Good morning, y’all, this is Oculus Reviews. How do you like your coffee? I like it black and bitter like my soul. But what do you do if it’s fresh and too hot to drink? People have different solutions to that: some put it aside until it’s cool enough, or put cold milk in it… or drink it anyway. But me, I’ve invented a different path. Put water in it! Not only will your diluted coffee taste like the devil’s taint, and not only will you piss yourself off first thing in the morning with having to drink it, but you’ll get to enjoy that sweet, sweet caffeine straight out of the pot. It's a win-win scenario, isn't it?
When I told my Aussie friend about my shrewd coffee strategy, her response was “call that coffee a Depresso”—and wasn’t that the best thing I’d heard all day. I can practically hear the commercial. “Tired? Sad? Feeling like the whole world is against you? Why not make it worse? Depresso.”
Anyway, here I am, done with my daily Depresso and ready to talk about the movie I love the most in the whole wide world.
It’s no secret of mine that the first Terminator is my favorite movie ever—no secret because I will blather on and on and on about it to anyone foolish enough to bring it up. I just love it to bits, y’all. I’ve seen it at least six times all the way through, not counting the times I only rewatched parts, and man, it still makes me sob like my dog’s been shot every single time. As far as I'm concerned, the Terminator franchise is the best thing since celluloid film was invented; and by franchise, I of course mean Terminator, Judgment Day and Dark Fate. I don’t recall any other movies because those don’t exist. Right?
Now as for the novelization… that’s a bit more complicated. There are two versions for the original movie; one of them, the more widely accessible one, was written by Shaun Hutson. You know… THIS GUY.
When I told my Aussie friend about my shrewd coffee strategy, her response was “call that coffee a Depresso”—and wasn’t that the best thing I’d heard all day. I can practically hear the commercial. “Tired? Sad? Feeling like the whole world is against you? Why not make it worse? Depresso.”
Anyway, here I am, done with my daily Depresso and ready to talk about the movie I love the most in the whole wide world.
It’s no secret of mine that the first Terminator is my favorite movie ever—no secret because I will blather on and on and on about it to anyone foolish enough to bring it up. I just love it to bits, y’all. I’ve seen it at least six times all the way through, not counting the times I only rewatched parts, and man, it still makes me sob like my dog’s been shot every single time. As far as I'm concerned, the Terminator franchise is the best thing since celluloid film was invented; and by franchise, I of course mean Terminator, Judgment Day and Dark Fate. I don’t recall any other movies because those don’t exist. Right?
Now as for the novelization… that’s a bit more complicated. There are two versions for the original movie; one of them, the more widely accessible one, was written by Shaun Hutson. You know… THIS GUY.
goodreads.com
And let's just say that I ain't touchin' that one with a ten-foot spork. (Although the Slugs cover does rock.)
The other novelization was written by Randall Frakes and Bill Wisher, both people who have worked on the movie script itself—so you know the story was in better hands here. Unfortunately, the book has fallen out of print pretty much immediately, and nowadays it’s a rare collector’s item; good luck finding it under 40 bucks, really. I’d love to say that I was one of the lucky ones to snag it cheap, but the truth is that I dropped a pretty penny for this baby. Was it worth it? Hoo boy.
The other novelization was written by Randall Frakes and Bill Wisher, both people who have worked on the movie script itself—so you know the story was in better hands here. Unfortunately, the book has fallen out of print pretty much immediately, and nowadays it’s a rare collector’s item; good luck finding it under 40 bucks, really. I’d love to say that I was one of the lucky ones to snag it cheap, but the truth is that I dropped a pretty penny for this baby. Was it worth it? Hoo boy.
I assume most of us would be familiar with the basic plot of The Terminator, either from the first movie or the second one, but I'll give it a quick rundown nonetheless. From the year 2029, after a bitter war fought between humans and machines, two men are sent back into 1984 to find a nineteen year-old waitress named Sarah Connor—who's much more important to the world than she thinks. One of the men is her protector... and the other is a machine designed to kill her no matter the cost. It's a matter of who gets to her first that will decide the fate of mankind.
Boys, girls and pals, this book broke me. Here I thought the movie was heartbreaking. If it wasn't for the heinous prices and difficulty finding this novelization, I'd honestly urge every single Terminator fan to find a copy. It's beautifully written. Frakes and Wisher flesh out a lot that the movie doesn't show, from Sarah's everyday life and friendships to the Terminator's victims, or Kyle Reese's trauma and life as a soldier of the future; it's alternately funny, deeply romantic and absolutely devastating. Under the authors' pen even the most minor characters gain lives, become human and real rather than just set pieces. One of my favorite scenes from this story, for instance, is the one with the biker guy the Terminator shoves aside to get the phonebook in an early part of the story. After realizing that the huge, dead-eyed man is looking for women named Sarah Connor he briefly contemplates calling them to tell them about the weird person searching for them, only to forget it; and later he's filled with horror and remorse when he sees that two of those women were murdered and realizes that he might have been able to warn them in time. Even the nameless bit characters from the movie get names and realistic inner lives in this, and it's a real delight to see—for a 240 page-long book, it really packs some heart and humanity.
The action scenes, of course, are just as good, filled with as much relentless intensity as they are in the movie, so reading them will get your heart pounding as much as watching them would. I'm usually not a marathon reader—I prefer to immerse myself in a book, take it slow, as it were—but I stayed up until 4 in the morning to finish this one because I couldn't. Put it. Down. And this after already knowing the story by heart; the richness of this novelization, of the prose and the characters and all the emotion and adrenaline, really surprised me. And if you happen to like Kyle Reese, prepare to be absolutely demolished by pretty much everything he thinks and does in this novel. He picks a strawberry and feeds a stray dog, y'all.
Or there's this particular passage which I have to show you guys, because you're all welcome to cry with me.
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| The Terminator, page 173. |
WHY MUST YOU HURT ME SO.
The good things about this book are many, and the bad are few; I could mention the occasional typo or the maybe one scene where I thought one of the protagonists was thinking a little OOC (at least as far as my own interpretation of the movie goes), but really, these bad parts are like needles in a haystack. If you're as immersed in this story as I was, you'll probably barely notice them.
In conclusion? The Terminator book is really freakin' good—because it was clearly made by people who knew what they were doing and gave a damn. It's a skillfully written, relentlessly dark, but also deeply touching novel that does the movie justice and fleshes it out in a way I haven't seen many movie novelizations do. If I could somehow make it so that every Terminator fan could get a copy of it, I would. And to answer the earlier question to myself... yes, it was worth it. Boy, was it ever.
Writing: While hardly literary fiction, this is really the best kind of vintage genre writing: rich, atmospheric, heart-poundingly intense when it has to be, soft and poetic where it hits you the hardest. 5/5
Availability: Why isn't this back in print?! 1/5
Entertainment factor: Couldn't. Put it. Down. 5/5
Do I recommend it? What else have I been doing until now? 5/5
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