The Terminator 4K Blu-ray gets surprisingly high marks; original sound mix restored

Director James Cameron’s The Terminator is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year. To mark the occasion, it’s the latest one of the director’s movies to get a radical 4K restoration done by Park Road Post, a post-production facility owned by Peter Jackson’s WingNut Films. This company is behind some of the most incredible, acclaimed restorations in recent memory, including Peter Jackson’s WWI documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old, and his The Beatles’ Get Back documentary.

But they’ve also been controversial, with James Cameron using them to significantly alter the looks of several of his films as they hit 4K. Notably, each film had been completely wiped of any film-like grain, making them look more like contemporary films than those made in the 1980s and 90s. This was especially noticeable in Aliens, which always sported a grainy look due to the high-speed film stock used. With the AI-assisted transfer, Cameron made the movie look flawless, but this led to some consternation from purists, who claimed he was doing revisionist filmmaking.

This notion hit a fever pitch when the long MIA True Lies finally hit 4K, which looked radically different than in the previous transfers or theatrically. For that one, Cameron used Super35 film stock, which allowed him to shoot in a spherical format, making it easier to do pan and scan transfers back in the VHS era without simply lopping off the sides of his image. The downside to this technology was more film grain, but when it hit 4K, you’d swear True Lies was shot using the latest technology. The transfer was so controversial here on JoBlo that film preservationist Robert Harris, who gave the transfers high marks, wrote to us to clarify what was happening with the Cameron transfers, writing, “The work performed was a re-visualization. An entirely new digital product, which (to varying degrees of success) appears to have achieved Mr. Cameron’s goals.’

Some fans love the new Cameron transfer, but many fans hate them. Whatever the case, Cameron’s The Terminator, has now been re-issued on 4K Blu-ray disc, with extensive restoration, but, unlike the other Cameron transfers, it seems to be somewhat more true to the way the film originally looked. Note that The Terminator was a low-budget movie by 1984 standards, with Cameron shooting the film using a 1:85:1 matted aspect ratio. It was never as visually polished as the director’s latest films, and to be sure, Cameron hasn’t done anything too radical with the transfer here. It doesn’t suddenly look like it was shot with IMAX cameras (like True Lies), nor is it as wildly re-imagined as Universal’s recent Jaws 3 restoration.

The transfer even has a certain amount of grain – just enough to give it a filmic look. Now, to be sure the movie DOES NOT look like it did back in 1984. However, Cameron seems to have effectively modernized the look of the movie without it feeling like it’s been entirely revisualized. But, what’s even better is the fact that the disc makes right something that’s been a big sticking point with fans over the last twenty plus years.

The Terminator was initially shot in Mono, but in the early 2000s, Cameron had the film remixed in Dolby 5.1, and it sounded a lot different than it did initially. The new restoration has a similar sound, with some of the SFX sounding “too new” in a movie shot in 1984—another movie with that problem is Tim Burton’s Batman. The new WB disc actually includes a restored version of the original Mono track, which sounds terrific.

In the end, The Terminator’s 4K release will undoubtedly prove to be another controversial Cameron upgrade for film purists, and I’m sure we’ll be writing about it again in the months to come. I’m curious: has anyone checked out the disc yet? Let us know how you thought it looked in the comments. 

Starring Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, The Terminator has the following synopsis: Disguised as a human, a cyborg assassin known as a Terminator travels from 2029 to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor. Sent to protect Sarah is Kyle Reese, who divulges the coming of Skynet, an artificial intelligence system that will spark a nuclear holocaust. Sarah is targeted because Skynet knows that her unborn son will lead the fight against them. With a virtually unstoppable killing machine in hot pursuit, she and Kyle attempt to escape.