've been told).
- I'd love to see a remake of the Old Testament where Herod travels back in time to kill Mary when she's five years old (and is brutally attacked by a pigeon).
- I thought the implicit message of the film would be that the most relevant or dangerous thing women can do is give birth to a man who would be relevant or dangerous in the future, but fortunately Sarah ends up playing an active role.
- Items that make the film special: strong female protagonist, opening with full frontal male nudity (albeit shadowy), actor and actress who play a couple were born in the same year (make a wish!).
Verdict: wonderful. Now I'm ready to watch Terminator 2, which they tell me is the good one.
