Just a Masterpiece, nothing less

Rating: 10/10 (14 January 2017)

Terminator (1) is a sci-fi/action/noir movie with a straightforward storytelling about time travel, indestructible killer machine, and everything that was 80s all about.
Cool Pop/rock Disco musics, 80s fashion, the electronic dark soundtrack reflecting the overshadowing story prior scenes which take place mostly in night-time, blue/red neon lights and lasers, love scene between two desperate yet heroic characters (but not in a cheese way, no sir). Everything is just perfectly lined up, telling a very dark story which holds its apocalyptic atmosphere throughout the movie from start to the end. You just smell the 80's all over the film, leaving you in such territory of feelings that today's movies cannot give, they just can't. The time travel concept suddenly becomes one with the movie's antic factor, as this period of our history presented here is no more, even if people are desperately trying to bring us back in time with their nostalgia today, no effort is enough to give us the real feelings as this movie does.
"Burnin' on the third degree"; "You can't do that to me"; only the choice of music gives the right view to Cameron's sense of conceptualism, reflecting the cool and innocent Sarah suddenly grabbed by an unfortunate, overshadowing sorrow, as the Terminator comes to terminate her for actions that haven't even occurred from her view. Then "Pictures of you, from another time and place" puts Kyle Reese into this concept as he held the one and only photo of the woman of importance, Sarah Connor. Besides all this the seemingly unavoidable dark future paints the sonic foundation to the whole soundtrack, its futuristic, robotic, and deadly, but most importantly; overshadowing.
The story elegantly emerges prior the scenes, built around the dark tension the movie is based on, giving the right informations at the right time in a really fast yet healthy phase.
The acting is also spot on, especially Linda Hamilton's natural talent manifests itself in any kind of scene, let it be action, drama, horror. This also applies to Michael Biehn, even though there are some almost "not that good" acting from his part, however these are rare moments. And of course there is Arnie, with his muscles and plain face, that are quite enough for a part like THE TERMINATOR itself.
With these elements above Cameron managed to create something so perfectly pure, that it just puts his latter movies look so below class. The Terminator 2: Judgement Day that came after this maintained the quality the Terminator 1 embraced, yet it couldn't remotely bring the same tension and atmosphere that the original movie had, however anything else was brought to the next level by which the movie Terminator 2 - from technical point of view - is still up to date. Terminator (1) relatively has some effects which can be considered out of date, however this immediately drops out of equation as we bring up the artistic quality of its, that couldn't and cannot be outdone by any kind of Cameron's latter productions. And that is the kind of quality that I hold most dearly.
Terminator 1 is easily the best in the series, that can be watched more times than any of the sequels.
9.5/10