How ‘Terminator’ redefined science fiction with only 14 phrases and a reduced budget

James Cameron premiered in the genre with a Little Budget film and low expectation that turned out to be a box office success.

One of the shortest and most famous phrases of the cinema of the last forty years is pronounced in this movie: “I will return”. But there is another that tends to go unnoticed and deserves to stand out: “No one else will come.”

Kyle Reese says, the human soldier sent from the future to try Stop the almost indestructible robot whose mission is to kill Sarah Connor, the mother of the future leader who will prevent the machines from seizing the planet: “We are only he and me.”

That could be true at the time, but time has shown that none script law You can resist the possibility of raising money with all possible continuations.

And they returned …

We have visited Terminators and Warriors from the future to dozens, in cinema and on television, although the last installments of the series – “Terminator Genesis” (2015) and “Terminator, Dark Destination” (2019) – They seem to make it clear that The idea of ​​exterminating robots More and more advanced chasing their human whites and fighting other robots no longer gives much more.

But the first one, the best of all. When in 1991 James Cameron rolled “Terminator 2: the final judgment”, the only novelty was to make the Android played by Arnold Schwarzenegger: otherwise, it is almost the same film, although with much more money behind.

Terminator combines common issues in science fiction: Time trips, the possibility of altering the future traveling to the past, machines seizing the world …

All this seasoned with an ominous Ciporg that does not seem to have paid much attention to the laws of Asimov’s robotics.

Little known faces

But none of that convinced Orion Pictures too much, which approved a tight budget of 6.5 million dollars for a film conceived by secondary: the only experience of James Cameron as director was “Piraña II: the vampires of the sea” (1981).

Gale Anne Hurd, producer and coguionist, had an even more shabby curriculum; And Arnold Schwarzenegger had begun to decolarize with “Conan the barbarian” (1982), but It was not yet the megaestrella in which it would becomethanks, precisely, to this movie.

The anecdote is well known: In principle, Schwarzenegger appeared for the role of the hero – which would end up in the hands of Michael Biehn -, But immediately realized the possibilities offered by the Terminator himself.

Like a robot

Cameron agreed, among other things, because it was difficult to conceive a character capable of intimidating a hero played by Schwarzenegger (Problem that in the second part would be solved with the creation of the liquid metal terminator).

The actor prepared for the role thoroughly: In addition to perfecting an artificial way of moving and walking, he practiced for a month with all the weapons he would have to use in the film.

He learned to mount and disassemble weapons with both hands and bandaged eyes Until his movements were automatic; The same as those that would use a robot.

Only fourteen phrases

Cameron increased this impression by reducing Schwarzenegger’s dialogue – only fourteen phrases throughout the film – so that the Terminator was a presence even more dehumanized.

And the plot advances to the frantic rhythm of the action films of the time, in which the persecutions and shootings They were the order of the day.

It was, as a label warned us at the beginning of the tape, A duel for the future of humanity. And nothing anticipated it better than the plane of the beginning taken from the Los Angeles Observatory, in which a naked terminator contemplates the views of the city at night, such as examining its hunting territory.