Ah, the two movies that made me love movies and look at cinema in a different way. Those two showed me that movies aren't necessarily just a fast food to kill time, they can also be an experience and art. And sometimes an experience like none other.
What's great about experiencing the movies back in the day as a kid is that you were so into them. As a kid, you know it's "just" a movie, but you're there - it may just as well be happening for real in front of you. So what a movie to experience for a kid like 1984's The Terminator.
Seemingly, the movie followed the usual pattern of the horror movies my teenage sister was renting every weekend: some kind of supernatural or unreal being stalking someone in a big city. Examples? Maniac Cop (undead strangler chasing a woman who got away), Child's Play (Possesed doll chasing after a kid and his mother), Goodnight God Bless (possessed priest chasing after a mother with a child who survived the encounter with him)
You could ask, who in the name would allow a kid to watch those? No one did. I would sneak into the living room and watch from behind, or pretend that I'm playing or reading comics nearby and actually watch.
But while those other movies were indeed scary for me, they didn't really have an impact on me. The Terminator thought? It was unlike any movie I've ever seen. It seemed so much more intense, so much more real, I couldn't articulate it, but I felt my heart physically gripped by fear. The mood of that movie is unmatched. Its music, look, tone, the constant feel of dread. For years I couldn't articulate why James Cameron movies are different. I used to say they're very serious, trying to explain why they're so much more immersive and intense than any other movies in existence. But that's not accurate. There's a lot of intense and serious movies. Cameron can somehow create a story that amplifies every possible feeling to the Nth degree: terror (The Terminator), sadness, happiness (Titanic), Suspense (Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgment Day). He knows how to stimulate and amplify every feeling to the heights we didn't even know existed. That's why his movies grip so many people and why he created all time record movies multiple times. That's why he's different than anyone else. Jim Cameron’s quote below best describes the experience of watching his movies
So experiencing a first James Cameron film is something. And if that's at the young age, that's even more amplified by the fact that you're so much into it. What tremendously helped with that first experience is that I didn't know and never heard of or seen Arnold Schwarzenegger. So he was not "him", he was "it". A terrifying entity (as James Cameron described him in his Masterclass video) that came from the shadows from another world to stalk a young woman.
For me, the most terrifying aspect of that thing was lack of any sort of humanity. It was a device. Lifeless, heartless device like lawnmower. You can’t plead to the Lawnmower to not to run you over if you fall in front of it, just as well as you can’t bargain with this device. It was an emotionless thing from hell. As a kid, I kind of looked at him as a possessed device, even though I knew it really wasn't. It came from a place that looked like hell, it had red eyes which faded once the evil left its body - the electrical discharge when the Terminator was being crushed by a hydraulic press seemed to me like the evil force leaving that device. The Omen-like horror music during that moment reinforced the poetic interpretation
And Michael Biehn's extremely intense performance was one of the crucial elements that made this movie so horrifying. When he spoke to Sarah about what's after her, and that scary, ever present synthesizer bass hum came in, you listened. You listened and you listened good.
I always scrutinized VHS covers after finishing a movie. But I was afraid to stare for longer than a second on the thing on the cover. I was afraid it's looking back at me, like the painting in Ghostbusters II. The version of the movie I've seen was unique for few reasons: one, this version had James Cameron's painting on the cover. It didn't have the theatrical poster. Two, I was born and lived in Poland for 16 years, and the movie was famously retitled there to "Electronic Murderer" which was very fitting, and I think it's actually a great title for that particular movie.
So that was in 1990, or early 1991. Flash forward to late 1991 or early 1992 (when T2 was hitting theaters in Poland), and my geek teenage sister comes in with a movie magazine in her hands: "Remember that movie about that robot that killed people?". I said "yeah". She said "Well, there's part 2 coming out and this time this guy is good" she said, putting the magazine in front of me that had a spread on Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and pointed at the photo of him on a motorcycle. That concept blew me away, like nothing in movies ever since. "Him? Good? How? Whaat?". For me it was such an unfathomable idea that something so terrifying would be a good guy. I kept staring at that photo of Arnold on the bike, thinking to myself "wow, he's good now. No, that can't be" I don't know how long I stared at that photo, but I remember it as long. It was such a fascinating concept for me. I saved that photo in my scrapbook and it still survived to this day
Very shortly afterwards, T2 was literally everywhere, and it was the first movie since 1989's Batman that everyone was talking about. But that was even bigger because the adults and all the people older than me were very interested in it. It was in every magazine, my friends and my sister's teenage friends were talking about it, my dad couldn't wait to see it, my older cousins couldn't wait (and gave me a sticker with the teaser image of half Arnold, half endoskeleton which was beyond awesome)
When it came out on VHS in the summer of 1992, it topped the VHS rental charts in the country and there was a big waitlist for it. My entire family gathered around that one night to see it when my sister's friend, whose father was a cop, managed to rent it for 2 days and passed it to us on the second.
And that was the experience like no other (until I saw Titanic). I became (and remained) a diehard Terminator fan which I am to this day (of only the first two movies). This movie was like an epic, insanely intense journey. It felt like I really spent those two days in it with the characters. I could feel the breeze that blew Sarah's hair when she was reminiscing on Salceda's ranch. It was that immersive. And of course, the cool factor was off the scale: Arnold Schwarzenegger as the T-800, a now outdated, conventional model in comparison to the absolute cinematic wonder - the liquid metal T-1000. The blue steel look of the film was so beautiful, so stylized.
Terminator 2 was one of those seminal 1990s movies that became a phenomenon and impacted the movie history, along with Jurassic Park and Titanic. Of course, it, like Jurassic Park, have been a milestone in movie history for advancing CGI. So you may ask, how did I react to the CGI (which holds up perfectly to this day), which was basically a magic on screen at the time? Truth to be told, I was so into the story that I didn’t pay attention to it. My parents threw occasional “How did they do that” and “huh, look at that”, but for me it was just part of the story and I was watching the story. Whatever technique, it was the story and the imagery and designs that counted for me. I was oblivious to it
I remember being wowed by the T-1000 reforming from little droplets. Again, it wasn’t the CGI that wowed me, but the imaginative idea of the whole gag
And the breaking of the 4th wall - the T-800 endoskeleton turning to the audience and blasting us with two rifles was such a cool and fun gag
I was also still high on the idea of turning heads on the Terminator character. It was such a cool idea, so novel. And I was fascinated with how different T2 was from the original, seemingly in every way possible (And even though everyone had seen T2, I was the only one who saw the first one, which wasn't widely available in rental places). It was so much bigger, so different.
There wasn't a person I was aware of, kid or adult, that wouldn't have seen Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Hasta La Vista became part of our language for years.
T2 was everywhere and in everything. I could see references to it in both cartoons I was watching (Animaniacs) and other movies (Wayne's World, Nut House, Last Action Hero, Hot Shots: Part Deux)
From then on, I wanted to see every movie with Arnold possible, and I did with my dad. Same went for Robert Patrick (although I only managed to see Die Hard 2, and I kept asking to rewind the part with Patrick). I started collecting all the magazines with Terminator 2 articles and managed to get a copy on VHS. I was watching it every chance I got, and actually my dad used it to wake me up for school each morning. Once I've heard that he put T2 on, I would instantly rise up from bad and had about 15 minutes to watch it before I had to get ready for school.
Even when I saw trailers for T2 before other movies I was getting excited and kept watching the trailer over and over again, even thought I knew every line and every shot of the movie by memory.
I eagerly awaited every episode of the TV show Movie Magic which showed in each episode the making of three scenes from three movies, and T2 was featured multiple times. It aired once a week right after school so I always eagerly anticipated another episode in hopes there's gonna be something T2 related.
The name of James Cameron in front of the coolest image I've ever seen burned into my mind; “So that’s the coolest guy on the planet who came up with Terminators”.
At the same time, I saw his and Spielberg’s photo in a New Fantasy magazine, and got to see how the two greatest storytellers and magicians look like. I became a super Cameron fan.
My cousin got a Game Boy from France along with the T2 game, so when I came over I could barely contain my excitement and eagerness to play it. He lived over an hour away so I couldn't just come over anytime, so it was my only chance to play it since nobody else had it (GameBoy and its games were very expensive at the time in Poland). So I waited for him to finish so it could be my turn, and just when he passed me the GameBoy my aunt said "You two go outside now! You're not gonna spend the day playing video games inside. Go on!". I was like "Ugh nooooo". So I never got to play it as a kid
Then life went on, and in my mid teens I got into music, as one does in that age, and completely left my love for movies behind. All of them. I was just fully into music and when 2000s hit, with their god awful movies, I lost hope in them and didn't really have any desire to watch movies anymore at all after trying to see a few. They ranged from terrible to bearable. I thought maybe I outgrew movies and they just aren’t for me.
But then in 2008 I decided to rewatch Titanic for the first time since seeing it in theaters (the experience of watching it in on a big screen was so immersive and so intense and traumatic for me, even thought it was the greatest thing I ever saw I couldn't take it again I thought, so I haven't seen it since). And boy, was I blown away. Like only one time in my life, in early 1998. After the movie ended, I realized I was gripping the sides of my chair and that I was extremely tensed up. Most importantly, I only then realized I was watching a movie! I was so swept away I forgot about the reality. I figured I got the movies all wrong, and that it’s not that movies aren’t immersive and amazing anymore, I was just watching wrong ones. So, hoping to repeat or at least get close to that movie watching experience again, I started rewatching all of my favorite movies from my childhood and all of the movie classics from 70s, 80s and 90s. And to my disappointment, a lot of them were not so good today, and some were just ok. Only 4 movies from my childhood favorites were just as good as I thought they were when I was a kid, and two of them were indeed, The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
The first movie has a mood to it that perhaps only The Exorcist III could match. It's got a fantastic mood, as if being constantly in a nightmare. The Noir cinematography and the absolutely phenomenal horror music create an experienced simulating an intense, fear and adrenaline filled nightmare
It's a perfection of a movie for me. As is the second one. I was absolutely blown away by T2, it's depth, the richness of the filmmaking craft in it. The cinematography, the thoughts behind the frames and the characters. I began to study T2 as much as possible: bought all dvd and bluray editions, watched every possible extra, listened to all commentary tracks, text commentaries, read all the books and interviews I could find about it. Each time I was amazed how much thought and art went into it (See HERE). When it wasn't enough, I started collecting vintage magazines that covered T2 and had interviews with the cast and crew, all to learn something new, discover a new thought and idea behind it. I was amazed how much depth and art was behind a movie that's an action blockbuster on the surface. But my favorite moments weren't the action, they were the quiet ones. My favorite scene is Sarah watching the Salceda family in their camp in silence, bathed in the afternoon sun, beautifully scored with an acoustic guitar.
The movie's stylized cinematography is just beautiful. The orange sunsets, the cold blue, almost monochromatic nights, painted with blue, accented with whites.
And the last act of the movie visually conveys the theme of the movie: man vs machine, warm vs cold
And signature Cameron's staccato lightning is of course present once the movie starts to pick up pace and in the last act
And the soundtrack is one of the most unique soundtracks in history. It’s almost completely created as if it’s made out of factory plant sounds that create percussive-like rhythms. It also got some apocalyptic choir parts in it which elevate the sense of both danger and the scope of the movie
Seeing how many ideas , care and thought was put into T2, I began studying filmmaking and became very passionate about the movies because I was in awe. And it all began with that one rewatch and then another with a text commentary on Extreme DVD edition. There I was floored when I read how much messaging was put into the image itself in the Hasta La Vista scene. Seemingly a cool action moment with a quotable line, yet so artistic and the image is such a great visual storytelling. Since it was a very human moment for the T-800, his damaged, metal side is covered in cold blue and in a shadow, while the human side is brightly lit and with warm colors, symbolizing his humanity's victory over his mechanical side in that very moment.
That's when I became fascinated with cinema again and started my path in discovering other great filmmakers like Kubrick and Scorsese, and dove into the movie world.
And I'm still fascinated by the idea of a sequel that's true to the original yet so different.
To this day, both The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day comprise a one, single story for me and are my favorite movies of all time
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