We open in a bluish-hued wasteland of rubble and twisted metal. Los Angeles, 2029, the title tells us. Seems a little optimistic. Bluish lasers shoot by and an airship hovers overhead, shooting its own laser beams. In the Los Angeles of the future, tanks roll over roads paved with human skulls, which seems sort of impractical. Giant cyborgs stomp and shoot. A human runs and ducks and seems to get blown up. We are informed, via a blocky computer-ish font, that "The machines rose from the ashes of the nuclear fire. Their war to exterminate mankind had raged for decades [which, assuming "decades" means at least twenty years, means we have at best two years left before your laptop eats your head], but the final battle would not be fought in the future. It would be fought here, in our present. Tonight..." The opening credits feature the cast presented with an old-school block cursor, while the larger letters of The Terminator float and overlap behind, the way they always used to an action movies. This usually signifies "ass-kicking." You can't read these letters right now, but they will be revealed to you in a manner which will make you go "whoa!" or "yeah!" Usually this involves a sound effect like a big "clang," but when the opening title reveals itself, I have to admit that it did not make me say "whoa!" or "yeah!" From the deadly flying technology a scant 22 years hence, we open on a garbage truck that whirs and wheezes and slides its prongs into a Dumpster in Los Angeles in 1984. It's 1:52 AM, and the driver is annoyed when his truck suddenly dies on him. Either that, or he's pissed that he has to have the stereotypical garbage man's unlit cigar butt permanently wedged in his jaw. "What the hell? Goddamn son of a bitch!" he says, rather mildly. Jiggling the keys proves futile, and then when the flashing lights and bright blue bolts of electricity start flying, he gets his hat blown off and hightails it out of there. When the special effects die down (they're due over on the set of Ghostbusters), a naked California governor is crouched on the pavement, looking like he's about ready to set himself in the blocks for the 100-metre dash. Given his nudity, we're talking at the original Olympic games here. He stands up slowly, and looks around, then strolls over to look out at the bright lights of Los Angeles. You can't help but wonder, Does he still have that ass? Nearby, some...whaddaya call 'em, punks, are showing an alarming disrespect for a pay telescope. They're amused to see the naked man striding towards them. Swinging Johnson or not, anyone built like Schwarzenegger is probably not someone I'd antagonize, even if my hair is spiked and Smurf-blue, and I appear to have some sort of tire track running up my face. They joke that it must be laundry day, and Arnie makes conversation by repeating everything they say (as on a first date, this demonstrates he's listening!). Then: "Your clothes. Give them to me. Now." Response: "Fuck you, asshole!" And the switchblades come out. It ends badly for the punks, especially the one who managed to at least wing Arnie. Arnie thrusts his arm into the punk's chest and rips out his heart. Or some internal organ. Whatever, that's not a proportional response! One of the punks finally realizes that surrendering a jacket is preferable to being eviscerated.
Elsewhere, a garbage-strewn alley is home to a muttering bum who is not super-impressed by the electric-blue zig-zags staticking up his home. Whoever this new arrival is, he doesn't have his ground-level set appropriately (like in Die Hard 2, and drops several feet to the ground, gasping and gagging and in general possessing much less dignity than Schwarzenegger's sculpted pose. Disappointingly, the nearby drunk does not stare at the spectacle in front of him, then stare at the bottle he's holding, then stare back at the spectacle and finally toss the bottle behind him. He also does not have all his belongs tied up in bindle either. Anyway, this is Michael Biehn. Hollywood, take a good long look and get used to this face! He staggers to his feet, and seems spooked by the sound of a helicopter overhead. He jogs down the alley, steals the pants from the bum (it's as easy as stealing pants from a bum), and then runs away when a patrol car drives up with cops on the lookout for future teleportation and/or hobo-depantsing. He manages to get far enough ahead of one of the cops to hide and then jump him, grabbing his gun. Biehn points it at the cop and demands to know the date. "May 12th," obliges the cop. "The year!" shouts Biehn, completely bewildering the police officer (more so even than the synthesizer score by, if I'm not mistaken, Ross Geller). I don't have many rules in life, but one of them is that if a man pointing a gun at me wants to what year it is, I tell him. Another black-and-white pulls up, and Biehn takes off, ducking into the back door of what appears to be some kind of department store, and bobbing and weaving through the clothing department. If only the cops weren't chasing him, we could have a Future Guy Tries On New Clothes montage, set to something bouncy by Flock of Seagulls. As it is, he only has time to snag some Velcro-closured Nikes and a grey trench coat before hiding in a curtained photo booth. Fortunately, the cops don't think to check there. Why would they? Biehn scurries up the inoperational escalator and makes his way outside and down the fire escape, landing back in the alley behind the cop car. It's unlocked, which seems unwise in light of the fact that any time-traveller can just help himself to the shotgun inside. Stuffing it into his trench coat, Biehn casually strolls away down the street, wary of other police cars, and hops into a phone booth, where he looks up Sarah Connor. There are three of them. The rise of cell phones may be the death knell for old phone booths, but just once before I die, I'd like to know what it's like to need to rip a page out of a telephone book.
Here's one of the Sarah Connors, riding down a Los Angeles street on an ugly light brown motorcycle that she parks in front of the tubby plaster lad holding plaster hamburgers outside of "Big Jeff's." Judging from her feathered hair, she's arriving straight from the set of a Whitesnake video. This could actually be true, as the vast majority of '80s videos were set either in dingy paper-strewn alleys (gang members were always implausibly choreographed) or post-apocalypse dystopias (mainly in utterly incomprehensible videos by Duran Duran). She strides into the restaurant, and someone gives her grief for being late, not -- as you'd assume -- for the high-waisted stone-washed mom jeans by Guess. Elsewhere, a sneering Arnie smashes the driver's side window of a crappy station wagon, rips off the steering column, and starts the car using his fingers. If you're going to program an unstoppable killing machine, you might as well give it a list of cool cars to steal. As if the indignity of her ugly pink dress uniform weren't bad enough, Sarah appears to be working in one of those movie restaurants where customers from all across the restaurant just yell at the waitress even if she's currently at another table. Sarah, unfortunately, seems to be a crappy waitress, so maybe she deserves to be working here. And maybe deserves the bratty kid who dumps a scoop of ice cream into her front pocket. "Nice going, kid. Ought to give you the tip," says one of the alleged grown-ups at the table. Sarah's co-worker cheerily points out that in a hundred years no one's going to care. No, everyone will breathlessly waiting to see if Robotron: 2084 proves to be the most prophetic video game ever. Arnie strolls into the Alamo Sport Shop and buys the following: a 12-gauge auto-loader, a 45-long slide with laser sighting, and an Uzi nine-millimetre. He also asks for a "phased plasma rifle," which wasn't invented at the time (or yet, goddammit). The clerk tells him there's a 15-day wait on the handguns, but he can take the rifles now. What he can't do, which Arnie is doing, is load the shotgun right there in the store. "Wrong," says the Terminator, and blows the guy away. (Remember, those of you who never saw the first movie: Arnie is the bad guy in this one.) Still skulking about in alleyways, Michael Biehn saws off his shotgun to make hiding it a lot easier. It's the middle of the day already! What's he been doing all this time? Mankind's slim hope for future survival isn't going to preserve itself, you know!
Arnie pulls the shaggin' wagon over to the side of the street because he needs to use a phone booth, but apparently wanted to wait until he found one being used by a burly bearded guy whom he could toss aside. I'm thinking even in 1984 they could have made the futuristic killing machine a little less dependent on obsolete-in-2029 technology. It's like if they sent someone back thirty-five years from 2008 and he had to rely on telegraphs to communicate. Arnie also looks up the three Sarah Connors in the phone book. Fortunately for him, he didn't stop at the same phone booth that Michael Biehn vandalized, so the page IS STILL THERE. Elsewhere, it's not so fortunate, however, for one of the other two Sarah Connors, who opens her door to a glowering futuristic killing machine. Arnie opts for the automatic with the laser sight, and pops her right in the forehead. By the time of our heroine waitress's coffee break, her co-workers are morbidly delighted that a murder victim has the same name as their colleague. "You're dead, honey," says her wisecracking buddy, who is...smoking and chewing gum at the same time? Do people do that? Meanwhile, Biehn has hotwired a car (the old-fashioned way) at a construction site, his location chosen for no other apparent reason than so the giant machinery can make him flash back to the future, with the skull-crushing tanks and what have you, where he was a bandanna-clad resistance fighter, dodging laser beams and sentry helicopters and some crappy Euro-dance Gary Numan-esque instrumental music. The killer machinery doesn't seem all that efficient, providing Biehn and a female partner ample opportunity to throw some kind of explosive thermoses underneath the treads of one of the tanks, which, before it gets blowed up, manages to obliterate Biehn's buddy. He allows himself a moment to clench his teeth in manly rage, before hopping into a car with mounted artillery. He and the gunner get blown onto their side, which seems to be good enough for the killer machines. Biehn struggles to free himself from the flaming wreckage... ...and back in the present day, Biehn jolts awake, stares at some digging equipment corkscrewing into the ground, and pulls out of the parking lot. Elsewhere, Sarah and her buddy are getting ready for an evening on the town. Sarah's friend pops a cassette tape into a Walkman the size of a car battery and starts bopping to the music, which was the style at the time. The phone rings, and Sarah strolls into the living room, wearing a Jetsons T-shirt. She picks up something that looks like a phone, only bigger, and with a curly cord attached to one end. The voice on the other end says, "First I'm going to rip your buttons off one by one, and then run my tongue down your neck to your bare, gleaming breasts." Grandpa? Sarah starts to smile as the guy describes various oral clothing removal methods, and yells for "Ginger" that "it's Matt," only Ginger has her headphones in and can't hear, so Sarah listens a little while longer to Matt, who we see is wearing a...sleeveless Albert Einstein shirt? "Who is this?" she says, flustering Matt, who asks for Ginger. "It's the creep," Sarah tells Ginger, handing the phone over. Completely recovered, Matt launches into his lascivious little speech again, word for word.
On now to a chaotic police station, where grizzled lieutenant Ed is getting the lowdown on a couple of murders that day. Women, both named Sarah Connor. "Is this right?" he says. "The press is gonna be short-stroking it all over the place," says the detective. Lousy press! I don't think I even want to know what "short-stroking it" means. These two morons lament the weird "one-day pattern killer." It occurs to neither that maybe they should check to see if there are any other women who fit the pattern. Oh, Lord. See, whenever I get nostalgic for the '80s, I will remember Sarah in her feathered hair and peach Jedi costume and Ginger, who spent all evening with her blow-dryer in order to make herself look like Brian May in a hot pink dress. This is what the hot women looked like back then. "Better than mortal men deserve," says Ginger. Well, the mortal men of the time wore T-shirts with pastel suits and sandals with no socks, so technically she is correct. Before heading out on the town, Ginger checks the messages on a microwave-sized device in the living room, while Sarah looks for her pet iguana (Pugsley), who is sliming all over the place. Bad news: Sarah's date is canceling. "That bum," says Ginger, all pouty solidarity. "So what if he has a Porsche? He can't treat you like this. It's Friday night, for Chrissakes." Sarah declines Ginger's offer to break the guy's kneecaps, and opts to go to a movie instead. In the parking garage, Sarah gets on her scooter, and looks around apprehensively, wondering perhaps if any time-traveling killing machines are lying in wait nearby. Satisfied she's safe, she drives off. Biehn, shrouded in darkness in his sedan, starts his car up and follows her, so the tenant at 229 can finally use his spot now, thank you very much. Back at the police station, the press corps are shouting questions at the detective and the lieutenant. They just let the reporters in the station like that? I don't think so. One of the reporters asks if the police are aware the murders happened in the same order as their names in the phone book. The cops ignore the press, and head into another room, where we find out that the police have been calling "the other girl" and even sent a unit over there, and have gotten no answer. That's because there's a different sort of unit getting a workout right now: Matt and Ginger are in bed and are ignoring the ringing telephone (Ginger's voice on the tape does the annoying "Hello? ...Ha, ha, fooled you" thing that has never fooled anyone, ever, not even in the early '80s when we all looked upon new technologies as some kind of wicked magic).
Back at the station, the detective hangs up. "Same shit," he says. "I can hear it now. He's going to be called 'The Phone Book Killer,'" says the lieutenant, who needs to worry a little more about women being murdered and a little less about what the press will write about women being murdered. Then it occurs to the lieutenant that if he can get on the news, the last Sarah Connor might call them. Luckily, as he opens the door, there's a cameraman standing RIGHT THERE with a camera in his face. Because police stations usually let reporters have the run of the place. After a movie alone, Sarah has decided on having dinner alone. More antiquated concepts for you: smoking indoors in a bar, and a television tuned to the news instead of a game. Sarah overhears that a second Sarah Connor has been murdered, and takes it about as well as you'd expect. (Unless you'd expect her to say, "Whoa. Freaky!" and go back to chowing down). She races to a pay phone, and grabs a phone book. Luckily, it's not one that's been used by killers in a hurry, so the page with her name on it is still there. She's the only one left. She picks up the receiver, but the phone is out of order (for you younger kids, it's like having no bars on your cell phone). She heads outside, looking around apprehensively, and notices Michael Biehn creepily holding up a doorway. She passes him by, and he follows her, so she ducks into a crummy ill-lit disco named "TechNoir" and the Brigitte Nielsen (all blonde women looked like her back then) on the door makes her pay the $4.50 cover charge so she can use the pay phone in the back. She calls the police, but gets an "All our lines are busy" message. She hangs up. Don't do that! When you call back, you'll be at the end of the queue! Your call is very important to them! Back at Sarah's apartment, the double-parked police car on stakeout gets a call that there's a 211 in progress (that's an armed robbery, good buddy) at a liquor store. He peels on out of there, and Arnie marches right on up the front steps of the building and checks out the apartment directory. In the apartment, Ginger apparently never takes her Walkman off for anything, not even PG-rated missionary sex. She leaves a spent Matt in bed and bops her way into the kitchen, where she cleans out a ton of food from the fridge and gets a scare from Pugsley the iguana crawling around. She threatens to make a belt out of him (as was the style at the time). Meanwhile, in the bedroom, Matt is not responding well to Arnie's attempt to make it a threesome. He smacks Arnie with a lamp, which only gets him thrown through a glass closet door, into a mirror, and onto a credenza. Ginger hears nothing through the sound of her '80s pop music, and her own drumming (with celery sticks). On her way back to the bedroom, she shrieks as Matt's bloody body gets thrown through the wall, and can't get away before Arnie plugs her in the back with his laser-sighted .45. Gasping, she crawls away, and Arnie calmly walks over and fires a few more times, killing her. The phone rings, and Arnie, startled, trains his gun on the answering machine, but doesn't shoot it (professional courtesy?). If he had, he wouldn't have heard a frantic Sarah's message telling Ginger to come pick her up at TechNoir. He rifles through a drawer, finding an address book, with an ID for Sarah, so he sees what she looks like. He doesn't look too bothered by the fact that he killed the wrong woman. They didn't even give him a picture of her before they sent him back in time?
Meanwhile, Sarah calls the police station and manages to get through to the lieutenant. She tells him where she is, and he says she'll be safe in the public place until they can come get her. Somewhat relieved, she hangs up, and manages to find an open table (busing tables doesn't seem to be a concern at TechNoir). Arnie has...already arrived? Okay. Anyway, he walks in, ignoring the cover-charge harpy, and strong-arming a bouncer who got really physical rather quickly over four dollars and fifty cents. TechNoir's poor table-clearing performance comes in handy, as Sarah accidentally knocks a bottle off the table, then reaches down to pick it up, so Arnie doesn't see her when he looks over her way. When she straightens up, however, she spots Biehn sitting at the bar. Then Arnie sees her and slowly stomps his way through the dancers. Sarah's instincts really need some work; Arnie raises his gun and paints a giant bindi on her forehead for about half-an-hour until Biehn whips out the sawed-off shotgun and blasts away at Arnie a few times, knocking him down. Not out, however; Arnie gets back up and starts spraying his Uzi around the bar. And that's why poor Kimberly Mitchell had the worst bachelorette party ever. The Terminator tries to mow down a fleeing Sarah, but gets another woman instead. That's good! (Well, for Sarah, anyway.) The dead woman gets her revenge by falling on Sarah and keeping her from getting up, which means the Terminator can walk menacingly over, reloading the Uzi, instead of running menacingly over, which gives Biehn time to blast off another five shotgun rounds that send the Terminator through TechNoir's front window. You know, this isn't anything I don't see on a Fort McMurray Friday night. Biehn crouches down beside Sarah. "Come with me if you want to live." As a pickup line, it's got panache. Sarah elects to gasp at the fact that Arnie is getting up again, even though he's taken shotgun hits around the double digits. Or maybe she can't believe that she can see some movie production crew behind him. Finally, she clambers to her feet and runs off with Biehn out into the back alley, and Arnie starts chasing. We get the first use of the robotic interface overlay point-of-view shot. It's red, with many digits and computer-y sounds! Having reloaded his shotgun, Biehn shoves Sarah into his car, then fires a few rounds at the gas tank of a car back down the alley where Arnie is, until it blows up. This only forces a flaming Arnie to jump up onto the roof of the burning car and launch himself onto the hood of Sarah and Biehn's car, punching a hole through the windshield. Biehn pulls out of the alley and swerves around, dislodging Arnie from the hood and depositing him on the pavement before peeling out. There's a cop car right there, and he makes the correct, if fatal, mistake to let Biehn go while getting on the radio to call for an ambulance for a hit-and-run victim. But said victim is getting to his feet, still smouldering, his hair singed and eyebrows burned off, and he tosses the cop aside and commandeers the police car (and the shotgun inside).
Biehn's racing down the street and through alleyways. He asks Sarah if she's injured or shot, and she's too much in shock to answer him. Then she spazzes and almost tries to go out the door of the moving car, and he stops her and orders her to do everything he says. "Do you understand?" he screams at her, and Sarah begs him not to hurt her. After mystifyingly driving a good length of empty sidewalk while a perfectly good empty stretch of road is right beside him, Biehn says he's there to help her. "I'm Reese. Sergeant/TechCom, DN. Assigned to protect you. You've been targeted for termination." I suspect he doesn't explicitly need to state that that's a bad thing. Over in the other cop car, the radio crackles: "Suspect vehicle sighted on Motor at Pico, southbound. Units One-A-twenty-one and One-A-seven, attempt to intercept. One-L-nineteen, come in." Arnie picks up the radio and speaks, but his Eastern European accent has been replaced with the cop's voice. "This is One-L-nineteen. Westbound on Olympic, approaching Overland." Sarah tells Reese that she didn't do anything. You will, he "explains." She can't believe that a man could get up after getting shot like that. "He's not a man. A machine. A Terminator. Cyberdyne Systems model 101." Thanks for the model number, Reese. I guess that's in case she wants to order from the Cyberdyne catalog, I guess. "A machine. Like a robot?" A cyborg, he says. "Cybernetic organism," he says. A police car flips on its lights and pulls up alongside. "Just a second," says Reese, as calmly as someone answering the phone and then going to get his roommate on the line. "Get your head down! It's going to be obvious in many upcoming shots that there's only one person in the car, and we need to have a good explanation for that!" He slams the shaggin' wagon into the cop car, which is more than enough to foil Sgt. Roscoe P. Coltrane over there. A second cop car starts chasing them, and Reese heads down one of his beloved alleyways. Then he slams on the brakes, and the cop does likewise and swerves, so that he's now sideways in the alley. Reese throws the shaggin' wagon into reverse and slams into the cop car for good measure, and then gets the rock out of there. Reese drives into a parking garage, slamming through the barrier. "The Terminator's an infiltration unit. Part man, part machine. Underneath, it's a hyperalloy combat chassis. Microprocessor-controlled. Fully armoured. Very tough. But outside it's human living tissue. Flesh, skin, hair, blood, grown for the cyborgs." Like Sarah's going to have any idea what he's talking about. He parks the car, saying he needs to ditch it, and fills in a little bit more. "The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy. But these are new. They look human. Sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot." He says he had to wait for the Terminator to target Sarah before he could "zero him." I guess a huge guy like Schwarzenegger walking robotically and glaring menacingly at everyone doesn't stick out as much if he's all sweaty with bad breath.
Sarah thinks Reese is looney tunes (and his cause isn't helped when he admits that he's from the future (or "one possible future," anyway), but she sits up and takes notice when Reese says, "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." Now Sarah is all, "Can you stop it?" Reese admits that he doesn't know. Maybe Sarah should be talking to someone else from the future, then. Someone with a little more positivity? Elsewhere, creepy eyebrowless Arnie is patrolling the streets in his stolen police car that no other cops seem to be looking for yet. But another patrol car is in the parking garage and they've spotted the shaggin' wagon, although no one appears to be in it anymore. The Terminator hears the address crackle over the radio, and pulls a U-turn, lights flashing. Now the parking garage is maggoty with cop cars, like when you're on the five-star level of Grand Theft Auto, and they still fail to notice Sarah and Reese skulking around with a shotgun. They sneak into another car. Sarah asks why the Terminator wants her, by which she means, "Please shoehorn in all the backstory, would you?" Reese says that in a few years there's going to be a nuclear war. All of Los Angeles will be gone. There were a few survivors, but no one knew what started it. "It was the machines, Sarah." Sarah doesn't understand. "Defense network computers. New, powerful, hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. They say it got smart -- a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat. Not just the ones on the other side. It decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination." He says he grew up after the war, hiding in the ruins, hiding from the Hunter-Killers. "Most of us were rounded up. Put in camps for orderly disposal." Oh, my God. Did James Cameron intend this movie as a Holocaust allegory? Reese shows her a red bar code on his arm. "This was burned in by laser scanner. Some of us were kept alive. To work. Loading bodies. The disposal units ran night and day. We were that close to going out forever." But on the plus side, it got him into Black Flag shows for free. But there was one man who taught them to fight. "To smash those metal motherfuckers into junk. He turned it around. He brought us back from the brink." John Connor. Sarah's unborn son. Since all the other cops have apparently given up looking for them, Reese hotwires the car. But as he starts it, there's creepy eyebrowless Arnie, blowing out the rear window with a shotgun.
And now we're off to the races, with Reese and the Terminator firing shotguns at each other and still able to drive, with minimal damage to other parked cars. Maybe road rage is commonplace enough in 2029 that everyone knows how to do it. The chase moves onto the streets of L.A., Reese and the Terminator trading shots, with neither connecting. Reese orders Sarah to steer so he can stick his torso out of the driver's side window and present a nice big target for the Terminator. Unfortunately, the underpass they're in ends at a big wall, and Sarah has no idea what to do. Reese appears to clip Arnie, though, and Sarah slams on the brakes, while the Terminator is too busy...rebooting? And slams into the wall. And here come all the cops who mysteriously vanished from the parking garage. A half-dozen squad cars pull up and block the road. Reese's instinct is to jump out of the car with his shotgun. Fortunately, Sarah stops him, telling him that they're required to have a scene in which the local authorities think the time-traveller is wacko. One of the cops goes to check the other car, but there's no one in it. Not one of the cops seemed to notice anybody getting out, though. Nice work, cops! At the station, Sarah is distraught over the news of Ginger's death. The lieutenant introduces her to Dr. Silberman, played by major Hey! It's That Guy Earl Boen. Trivia note: he's the only actor besides Schwarzenegger to appear in all three films (and the only one who played the same character in each one). Sarah's to tell him everything Reese told her. "Is Reese crazy?" she asks. "Well, that's what we're gonna find out," he says, clicking his pen. Elsewhere, the Terminator has found the perfect place to hide out. It's got the basic tools he needs to repair the damage done to his system, and it's dimly lit for sci-fi action ambiance. His left eye appears to have been shot out, and there's a big hole on his right forearm -- we can see the machinery. Arnie picks up an X-Acto knife and gets to work, cutting deeper into his arm to get a better look at the special effects. Meanwhile, a handcuffed Reese is being questioned by Silberman. It seems to be a surprise to Reese that the "I'm a time-travelling soldier" story isn't cutting it with the local authorities. "This computer thinks it can win by killing the mother of its enemy. Killing him, in effect, before he's even conceived. A sort of retroactive abortion," says Silberman. The cop, watching from behind the one-way glass, laughs, which isn't cool. In 2029 everyone knows you just don't discuss retroactive abortions at cocktail parties. The doctor wants to know why the computer didn't just kill John Connor back in the future. Reese "explains" that the computer's defences were smashed. The humans had won. "Taking out O'Connor then would make no difference. Skynet had to wipe out his entire existence." The human resistance captured the time-displacement lab, and found the Terminator had been sent back. O'Connor sent Reese back to intercept it, and then had the place blown up. So how are you supposed to get back? asks the doctor. "I can't. Nobody goes home. And nobody else comes through. It's just him and me."
As for "him," he's finished working on his arm, and is now going to work on his left eye. I hope that either that's a new X-Acto knife he's jabbing into his the pulpy mass that used to be an eyeball, or he disinfected the one he gouged into his arm with. Oh, wait -- in one of the shots, there's clearly no actual blade in the knife at all. Never mind. He plucks the eyeball out, and drops it in the sink. He wipes the eye socket out and is left with machinery and a camera lens with a light-sensitive shutter covering the bright red light underneath. Unfortunately, to achieve the effect, it looks like Arnie's wearing a mask over top of his face, one that's about as lifelike as the one Mike Myers wears in the Halloween movies. The Terminator looks at his robot eye in the mirror, apparently decides that bad breath and sweat doesn't exactly trump a futuristic eye socket filled with machinery when it comes to blending in with the humans, and opts for giant sunglasses. As was the style at the time. (Or still is, if you're eighty years old.) He gathers up his weapons and heads out onto the fire escape. Back at the station, the cops, the doctor and Sarah are rewatching Reese's interview footage, with the doctor wondering why Reese didn't bring back futuristic weapons with him. Reese is unsure of the "science" behind it, but it has something to do with the magnetic field or blah blah blah. "Nothing dead will go," he says. But the Terminator is machinery, says the doctor. "Surrounded by living tissue!" yells Reese. So shove a phaser up your keister and hope for the best, Reese. After addressing a couple more implausibilities in the story, Reese angrily demands to see Sarah, and the doctor says it's not up to him, so Reese starts yelling directly into the camera. "You still don't get it, do you! He'll find her! That's what he does! That's all he does!" And he goes on like that. Sarah looks worried, and her hair is in need of a good feathering. "So Reese is crazy?" she says. "In technical terminology? He's a loon," says the doctor. Nevertheless, there are two other dead Sarah Connors out there, so the lieutenant gives her some body armour, says it'll stop a twelve-gauge round. "What about when he punched through the windshield?" asks Sarah. A twelve-gauge is harder to stop than a fist, Sarah. Jesus. The cop attributes it to PCP, which at one point was considered a dangerous drug, but today is the main ingredient in several energy drinks. Sarah's going to sack out on the couch in the police station, because it's going to be at least an hour until her mom gets in from Big Bear. "You'll be perfectly safe. I've got thirty cops in this building," says the lieutenant. Sarah thanks him, and closes her eyes.
The doctor signs out of the cop shop, and a beep from his pager draws his attention away from what appears to be a massive Austrian sunglasses-at-night-wearing man strolling into the station. Either that or Corey Hart has really been hitting the weight room. The Terminator robotically says he's a friend of Sarah Connor's and would like to see her. The idiot desk sergeant confirms, to the strange man fitting the description of someone who attacked a woman in their custody, that the woman whose life is in peril is indeed in that building. And that she's making a statement. "It could take a while. If you want to wait, there's a bench over there." The Terminator futilely tries to see into the station, and then gives the enclosed security gate the once-over. This escapes the cop's notice. "I will return," says the Terminator, or something like that. He walks out, and the cop keeps going with his paperwork, at least until a car drives through the front doors and into the security gate, pinning him against the wall. Do you think it was the Terminator? I say yes. Sarah startles awake, hearing the noise. The Terminator gets out of his car and starts cutting a swath through the cops. And honestly, given that most of them seem to respond to the sounds of car accidents and carnage by running into the room holding their coffee cups, I could probably take these guys without a whole lot of trouble. The lieutenant comes into the room, closing the door behind him. "Stay here," he says, and goes out through another door, closing that behind him, like THANKS, LIEUTENANT, FOR LEAVING ME HERE ALONE. Arnie shoots more cops, and then opens a door to find the station's electrical panel, and he rips off the main supply line, and sticks it, sparking, into the lighting circuit. The lights spark and explode. I'm not sure this would have happened so cinematically, but the building goes dark, and the emergency lighting comes on. The cop in the room with Reese opens the door to see what's going on, and Traxler, running by, says, "Watch him." Too late! Reese knocks the guy out and sees about getting his cuffs off. Meanwhile, Sarah stands around hyperventilating, before hiding under a desk. The Terminator continues his rampage, alternating between his automatic weapon and his shotgun. The sound effects also alternate between automatic fire and shotgun blasts, but not in the same pattern. Nice job, guys. The lieutenant fires a few rounds from an M-16 in the Terminator, and gets taken down. Traxler seems to think, "Hey, I want in on this," and it's bye-bye Traxler.
Sarah glances out from under the desk and sees a silhouette in the door's frosted glass, and ducks back under. The doorknob rattles, and then Reese punches through to open the door from the inside. He checks the rooms, and yells, "Sarah!" Sarah obligingly scrambles out, and they go running off down the hall. Elsewhere, the movie's composer has turned the beatbox on his synthesizer up as high as it will go, as the Terminator strides among the carnage and flames. Reese and Sarah are peeling out in the parking lot, and the Terminator shoots after them, missing them completely. He calmly walks out into the parking lot. It's dark. Reese's gas tank is empty, and the radio is talking about L.A. County's greatest single law-enforcement mobilization ever in a manhunt for...they switch the radio off. Now we'll never know! The two of them push the car off the road and take refuge in a culvert. Reese asks Sarah if she's cold. She's only shivering enough to rattle her fillings loose. Instead of offering her his jacket, he crouches beside her and puts his arm around her. She asks him if he has a first name. It's Kyle. "What's it like when you go through time?" she asks. "White light. Pain. It's like being born, maybe," he says, reflectively. She notices blood on her hands, and Reese nonchalantly admits he's been shot, and resists her insisting that they go to a doctor. She orders him to take his jacket off, and opens the car's first aid kit. "Jesus, I'm going to puke," she whines after seeing the wound. We don't see the wound. I guess the bulk of the makeup budget went to the Terminator's Mike Myers mask. Sarah hopes some inane chatter will keep her from chundering all over the man from the future, so she asks about her son. "He's about my height. He has your eyes." And her Bon Jovi hair? There's more: "You trust him. He's got a strength. I'd die for John Connor." "At least now I know what to name him," jokes Sarah, who asks Reese if he knows who the father is. Yeah, WONDER WHO THAT'LL BE. Reese says John never said much about his father. "I know he dies before the war --" begins Kyle, but Sarah makes him stop, saying she doesn't want to hear anymore. Oh, but Kyle volunteered for this mission, so he could come back to meet the legend. It's 1984, so he's talking about...Boy George? No, Sarah Connor. "Taught her son to fight, to organize, from when he was a kid." Sarah's going nuts listening to him talk in the past tense about stuff she hasn't done yet, and isn't even sure Kyle's got the right person. She can't believe she's the "mother of the future" since she can't even balance her own chequebook. Uh, no one called you "mother of the future," there, Sarah. Dial it back. She says she doesn't even want the honour.
Kyle manages to convince her with a message from her son from the future, something about thanking her for her courage through "the dark years" and urging her to be strong or he will never exist. It sounds a little more plausible that Kyle Reese is a militant pro-lifer, if anything, but Sarah calms down, enough to shut up, anyway. He urges her to get some sleep, and then decides the best way for her to get some shuteye is to hear some scary stories about a dystopian future where humans hide out by day and come out at night to fight things with names like the "hunter-killers" and the "infiltrators." We get a nifty little flash-forward to Reese in the future as a soldier, skulking around a scrap-iron wasteland and hiding out underground with the other surviving humans. After a hard day's work fighting the machines, he likes to relax by pulling out a picture of Sarah, taken, judging from the headband, when she was pretending to be Olivia Newton-John getting physical. His reverie is interrupted when a Terminator infiltrates the hideout (the humans are warned when the guard dogs start going apeshit) and starts laying waste to the humans. Even worse, Reese, in the fighting, drops his picture of jazzercising Sarah into a fire, and it bubbles and shrivels and blackens. We dissolve into morning back in 1984, Reese stroking Sarah's sleeping face. "I was dreaming about dogs," she says. Oh, great -- don't you love it when a co-worker starts going off on the weird dream they had the night before? Reese just says they use dogs to spot the Terminators. "Your world is pretty terrifying," says Sarah. Reese assures her that time, they'll spend a lot more money on his future, and it'll look a lot cooler, with liquid metal and stuff. Back at his dingy no-tell hotel hideout, the Terminator leafs through Sarah's address book, flies crawling over his rubber Mike Myers face. The hotel's cleaning guy -- smoking a cigar -- knocks on the door and asks if he's got a dead cat in there. The Terminator scans through a list of possible responses before settling on "Fuck you, asshole," which I can't believe didn't beat out "I'll be back" for this movie's enduring catchphrase. I also think it's hilarious that in the future, there exist robots so lifelike that they sweat and have bad breath -- but still speak in robotic voices. Equally amusing is the fact that the Terminator -- after finding an address for Sarah's mom -- puts on sunglasses to disguise his robotic eye socket hole, but totes his AK-47 in plain view.
Sarah and Kyle check into the "Tiki Motel" -- I know it sounds great, but it's kind of a dump -- and Kyle leaves Sarah with a revolver while he goes out for supplies. Later, freshly showered, Sarah's on the phone with her mom, reluctantly telling her the name of the motel. But a pan over her mom's trashed cabin reveals that Sarah's mom is dead, and the Terminator is simply imitating her voice. After he hangs up, he dials the motel: "Give me your address there," he says, only it's Arnie, after all, so it's more like "Gif me your address theya," with the extra "there" pretty much the entire hook of Darrell Hammond's Schwarzenegger impression. Reese has arrived back at the Tiki Motel -- "now seventy-four percent cockroach-free!" -- with the "supplies": mothballs, corn syrup, ammonia. As Marge Simpson once said, "I don't know what you have planned for this evening, but count me out!" He tells her it's to make plastique: "I learned to make it when I was a kid." Which sounds kind of dark, but I think it just means that they have MacGyver reruns in the future. So, as the Terminator speeds down the highway on his motorcycle, Reese -- sent from the future to ensure that Sarah Connor has her baby as planned, remember -- gives Sarah the job of making bombs full of plastic explosive. Careful, now! Nighttime. Sarah's stretched out on the bed while Reese keeps a shirtless watch by the window. She's all, "He'll find us, won't he," and "It'll never be over, will it." She comes over to sit in the chair beside him and points out that she's shaking. "Some legend, huh? You must be pretty disappointed." He softly says he's not. Then she asks him what the women of his "time" are like. "Good fighters," he says. That's not what she meant. What the hell does she mean? Like, do they have three breasts like in Total Recall? What she's asking is if there's someone "special." "Never," says Reese, before turning away manfully. She says she's sorry, and then runs a hand down his back, and they start blah-blahing about disconnecting pain, and then a tinkly piano kicks in while Reese talks about how John gave him an old picture of Sarah, and that he memorized it, and he loves her and came across time for her. And then he gets up and is all, "Now, about that plastique..." and starts angrily stuffing the EXPLOSIVE BOMBS into a gym bag, and Sarah jumps him and they start kissing up against the fridge and then the thing we know, she's naked and they're rolling around in bed. Fortunately, the motel lobby bathroom vending machine was out of condoms -- and thus was conceived John Connor.
Well, here's some extreme birth control for you: the Terminator, busting through the door and shooting up the room. Reese and Sarah are already out the door and hijacking some dude's truck, smacking the Terminator with it for good measure for peeling out. Termie recovers and hops on his motorcycle and races after them. Sarah drives while Reese chucks his home-brew plastique at the Terminator, while dodging automatic fire. He gets clipped, and the bomb in his hand almost takes his arm off. Shrieking, Sarah yanks a dazed Kyle back into the truck and winds up sideswiping the Terminator, knocking him off his back. Unfortunately, she loses control and the truck flips onto its roof. While Sarah struggles to free a barely conscious Kyle from the truck, the Terminator starts getting up, only to be hit by a huge tanker truck with two people in it who apparently didn't notice the overturned truck or the crashed motorcycle, not to mention the PERSON ON THE GROUND DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF THEM. The Terminator gets pulled under the truck and gets a few bumps and bruises while the driver hits the brakes and hops out of the cab to see what manner of varmint he hit. But his vittle-eating days are done as the Terminator kills him, then climbs in the cab and orders the passenger to get out. Considering half of the Terminator's face is scraped off and his metal endoskeleton is showing through, it's an effective threat. Arnie fires up the truck and starts pulling a U-turn so he can ram Reese's truck. I'm not knowledgeable about the highway laws of California, but it's unfortunate there's no state trooper nearby to witness that maneuver. Sarah manages to pull Kyle out of the truck just before the Terminator pancakes it, which is the good news. The bad news is that they are now being chased down the road by a semi driven by an indestructible killing machine. They turn a corner, and Kyle stumbles, and he orders Sarah to keep on running. While the truck slows down to take the corner, Reese lights the fuse on another bomb and throws it into some tube on the back of the truck, and he hops into a garbage bin for cover. The truck explodes in a spectacular fireball, engulfing the truck and sending napalm splattering in all directions. Kyle crawls out of the now-flaming garbage bin, while Sarah watches the Terminator, fully ablaze, stumble from the truck and collapse on the ground, burning down to its skeleton. Sarah closes her eyes in relief. Then, since the best thing to do is head back towards the indestructible killing machine in the wreckage of an exploded tanker truck, she and Reese embrace. "We did it, Kyle!" she says. Yeah, we all saw you naked -- oh, she means they killed the Terminator. Well, that they didn't do, as it slowly rises from the wreckage. It's all metal now, no flesh, and it still looks scary, almost twenty-five years later. The animation, though? Strictly Army of Darkness, man, all stop-motion nonsense.
Sarah and Kyle flee into a nearby factory, the Terminator herkily-jerkily limping after them. They manage to slam a steel door shut behind them, and they are now in what seems to be an assembly line for (ironically) a robotics factory. Reese starts flipping all the machinery on for cover, so the Terminator can't track them. Do any of his ideas ever work out? As the Terminator methodically breaks through the door, Kyle collapses. Sarah can't get him up until she hilariously starts barking at him like a superior officer: "On your feet, soldier!" The Terminator finally gets in while Sarah and Kyle dart through the machinery on the factory floor. The noisy machinery seems to confuse the Terminator (or maybe it's love at first sight when he spots the shiny spot-welder) but Sarah blows their cover when she accidentally fires up a huge industrial press. The Terminator chases them up some stairs onto an elevated catwalk. While Sarah flees, Kyle distracts the Terminator by using his head for batting practice with an iron pipe. It doesn't hurt the machine at all, but it's really a ruse for the Terminator to get close enough for Reese to jam his last pipe bomb into the Terminator's abdomen. Reese tumbles down the stairs while the Terminator blows apart. Sarah's taken a shard of metal in her leg. She yanks it out, but can barely walk. She drags herself over to Reese, still lying there. Any thoughts of post-blowing-up-Terminator nookie are wiped out when she rolls him over. He's dead. Worse luck: the Terminator is not. His nearby torso sits up, and starts pulling itself towards Sarah, who shrieks and crawls away. Singing, "I have no legs, I have no legs," the Terminator grabs Sarah by the ankle, but she pulls free and keeps crawling. On a conveyor belt now, and through a tight squeeze under another machine. On the other side, she pulls down a metal grate, trapping him. He desperately claws through the bars at her, and looks like he might be close enough to choke her. But wait, that's not all! "You're terminated, fucker," she says, and pushes the button that drives down the industrial press. Flattening him into a metal mass an inch high, only his arm sticking out. The little red light in his eyes goes out. We hear sirens in the distance. Estimated response time for L.A.'s emergency services after a tanker truck blows up? Oh, fifteen minutes or so. Sarah gets loaded into an ambulance while she watches Kyle being zipped up into a body bag. Cut to Sarah in a Jeep, with a dog in the backseat, a Jane Fonda headband on, and a .357 revolver on her lap (well, she's packing for two now, apparently). It's November now, and she's recording "tape seven" for John, saying she's not sure what to tell him and what not to. Well, since you're on tape seven, I'm guess she hasn't left a whole lot out (in her defense, she acknowledges that the tapes are really more for her to sort things out). She stops at a gas station and speaks Spanish to the attendant, and then blathers on some more about whether she should tell John about his father: "Will it affect your decision to send him here, knowing he's your father? If you don't send Kyle, you could never be. God, a person could go crazy thinking about this. I suppose I will tell you; I owe him that. Maybe it'll help if you know that in the few hours that we had together we loved a lifetime's worth." Maybe she thinks that, in the future, children like hearing about all the sex Mom and Dad had.
Suddenly, a nearby Mexican boy snaps a Polaroid of her and starts talking excitedly in Spanish. She asks the attendant for a translation, and he says the boy said that she is very beautiful and he is ashamed to ask for five dollars for the picture, but if he does not, his father will beat him. Sarah smiles, calls it a good hustle, and offers him four, which he accepts. Needless to say, it's the picture Reese carried with him in the future. The boy runs off, yelling something else, as the wind picks up. "He says there is a storm coming," says the attendant. Sarah stares off into the middle distance. "I know," she says, before putting on her sunglasses and heading off down the highway, towards the phony storm. What's in that storm? Liquid metal. A Guns N' Roses video. The unsettling truth that her son may well one day save humanity, but as a teenager he'll be mind-bogglingly annoying. And you will believe a robot can cry.