The Terminator

We all know by now, the fascinating piece of trivia, that OJ Simpson was almost cast as The Terminator. I was going to write a treatise on the alternate history that might have occurred had OJ Simpson been cast instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator. I would have gone into OJ's illustrious film career that would have followed, with such success and happiness OJ isn'tled down the path of murder, instead his new path leads the former Athlete-tuned-Box-Office-Star to a tenure as Governor of California and then eventually, with no foreign citizenship blocking his path unlike a certain real life Governor, OJ becomes the first black President of the United States in 2009. He kind of fucks things up though just a year into his presidency. The stresses of the job and suspicions of an affair lead OJ to murder his most recent wife, Gwyneth Paltrow. He grants himself a presidential pardon and then America becomes kind lawless. OJ is granting pardons to anyone who has murdered their wives and it starts a trend. By 2016 the population of America is 86% male. The country elects Donald Trump as President in an attempt to restore some sanity to America. Meanwhile James Cameron is blacklisted for his racist portrayal of Black people as 'infiltrators' out to 'Terminate' White People. But that's not really a review of the film.

I'm not sure when I first saw The Terminator. I know I had seen it by the time I was 6 because I remember we had the poster up in the attic room where my brothers and I played the Amiga 500. At that age I loved Arnie from films like Conan, The Running Man, Commando, Predator and Total Recall. He was Mr Universe. An Austrian All-American Hero who could lift a car and pull off a great one liner at the same time. Sure there was Dolph Lundgren and Jean Claude Van Dam but neither of those European Meatheads were able to cross the Atlantic with quite the same success of Arnie. I was quite a discerning 6 year old. But in amongst all of Arnie's heroic offerings was the weird black sheep of his filmogaphy, The Terminator. Here was a movie in which Arnie says very little, and certainly doesn't have any oneliners, instead he's actually giving a genuinely nuanced performance as a cyborg; he looks kind of fucked up with melted off eyebrows for more than half the movie and not only that but he is the scary bad guy who doesn't stop coming like Michael Myers from Halloween. But none of that really mattered to six year old me, because Arnold Schwarzenegger lands on the wet tarmac in the dead of night in a bubble of electricity and he's totally naked and looks like a God and I really didn't know how to feel about all of that. I didn't know what the term homo-erotic meant back then but to a 6 year old this film is pure homo-eroticism: two naked guys in the first 10 minutes; a glimpse of some Schwarzenegger's schlong; even Sarah Connor kind of looks very masculine or at least androgynous in her extremely 80's sex scene. It left me with a lot of confused feelings.

Nowadays watching the film, I still have a few confused feelings, but it's more about how Schwarzenegger is supposed to be an infiltrator unit - he supposed to look like human and disappear in crowds, but if that's the case, why did they make him look like Schwarzenegger? Also, did this film invent 'cyborg view' that we'd go on to see in Robocop and Iron Man etc. I'm also left dismayed by what a dog-eaten mess this franchise has become after starting out with this amazing film and the almost impossibly even better sequel. From the third film onwards they became mostly bloated nonsense with an abundance of bad ideas trying to compensate for the lack of any good ones. But mostly, I'm impressed. This film has big stakes and great effects but is also focused, streamline and raw. Despite how eighties everything is, it feels kind of timeless due to its quality. The score is amazing despite famously not having any discernable time-signature. The action is well choreographed and tense throughout. And of course... Schwarzenegger looks great naked.