Movie Night With Urbaniak: The Terminator
The Terminator perfectly embodies two crucial truths about motion pictures:
The motion of the narrative of The Terminator could not be more perfectly shaped. The first act presents all its players, tells us nothing about them except their actions, and sets them on an irreversible collision-course toward each other. There is no scene where the Terminator explains who he is, there is no scene where Reese pets a dog to make him “likable,” there is no scene where Sarah Connor complains to her roommate “look at me, I’m pushing 30 and I’m still working as a waitress! I’m such a mess, I’ll never get a guy or have kids! My life will never mean anything!” The Terminator moves implacably toward his goal, Reese moves implacably toward his, and Sarah gets caught in between. Once the characters all meet up, chase each other and exchange gunfire, they break apart for the start of Act II and we finally get a little information about who Reese is, who the Terminator is and why they’re doing all these crazy things. As the confusion lifts, solid, eternal themes emerge — destiny, fate, motherhood, fatherhood, the nature and purpose of humanity, all dealt with with a maximum of economy, grace and visual acuity. What Urbaniak calls “the moebius-strip nature of the time-travel movie” is intricately laid out in scenes that are heavily expository yet crammed with suspense and action, so that a 106-minute movie with a complicated backstory flies by in no time whatsoever. Events follow hard upon each other so that the story plays out over a matter of days, the few scenes of rest contain tidbits like a robot peeling off its face or a tutorial on building pipe bombs, the emphasis is on pursuit and jeopardy, sacrifice and honor. The love story, improbable as it is (two people meet, one a soldier from the future, fall in love, have sex and conceive a child, all within 24 hours, while being pursued by an evil, unstoppable robot) works because it stands as the inverse of the antagonist, a character who exists only to destroy.
TRUTH 2: Different narrative forms naturally lend themselves to different aspects of existence. The novel is ideal for presenting the inner lives of its characters, the play is ideal for showing people in a room talking and movies are ideal for showing large metal objects hurtling through the air. Or, to put it another way, novels are good for delineating thought, plays are good for presenting speech, and movies are good for displaying action. The action, however, cannot be action for its own sake. The lesser talents who followed James Cameron into the arena of “80s action movies” often did not share his intuitive sense of what constitutes effective action. An action setpiece in a movie is a lot like a song in a Broadway show. In a good Broadway show, the songs are memorable and powerful and also advance the plot, so that the narrative stakes at the end of the song are higher than they were at the beginning. In the bad Broadway show, the songs are “show stoppers,” big production numbers exuding spectacle and bombast, after which everyone goes back to doing exactly what they were doing beforehand. And so it is with the action movie. The excellent action sequence is a culmination of narrative, sharply expresses character, is innovative and surprising, uses location in a vital and thematic way, and serves as a plot turn without which the narrative is meaningless. The 80s and early 90s teemed with movies whose action sequences did none of these things. These movies are largely forgotten now, but the ones that remain, principally the Die Hard movies, the Terminator movies, Aliens, the first 80 minutes of The Abyss, and a few others stand as the fulfillment of not just action movies but as a genuine fulfillment of the potential of the cinematic form.