We saw The Terminator 4K restoration; how did it look?

The Terminator is the latest James Cameron film to undergo a major restoration, but it will be controversial.

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 undergone a similar “re-visualization,” which I caught theatrically yesterday. 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.

However, the film has no grain whatsoever, and it looks pristine in a way that the film never looked back in 1984. To me, this is Cameron’s prerogative, as given how timeless the film has become, he probably wants it to look as good as it can for younger generations. I honestly thought it looked really good. My issue with the restoration has more to do with the sound mix than anything.

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. If Cameron had included the original mono track in the UHD release, I wouldn’t have cared, but the mono track has been unavailable for some time. 

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: Did anyone else check it out in theatres this weekend? Let us know how you thought it looked in the comments.