Review Summary: -Phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range.
-Hey, just what you see, pal!
Long before the 'talk to the hand' or 'cool my own terminator!' quotage, a big badass 'chose an infrared 'Fu*k you As*hole' and went-on with the chase. Slightly before that, in a set joint the seasoned det knew it was on Pico - four fifty uninflated, two strangers and that guy who didn't pay, engaged for the first time under a resonant "Burnin' in the Third Degree" by the Tryanglz - one of the five non-Fiedel pop tunes being present on side B of this soundtrack. Then Sarah went with Reese 'cause she wanted to live and the rest may be pop culture or tech franchise, yet the original was also noir.
Interestingly, the sublime main theme was never meant to be - bearing a 13/16 time signature that is*. You see, Brad Fiedel wasn't schooled on charts and notes, instead, he used to fiddle around with primitive analogue synths and sequencers back in the day. These machines were big, ugly and didn't have autocorrect to boot. In effect, the sequence Brad punched in one of 'em so that he could come up with a melody while improvising, had been unintentionally cut something short of a complete bar. Nevertheless, he went along the vagarious task and guess what... the ominous melody that was conceived atop the quirky pulse, could be a blueprint of what impending doomsday sounds like. To illustrate, the actual synth line was not nailed exactly on the beats, which led to a natural fluctuation that contrasts the mechanistic and complex time signature; a foolproof score analogy of the human vs. machine scheme. Conversely, the minimal - still beautiful - piano rendition of the main melody during the love scene toggles to a humane or terrene four per bar, while the aptly titled post apocalyptic "Future Remembered" can still traverse those with a taste for the analogue synth through memory lane. Truly a shame that the last two tracks mentioned are of such short duration.
All the same, these were before a withered governator wearing daisy shades... before the box office hit that afforded Brad and James more advanced mimetic polyalloys, allowing the first to sequel the score in - Fiedel's own words - a more warm 6/8 or Cameron to swap Tryanglzs for charting Guns. Could it be that back in 1984 you didn't know much about charts & time signatures?... Well, thank god you didn't and thank that bloody old machine of yours for the rest, or paraphrasing what Sarah said before the storm -in the few hours you had together, you loved a lifetime's worth.
Speaking of which, let me nod my footnote on life being fair once in a while, as "Intimacy" which had been planned as the audile flagship of the flick, barely made a cameo through Ginger's headphones, just before roommie & tune were Terminated under a scope of Original alloy - or at least under whatever beamy goods the stores had available for a T-800 back then.
* http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/02/the_time_signature_of_the_terminator_score_is_a_my stery_for_the_ages.html
