Cider and Cinema: The Terminator

Tonight’s cider is by my favourite cider brand – Rekorderlig.  This Swedish company does THE BEST pear cider I’ve ever found – it’s my absolute favourite – and they also do a range of other fruity flavours, too.  This one is peach-apricot, and it’s delicious.  Unlike the elderflower cider I tried last time, you can’t taste the apples at all, which is good, because there are plenty of apple ciders if that’s what you’re after.

Mmm, lovely cider…

This one doesn’t taste remotely alcoholic, which could be dangerous, but I find there’s a limit to the number of sweet ‘n’ fruity drinks I can have in one sitting.  I wish there was a scratch ‘n’ sniff facility so you could at least get a sense of the full-on fruitiness of this peachy beverage, but alas, it is not so.  You’ll just have to take my word for it.

Now that I’m settled down with my lovely drink, I can get to tonight’s feature: The Terminator.  Everyone knows the plot by now, so I’m not going to dwell on it except to say there’s a time-travelling cyborg bent on destruction of the woman who will give birth to the future saviour of the human race.  Nice and simple.

Anyway, I’ve had a hankering to re-watch this since seeing the Terminator Genisys trailer the other day, even though the bf and I only re-watched it about two months ago.  When we watched it last time I was struck by how surprisingly good it was.  I mean, the Terminator franchise has a bit of a chequered history, and whenever I go back to it, it seems to be Terminator 2 that I’m drawn to (perhaps because they’re always showing it on ITV2?)…

Terminator 2: Judgement Day

After realising that this is actually a really bloody good action film in its own right, the next thing that struck me was how weird it is to see Arnie’s T101 as the bad guy.  I mean, I’m much more familiar with the T2 movie where Arnie was the goodie, so seeing him on a homicidal rampage, relentlessly trailing Sarah Connor (the truly awesome Linda Hamilton) was kind of confusing.

Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor

[Incidentally, this cider is going down incredibly well.  It’s basically like drinking sparkling fruit juice]

I freaking LOVE the soundtrack to this thing, it’s all electro and jangly synth sounds, proper 80s style.  I think this is what It Follows and The Guest might have been aspiring to.  Well, it feels like this is the sort of thing they were aiming for, and if you ask me, I think both those films were all the better for it.

But back to this one… one of the other things I loved about this film is the real effects.  The seriously old-school Jason-and-the-Argonauts-style real effects.  They may not be as seamless as state of the art CGI, but there’s a beauty and charm in real effects that you just done get from using a computer.  LOVE IT!  I just love how the terminator moves.  It reminds me of this:

 

So, what you’ve got here is vintage Arnie at his one-liner-spouting best, a relatable, strong female character played by a top-form Linda Hamilton, time-travel, car chases, explosions, real effects, 80s synthesiser music and homicidal cyborgs.  What the hell else do you want?  Cara, you need to watch this!

Cider score: a fruity 7.5/10

Movie score: 8.5/10