The “seminal” action movie that inspired Kathryn Bigelow: “A game-changer”
You know a movie is truly special when it receives praise from a director of Kathryn Bigelow‘s calibre.
Being the director of hard-hitting cult favourites Near Dark and Point Break, along with the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker – for which she became the first woman to win the Oscar for ‘Best Director’ – and Oscar-nominated Zero Dark Thirty, has carved a unique path in the industry. She is known for making films that are thrillingly tense and often shocking in their brutality, but also very focused on the inner lives of her protagonists.
Speaking to Rotten Tomatoes in 2009, Bigelow took the opportunity to list some of her favourite films. They included Sam Peckinpah’s “muscular” western The Wild Bunch, Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, owing to Robert De Niro’s performance, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, “for its sheer bravado, magnificence, scale, scope”, and the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock. While Bigelow praised all of these films, she noted that James Cameron’s “[The]Terminator was a real seminal piece”.
The 1984 classic about a cyborg assassin sent back in time to kill the mother of a future resistance leader was a huge hit with audiences when it came out. It grossed over $78million worldwide and spawned a franchise with a sequel seven years later. But the film made a big impression on Bigelow before it even hit the screen. In the interview, she mentions that she “read the script before [James Cameron] shot the movie”.
After reading the script, she could not wait to see the final product, and when relating her experience of the film, Bigelow said, “It’s like you’ve opened up a Pandora’s Box, and the filmmaking world can never be the same—the language is different, the grammar is different”.
She also showed a lot of respect for James Cameron, noting, “I think he really changed the playing field”.
Given the director’s own style, it’s understandable why she would be drawn to a film like The Terminator. Firstly, it features a lot of tension. The film is essentially one long cat-and-mouse chase with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 relentlessly hunting Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor and Michael Biehn’s Kyle Reese. It also has some quite grim moments, such as the T-800 repairing itself and the bloody shootout at the police station. However, underpinning it all is the engaging drama of Sarah Connor trying to come to terms with her desperate situation and the burgeoning romance she shares with Kyle Reese.
You can definitely see The Terminator’s influence in a lot of Bigelow’s work. Maya’s relentless hunt for Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty very much acts as an inverse of the T-800’s hunt for Sarah Connor, with more focus on the hunter’s motives and life; the brutal action of Near Dark and Point Break and the grimy tech-noir aesthetic of Strange Days all owe a great debt to Cameron’s cult film.
Bigelow herself has helped to change the landscape of modern cinema with her filmmaking achievements. It’s therefore no surprise that she is a huge fan of The Terminator, as she said it herself, “The only way you can describe it is as a game-changer”.
