An action movie classic

Rating: Null/10 (29 April 2001)

Back in the days when 'Titanic' was just a big old boat and the script for 'Junior' had not yet been accidentally dropped in the greenlight pile, James Cameron was the up-and-coming director of low-budget action movie 'Piranha II: Flying Killers' and Arnold Schwarzenegger was a towering Teutonic wunderkind that you wouldn't want to mess with. Together they made 'The Terminator', and transformed a genre forever.
The concept is fantastically simple: an unstoppable killing machine (Schwarzenegger) goes back in time to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), future mother of John Connor, leader of the resistance. The direction is intelligent, humorous, and stylistic; Cameron gradually builds up the tension with a series of stacked set pieces that result in a fast-paced finale that effortlessly blends the intensity of face-to-face combat with the spectacle of bullet-ridden cops flying across the screen.

Oh yes, it's all very easy to laugh at the eighties perms, disco boogying and dated special effects. It's even easier to pick holes in the script: why, for example, when Sarah proves so difficult to kill, doesn't the Terminator go back in time another thirty years and kill her mother? And why, if he can expertly mimic anyone, does he choose to speak like a cack-brained Austrian?
Such distractions, however, do not override the fact that lying under this classic audience-pleaser is a dark, serious, emotive movie, with a convincing performance from Michael Biehn as Reese, and a genuinely disturbing man v machine subtext that still resonates today.

It's about time the commonly held misconception that Arnie's sixteen lines somehow form the basis of the movie is exposed as falsehood. Yet an attempt to find any other performer who could request a `phased plasma pulse-laser in the forty watt range' with quite the same level of automated cool would be an uphill struggle indeed. `I'll be back', he famously declares in his trademark shades. And thank Christ for that.