posted November 30, 2020 05:05 PM            

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http://thespool.net/features/columns/love-and-robots-the-terminator/

Love and Robots: "The Terminator" is Cameron's Most Romantic Movie
thespool.net

1984’s The Terminator is Jim Cameron’s saddest movie. It’s about humanity’s best and worst impulses, hopelessly bound with one another in an inescapable loop of life and death. If his other films don’t always end in absolute triumph, there’s at least the suggestion that the danger has passed and peace is on the horizon. The worst is still to come in The Terminator: there’s no final victory and order is not restored at the end of the movie. In its place we have a young woman, pregnant and alone in a new country where she barely speaks the language, driving an open-topped jeep into an oncoming storm.

It’s also, paradoxically, his bravest and most boldly humanistic movie. Because it’s also about the drive to push forward and fight on in the face of impossible odds and to try and survive no matter what. The fact that there’s no chance for the protagonists to have a happy ending doesn’t stop them from trying to improve the future for others.

That’s a fun narrative trick, but it also speaks to a deeper truth about reality: life and death and the impulse to create and destroy are impossible to separate. If the Evil Machine Skynet had never sent a Terminator back in time to kill John Connor, then Kyle Reese would not have gone back and fathered him. In trying to preserve its future, Skynet unknowingly ended it. Much like humanity tried to ensure an end to the threat of nuclear war by creating Skynet in the first place only to have Skynet determine the best way to curb war was by curbing humanity.

There’s also a cut scene from the very end of the movie in which pieces of the defeated Terminator recovered by the very company would go on to develop Skynet. Skynet didn’t just facilitate John Connor’s birth, but its own as well. Normally, cut scenes shouldn’t factor into how a movie is interpreted. But Cameron went on to develop those themes in the sequel, so in this case, it’s worth making an exception.

There is no life without death in The Terminator, no creation without destruction. But nothing’s ever quite over because death isn’t the end. Reese dies protecting Sarah, but they create a child before he leaves and he’ll be reborn in a few decades too, and then he’ll live and fight and suffer and go back in time again and die again and around and around we go. There’s no relief for anyone in The Terminator, no end to fighting and loss, but there’s also always victory and triumph and love.

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posted September 27, 2021 08:51 PM            

We have worked on the individual too long, now the carpet under the collective soul is swept away. And we have to change in concert with the whole.