When I was 9 years old, my mother went to the public library in Toronto to rent a VHS cassette of the Oscar-winning Henry James adaptation The Heiress—only the clamshell case that she brought back to our house contained a copy of The Terminator instead. The next morning over breakfast, she told me and my younger brother that she had watched this great movie about a killer robot from the future, and, after some perfunctory family meetings about guns and violence—and whether or not to fast-forward through the sex scene—The Terminator quickly found its way into heavy rotation on our family VCR. Sometimes, we’d stop to wonder about the other people in this story—the ones who were looking forward to seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger murder some unlucky punk outside the Griffith Observatory only to get Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift in a tremulous and tragic fable of social climbing and doomed romance. To quote Cameron’s film, a person can go crazy thinking about all this.
I myself think about The Terminator a lot—more and more the older I get, and not just out of nostalgia and the memory of video stores past. There is a solid case to be made that James Cameron’s low-budget, high-concept breakthrough—which turns 40 years old this month—is the most accomplished and influential mainstream American exploitation movie ever made, an ingeniously conceived fusion of ’60s Cold War paranoia, ’70s slasher-flick tropes, and ’80s future-shock aesthetics, shot, directed, and edited with ruthless efficiency and put over the top by a wildly unlikely and brilliantly inspired piece of alpha-male casting. It’s one of the films that I’ve rewatched the most in a lifetime filled with all kinds of academic and professional viewing—a title residing at the top of a short list along with Jaws, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Don’t Look Now.
The Ringer’s Streaming Guide
There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.
There’s actually a morbid common denominator between these movies: The end comes for us all, whether it’s being dealt out by a great white shark, a marauding alien seed pod, a raincoat-wearing Italian dwarf, or an Austrian bodybuilder in a leather jacket. You don’t have to pick too deeply at The Terminator to reveal its steely metaphysical endoskeleton—cue Michael Biehn’s Kyle Reese to unpack the Terminator’s subtext as a hyper-modern incarnation of the Grim Reaper: “It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop ... ever, until you are dead!” On one level, the predicament facing Greater L.A. area hash slinger and motorbike enthusiast Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) is absurdly and obscenely specific: She’s been targeted for assassination by a time-traveling cyborg in order to prevent her from giving birth to a baby boy who will grow up to be the leader of a post-apocalyptic human resistance against the AIs who reduced human civilization to cinders. More generally, though, The Terminator is defined by a piercingly universal sense of mortality, one that manifests at the edges of the story but pushes its way to the center until every scene is pressurized by the proximity of death. When Schwarzenegger’s T-800 starts going door-to-door executing women named Sarah Connor based on the order in which they appear in the city’s phone book, it’s an (analog-era) plot point that doubles as a kind of sick, cosmic joke. Do not ask for whom the doorbell tolls.
The vision of Arnold as a kind of übermenschian Hell’s Angel, clad in leather and denim and stone-faced behind a pair of Gargoyles classics, endures because it splits the difference between horror and humor. With his various bulbosities and protuberances shoved into leather and tied off, his diction chopped, his eyebrows blistered, his hair hacked, and his attitude tweaked, Arnie is a walking punch line. “[He’s] a joke that kills,” as the critic Jay Scott wrote.
The much-documented lunch meeting between Cameron and Schwarzenegger, in which both men realized the latter’s otherworldly physiognomy and physique would make him an ideal villain, serves as the primal scene of The Terminator’s greatness, as well as a wonderful example of showmanship trumping and transcending logic. “The guy is supposed to be an infiltration unit, and there’s no way you wouldn’t spot a Terminator in a crowd instantly if they all looked like Arnold,” Cameron noted in 2009. “If there’s a visceral, cinematic thing happening that the audience likes, they don’t care if it goes against what’s likely.” It’s fun to imagine a version of The Terminator featuring Lance Henriksen as a lanky, anonymous cipher, but you also don’t have to, since that image eventually informed the casting of Michael Biehn as an all-too-vulnerable guardian angel. (Cameron frames Kyle at the outset as an ambiguous, trenchcoated figure with palpable night-stalker vibes, just to give his own clandestine but protective pursuit of Sarah an edge of potential threat.) It also manifested in the presence of Robert Patrick in Terminator 2 as the anodyne, everyman T-1000—a shapeshifter who was also an emissary of CGI’s reality-altering properties. Meanwhile, more practically speaking, Arnold gave a low-budget production a source of box-office muscle, and in return he got a chance to recontextualize the stoic, mythic heroism he embodied in early roles as Hercules and Conan the Barbarian, as well as the charming satirist of Pumping Iron, who cheerfully compared biceps curls to ejaculation. In real life, the young Schwarzenegger was a fleshy raconteur; in The Terminator, he’s an anti-life force whose arsenal of automatic weapons aren’t so much tools as an extension of his heavy-metal essence.
Like all the best B-movies, The Terminator is a marvel of left-to-right narrative momentum, but its digressions are suggestive of larger ideas. Take the priceless bit where the big guy engages in conversation with an affable gun store owner (played, in a nod to Cameron’s mentor Roger Corman, by AIP stalwart Dick Miller) only to blow him away before the latter can make a sale. For viewers with strong ideas about the Second Amendment, the scene could be read as caustic satire or cautionary critique. The same goes for the fact that, at its core, The Terminator’s time-traveling narrative—borrowed (or stolen, without attribution) from sci-fi master Harlan Ellison’s The Outer Limits episode “The Soldier”—is a parable about abortion. The premise that the survival of an unborn (and, as the film opens, unconceived) child is the only thing standing against the extinction of the species could easily be interpreted as a pro-life allegory.
But mapping the intentional ideology of a movie like The Terminator is futile. In lieu of coherence, it channels potent wavelengths of rage, fear, and paranoia. Cameron’s ability to strip-mine both contemporary and perennial anxieties about everything from technology to gender politics to authoritarian overreach—take, for example, the exquisitely sinister implications of the phrase “To Care and Protect” being emblazoned on the door of the squad car commandeered by the Terminator during a high-speed chase—qualifies as a protean feat in its own right. As does his skill for taking something as abstract as the grandfather paradox and giving it genuine dramatic shading and emotional weight. No less than Halloween (which The Terminator resembles more than Cameron would probably like to admit), the movie works as well as it does because its Final Girl is more than an archetype. As played by Hamilton beneath an endearingly blown-out hairdo, Sarah Connor is a recognizable and relatable human being who grows into her destiny as the “mother of the future” in increments, slowly and rousingly, until we believe that she is capable of holding her own against an apex predator—not in spite of being put through the proverbial ringer, but because of it.
It’s also important that there’s a genuine spark between Sarah and Kyle, which doesn’t just redeem the mechanical (and predictable) revelation that the latter is John’s father, but taps the same reservoir of romantic despair as the one between Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The more doomed they are, the closer Sarah and Kyle become, so that the aforementioned sex scene—accompanied, for better and for worse, by a tinkly piano version of Brad Fiedel’s awesome synth score—is more tender and erotic than you’d expect for a film originally aimed at hordes of multiplex teenagers. Even better, and in its way just as tender: Sarah willing herself into a version of Kyle in the homestretch, imploring her badly wounded lover, “On your feet, soldier!” while they stagger through a deserted factory—a moment that anticipates not only Sigourney Weaver’s bad-bitch arc in Aliens but Sarah’s transformation into a hard-edged, unflinching human Terminator in T2.
Beyond his basic instinct for rewiring old-fashioned scenarios so that they feel new—the postmodern throughline running from The Terminator films to Aliens to Titanic and Avatar—Cameron’s greatest gift as a filmmaker is his command of pacing. His internal storytelling metronome is precisely calibrated to shift, maintain, and subvert tempo as necessary. Think of how judiciously The Terminator leverages exposition against ambiguity in the opening scenes, which have the distilled visual potency of a fine graphic novel: the naked assassin overlooking L.A.; Kyle slipping wordlessly into a pair of Nikes; a child’s toy truck crushed mercilessly beneath the treads of a full-size vehicle. Think of the exhilarating sense of convergence in the shoot-out at Tech Noir, with dancing revelers parting like the sea as the Terminator makes his way toward Sarah, shot in lyrical slow-motion worthy of Brian De Palma. Think of the false idyll at the police station, which somehow contains the film’s single funniest line—the deathless, monotone promise of “I’ll be back,” with Cameron insisting, counterintuitively but correctly, on a precision-machine incongruously using a contraction—and its scariest moment, when Sarah awakens from a deep sleep into a nightmare, a shot that deliberately recalls Kyle’s reminiscence of a similar siege in 2029, a flashback embedded in our memories even though, as per the film’s timeline, it hasn’t happened yet.
Again: A person could go crazy thinking about the structural sophistication and embedded existential terror of The Terminator, with its survival-of-the-fittest subtext and brutally intricate rules of cause and effect, which lead Sarah—and us—down a road toward a profoundly unsettling coda in which the heroine, having won the battle, must now prepare for war. She doesn’t drive off into the sunset, but into a storm. The Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, who made a pair of enduring science-fiction masterpieces in Solaris and Stalker, recognized The Terminator as a movie with aspirations to seriousness: “As a vision of the future and the relation between man and his destiny, the film is pushing the frontier of cinema as an art.”
The last shot of The Terminator is a horizon, over which lies the end of the world as we know it—a vanishing point beckoning the audience toward the terrible and humbling understanding that the Terminator, like the malfunctioning, malevolent HAL 9000 before it, is ultimately made in our own self-destructive image.
I sometimes fantasize about going back in time and preventing Cameron from making Terminator 2. It’s not that I don’t consider it a work of art. It’s not that I can’t recognize how phenomenally well-made it is, how fabulously entertaining it is. But it’s also fundamentally a cop-out—one that not only takes the edge off the probability of global apocalypse, but which also domesticates (and Spielberg-izes) Schwarzenegger so that he becomes a good guy. He’s a kinder, gentler Terminator, who maims people instead of killing them, which somehow makes him more sentimental and sadistic than his predecessor. What Terminator 2 represents—and, in its early ’90s way, perhaps epitomizes—is the franchise-movie mindset of Bigger Is Better, the same commercially-minded calculus that guided Cameron’s familiar yet singular trajectory from lean, mean B-movie origins toward an unprecedented form of cinematic gigantism. Nobody makes bigger movies better than Cameron does. But for me, it’s his smallest feature that will always cast the longest shadow.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.
