The Terminator, 1984.
Directed by James Cameron.
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, Linda Hamilton, Paul Winfield, Lance Henriksen and Earl Boen.
SYNOPSIS:
James Cameron’s classic The Terminator makes its 4K Ultra HD debut in an edition that sports a solid transfer (your mileage may vary, of course) and a smattering of bonus features from previous releases. It’s a bummer that some extras are missing, including Van Ling’s Other Voices documentary, but this is still a decent disc. A code for a digital copy is included too.
I feel like I need to address two things at the start of this review: this new 4K remaster and the eerie sense of dread I felt watching The Terminator for the first time in a long time, thanks to current events.
On the subject of the 4K remaster: I’m not an expert on that kind of stuff, but I’m aware of the complaints about movies being scrubbed too clean, so to speak, for their 4K Ultra HD editions, in particular the recent releases of some of James Cameron’s other films.
I received digital copies of those other movies for review, so I can’t speak to them, but I have the 4K Ultra HD disc of The Terminator in hand and it looks pretty damn good on my TV. I have a pretty standard setup, like a lot of people do, and I’m happy with the image quality.
And I’m one of the people who knocked Terminator2: Judgment Day on 4K Ultra HD because it had been scrubbed of film grain and had a waxy look to it. I know people have had similar complaints of the new 4K Ultra HD editions of Aliens, True Lies, and The Abyss, but I’m not seeing that with The Terminator. As always, of course, your mileage may vary.
On the subject of current events: holy crap, do we have dystopia staring us in the face right now or what? Between the US elections going oh-so-wrong and a lot of interest in AI by the tech industry, the depictions of the year 2029 in The Terminator have much more eerie parallels than they had in 1984, when the film was released.
As someone who works in the tech industry, I’ve come across the following observation multiple times: people overestimate what AI can do right now but underestimate where it will be in the next couple years. I’ve played around with tools like ChatGPT and MidJourney, and, yes, they botch a lot of things, but they get a lot right, too.
I’m reminded of a neighbor I spoke with about 15 years ago (a guy who was working in IT, no less) about the potential for streaming video. He scoffed at such an idea and couldn’t seem to understand that I wasn’t talking about what was possible then, I was talking about what could happen in the future. (He later moved, so I haven’t had a chance to revisit that discussion. (And, yes, I’m aware of the Netflix boxing debacle as I type this.))
Could AI improve by leaps and bounds in the coming few years? Yeah, I think so. (To be clear, I’m a marketing guy in tech, not an engineer, so this is just my observation from talking to people.)
Could it quickly reach the kind of intelligence shown in The Terminator, just in time for that movie’s future to become our present day reality in 2029? Mmmmmmmmm, I hope not. I can foresee a future where people increasingly rely on AI, as pure software and as software running inside robots, to take care of simple tasks, but I’d like to think the idea of an AI becoming self-aware and attacking humans on a wide scale is pretty much fantasy. (Yes, my choice of the words “on a wide scale” means that one-off incidents are always possible.)
I know, I haven’t really talked about The Terminator, but do I need to recite the plot? You’ve probably seen it at least once and know the basics of the story. If you haven’t seen it, it’s well worth a viewing. Revisiting it in the year 2024, 40 years after its initial release, it holds up well, except for the 80s synthesizer soundtrack.
And like I said, this 4K Ultra HD release looks nice on my TV. There’s no Blu-ray included too, but you do get a code for a digital copy. On the bonus features front, you’ll likely want to hold onto previous home video editions of the movie, if you have them, since what’s included here is far from everything that’s been available before.
However, you do get James Cameron’s optional commentary on the 10 minutes of deleted scenes found here, which is nice since that track was missing from the old Blu-ray.
Unfortunately, Van Ling’s great Other Voices documentary isn’t found here, nor is the Terminator: A Retrospective featurette, but you do get a trio of previously available featurettes that run about 35 minutes total. Two of them are from the DVD era and the third is from an earlier Blu-ray. They serve up a nice little making-of as a group, but, of course, this is a movie worthy of more in-depth extras. Hopefully a more definitive edition will be released eventually.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Brad Cook
