Collection Terminator

The Terminator was made for around six million dollars and it looks like considerably more, mostly because James Cameron shot it like a horror film. A machine walks toward its target for ninety minutes and does not get tired, negotiate or stop.

Judgment Day then did the harder thing and made the same machine sympathetic without softening it. The T-800 doesn't learn to feel - it learns what feelings are for, which is a much more interesting piece of writing, and the thumbs-up at the end earns its reputation honestly.

The design language is all in the eyes. Red optics behind human skin, and the moment the flesh comes off is one of the most reproduced images in science fiction.

Stan Winston's practical endoskeleton and the early liquid-metal CG both stand up remarkably well, largely because Cameron used each only where it worked.

This collection covers the T-800 and its iconography. I'll be back, and so on.