In The Terminator, Sarah Connor is a young waitress who finds herself pursued by a relentless cyborg killer, the Cyberdyne Systems T-800 Model 101 Terminator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger), for reasons completely unknown to her. She is rescued from the Terminator by time traveling soldier Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), who explains that in the future, an artificial intelligence called Skynet will be created by military software developers to make strategic decisions. The program becomes self-aware, seizes control of most of the world's military hardware (including various highly-advanced robots), and launches an all-out attack on human beings. However, a man named John Connor eventually leads the human Tech-Com resistance to victory, only to discover that in a last-ditch effort, Skynet had researched time travel and sent a robotic killer back in time to destroy John Connor's family before he can be born. John Connor, of course, is Sarah's future son, and Connor sends back a trusted lieutenant (Reese - who, unbeknownst to either of them, is John's father) to protect his mother at all costs.
You can name dozens and dozens of male action stars who kick ass and take names. Since the first silent films, heroic male leads have been the norm, not the exception. For women, the opposite is very true. Of course, for all those manly men to flex their muscles, there had to be damsels in distress, and that's the role most female leads have had through not just the course of film, but history. There are notable exceptions however, and tonight's review covers one of those. Like Ellen Ripley before her, Sarah Connor didn't need any guy with big muscles and an even bigger ego to come along and rescue her. She could do that just fine on her own, thank you very much, and you best not get in her way. This persona wasn't fully realized until Terminator 2, but in that film she was the definition of bad ass. Sideshow has been doing a great job with the Terminator license, and the latest release is dear Sarah. The regular version is already sold-out by the manufacturer, but can still be found at DarkFigures.com. Parts of this review were provided by Michael Crawford Reviews & Wikipedia
