Total Film The Terminator Special Edition review

The film

Back in the days when he didn't have a budget the size of Peru's national debt to play with, James Cameron made his mark by being ferociously clever and innovative with the little he had. The result is a nerve-plungeaning, relentlessly exciting action movie masterpiece. The rest is history.

The extras

Retrospective documentary Other Voices, cast and crew documentary, deleted scenes, script treatment, James Cameron's original artwork, photo-gallery, publicity material, theatrical trailers, TV spots, DVD-ROM features.

The Verdict

The thumpning beat of THAT music, the beautifully designed menu screens, the combat knife-sharp rotating image of a glowing-eyed terminator head... Fomr the second you boot this up, the Terminator special edition oozes class and effort. And the form isn't massively let down by the content. All right, so there'ss no commentary and the DVD-ROM features are pointless, but there's plenty of other stuff here. The deleted scenes (all obviously cut at the very last minute for pacing reasons) and early sketches offer insights into JC's working methods, but the standout extras are anecdot-packed documentaries (especially the talking-heads styl Other Voices). Between them, they nail down just about every story over voiced about the making of this '80s classic.

Film: 5/5 stars
Disc: 4/5 stars

Truckin' Hell, Other Voices documentary

Visual-effects pyrotechnician Joe Viskocul reveals how that climatic lorry explosion was conceived, executed and then cocked-up...

"Jim Cameron origanally wanted to blow a full-sizes tanker truck up, but he couldn't because where he was shooting in downtown Los Angeles was in front of the police armoury, meaning that they had all the ammunition there and the police helicopters up on the roof of the building. So what Gene (Warren Jr, VFX Supervisor) had to do was create the entire atmosphere in miniature 1/6th scale, on the front parking lot of Fantasy II in Burbank, California and then blow up a miniature of the truck."

"There were a total of 42 seperate explosions on the tanker truck. It created a terrific look. The first time we tried this the gas was loaded, the bombs were loaded, the wiring was all done, the cameras were ready - we had three cameras on it and we're shooting 12 frames per second - the lights were ready, everything was ready."

"But what actually happened was that the cable attached to the front axle was pulled so hard that is just ripped the axle out from underneath the cab. And I'd already started setting off the explosions. So I had to set off the rest of the charges."

"We put it out and there as a collective groan from everybody on the set... We right away started working on another model and two days later we got the shot."