It's 1984, and Arnold's career is launching into the unknown!

Rating: 8/10 (5 February 2006)

The Terminator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, and Michael Biehn, is about a dark future of Earth that leads to a battle in present day. How can this be? Simply, in 2029 time travel will be possible.
The mission for the Terminator is simple: kill Sarah Connor. Destroy anything or anyone that tries to prevent this from happening.
The mission for Kyle Reese isn't so simple: locate Sarah Connor and prevent her from being destroyed by the Terminator.
The movie does quite a nice job of explaining many details. You learn quite a bit about all of the basics of the future war, how the machines come to power, primarily when Reese explains all of this to Connor.
It's a fairly simple plot and isn't difficult to understand. This is acceptable, because it's an action movie and doesn't really need much explanation. Of course, as an action movie this movie definitely delivers, with some very detailed and gory scenes. A few examples are the Terminator punching through someone and pulling his arm out, the killing of 30 law officers in a police station, and point blank assassinations of Sarah Connors. The movie can be very creepy as well, so there is some potential scare factor as well.
As of this writing, The Terminator does show a few signs of aging. The music is very 80s with a lot of synthesizers. There's the typical big 80's hair. A lot of the props are date-able as well, such as the cars.
This really can be overlooked though, because end to end this action flick is spectacular.
8/10