A low-budget start to a high-budget franchise

Rating: 8/10 (27 January 2020)

After years of procrastinating on starting the series, I finally got around to watching 'The Terminator' - a relatively low-budget film that spawned a series of high-budget films, which I plan to watch in chronology. Not to mention how this film had very successfully launched the directorial career of James Cameron and solidified Arnold Schwarzenegger's acting career.
'The Terminator' follows Kyle Reese, a human soldier tasked to stop an indestructible cyborg killing machine - both sent from 2029 - from executing a young woman, whose unborn son is the key to humanity's future salvation.
It becomes clear from the basic structure and narrative elements of the film that Cameron was inspired by horror-slasher films like 'Halloween' and the dystopian sci-fi films of that era such as 'Escape from New York' and 'Mad Max', as the similarity becomes more apparent with time.
Though the world-building and mythos-creation of the film is excellent, the plotline is quite predictable, emotional moments feel forced and contrived for the plot, and the 80's cheesiness is apparent through the dialogues and performances. Even the romance subplot feels sudden and contrived for the sake of establishing the predestined fate of the movie's plot.
Personally, the story of how this film came to be is more interesting than the actual film - and I don't mean that as a detriment to the film's quality. The noticeable prosthetics and dated visual effects that may hamper the initial viewing experience eventually becomes more fascinating once you find out the amount of hard-work, rejections and creative problem-solving it took to make this sci-fi film in the 80s - an era that hadn't yet developed visual effects as we now take for granted.