Still my number one movie of all time.

Rating: 10/10 (6 May 2015)

I have no defense. I stand guilty as charged. I must be insane.
The Terminator, for so many, many, many reasons should never be anybody's number one movie of all time. Better "films" exist. Certainly better actors. Better photography and special effects existed at the time. Much classier direction could be found in abundance, I kid not.
It was the film of the moment, and the moment was a very complex one. A moment when two thirds of the world were holding their breath for World War III to begin. The schools and mass media were educating children as young as twelve that nuclear war was probable, and what those terrified young people needed to do should "the four minute warning" (in the U.K.) be given by T.V., radio and War War II relic Klaxon Horns. Yes, my generation grew up with this. When humans with itchy trigger fingers were barely being controlled by others with nerves of steel and the courage to state that Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was not a viable solution. However, while they could not reach "the big red buttons", the military of the two superpowers of "The Cold War" were using computers and technology to enhance their reasoning and their ability to respond.
Films like "The Forbin Project" and "War Games" almost projected the unidentified third man into the public psyche, but these films were either too cult/boring or too Hollywood Happy Ending to hit the mark.
The Terminator ended all doubts. If we did not kill each other, the machines we built to "defend" us were the unidentified enemy and, if given enough power and freedom, they would resolve to eliminate all humans in order to survive our MAD ambitions.
This alone would have made this a worthy 8/10 movie, but the twist that was added by the fully comprehensible Time Travel Paradox slotted in to the life story of the main character, "Sarah Connor", is what maintains this film as number one for me.
Spoiler Alert: If you have not seen it, read no further. Come back and read the rest of this review after seeing the movie (yes, really, through to the end {the movie, not this review!} ) to see if you agree.
The first time I saw the movie, I was perhaps 17, but the Time Travel Paradox had been hit upon by a number of books and one film in particular, "The Time Machine". But the consequences of changing the past that could affect the present such that you might never be born in order to travel back in time to make those changes, thus time always self corrects, etc, etc was not made so startlingly clear until ... "What should I tell you about your father?"
The line just hung in the air.
It marked, (and still marks), the viewer deeply with a question that seems impossible to answer.
If Sarah Connor did not tell her son, "John Connor", that his already dead father had not yet been born, but that they will meet when John is a grown man and a leader of a group of guerrilla warriors fighting against artificially intelligent machines that will be set on the absolute extermination of the human race, and that he must convince and prepare that man, his father, "Kyle Reese", to travel back through time (through a time travel device that will be created by the genocidal machines specifically to send a robot soldier, "The Terminator", back to the recent past to kill John Connor's mother, Sarah, before John is born) to save his mother and ... to become his father.
From here, the viewer is left with an endless list of questions that can keep the mind imagining consequences of action, or inaction, on the parts of any of these three protagonists, Sarah, Kyle and John ... plus the damned Terminator and the SkyNet computer network.
Best movie of all time? Thirty years on, and the number of questions continues to increase. No other film, science fiction or otherwise, has created so many thoughts that related directly to my life (particularly during the Cold War), to my work (during thirty years in the I.T. industry) and to the future I see for the human race ... and as hard as we have fought to avoid it, the more we seem to be creating it.
"There is a storm coming"