This movie didn't even need two spectacular sequels (so far) to be great.

Rating: 10/10 (6 July 2003)

The original Terminator is an extremely rare breed of science fiction film. It holds a spot in the memory and the imagination because it is so unique (which is a rarity these days, especially in science fiction), original, and intelligent (also a rarity). I have always had an almost unconditional love for movies that involve time travel, just because I find it to be such an interesting topic, but the time travel in The Terminator actually takes up relatively little of the overall storyline. Obviously, time travel is what makes the entire movie possible, but the plot itself focuses on Sarah Connor escaping from the brutally relentless terminator.
After the terminator and Kyle Reese arrive back in 1984 early in the movie, really the only thing that time travel has to do with the story is that we know what the future will be like if the terminator is not stopped. Occasionally there are flashes into the future (mostly in Reese's nightmares), but for the most part the movie takes place in the present (well, 20 years ago now), where Sarah is fighting against an unkillable killer while trying to comprehend her role in the bleak future.

Arnold Schwarzenegger portrays the terminator with a stolidity and mechanical determination that only he can provide, setting the stage for many different things that would become traditional in the next two movies. Even the film score remains one of the most memorable film scores in film history, right up there with Star Wars, Halloween, and Robocop (come on, you remember the one from Robocop! It goes like this - Dun dun DUN dun der NER, dun dun DUN dun derrrrr, dun dun DUN dun DER NER nerrrrr.Remember now?).

The go-motion photography that is used to animate the metallic terminators renders their motion jerky and unreal, but keep in mind that this is 1984, before the age of computer animation. Even with the early special effects, the metal terminators themselves are so menacing and original that they secure themselves immediately a spot among the most recognizable figures in film history.
(spoilers) Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn have a perfect chemistry onscreen, and it's interesting to watch their relationship blossom as we gradually realize that he's John Connor's father. One of the things that I've always loved about The Terminator movies are the subtleties that you can catch in the plot if you watch closely. There are definitely two timelines going on here, one in the present and one in the distant future, and you can learn a lot about them and how they're related by the things that the characters say.
I was particularly impressed with the relationship between Reese and Sarah, because even Reese does not know that he is John Connor's father (and it's a good thing he is, too, because if it was someone else he could have seriously jeopardized the future of humankind by having sex with her!). Time travel involves a lot of paradoxes, such as in Back to the Future II, when Marty and Doc go to the year 2015 to save Marty's family from destruction, but if Marty and Jennifer are taken out of 1985 to go to 2015, they are no longer in 1985 to grow into the older ones that they find in 2015. This movie seems to have found a way around that, at least if you don't look TOO closely.
Reese volunteered for the mission back to 1984 to stop the Terminator from killing John Connor, not knowing at the time (and Connor also not knowing) that if he hadn't volunteered Connor would never have been born. Maybe a coincidence, or maybe this is still fate working for them. Connor was born BECAUSE Reese volunteered, so maybe it's not coincidence but cause and effect. At any rate, the necessary facts are there. John Connor never met his father and doesn't know who he is, and neither does Reese. The only thing either of them know is that he dies before the war. At this point you should remind yourself that not only is this a science fiction movie, but it's a science fiction movie made in the 80s. This is VERY well written.
Another small detail that I really liked about the movie is that Reese gives Sarah a picture of her that John Connor had given him to take back so he'd recognized her (this is something that NONE of the terminators in all 3 movies (so far) were provided with, by the way), and he tells her that he studied every line and every detail about the picture, and always wondered what she was thinking about when the picture was taken. At the end of the movie, we find out.
The movie kind of gets around the Back to the Future II problem in that, even though Reese is killed in 1984, he can still exist in the future to be sent back by John Connor. Unlike Marty McFly, He was born in the future and sent back to the past, so his death in the past does not change his existence in the future. And besides that, we can still have a sequel to the movie because Sarah ultimately killing the Terminator sent back to kill her does not win the war, it just prevents the total eradication of humans, so we're basically back to where we started.
The other thing that comes to mind here is that, in order for neither John or Reese to know who John's father is, Sarah has to die before the war. She survives in T2, but I have a feeling that Linda Hamilton turning down a role in T3 has something to do with he character dying between T2 and T3. But hey, even that fits perfectly into the story.
As we learn in Terminator 2, the machines haven't lost because of the T-101's failure to kill Sarah Connor in T1, they just need to try something else. And as we learn in Terminator 3 (I may be about to spoil part of that movie too, so stop reading if you haven't seen it!), it is not the massive destruction of humanity that they are seeking to stop, because that can't be stopped at all. It is, instead, the resistance of humans that must be preserved to prevent our total extinction.
The Terminator series deals a lot with the growing human desire to create machines to replace ourselves, taking this to the extreme of machines becoming so widespread that they attempt to destroy the human race and take over. I love the way it all comes about, which we don't really learn for sure until Terminator 3, since that's the only one of them (so far) that has been released after computers really exploded and became almost required in modern life.
One of my favorite things about the Terminator series as a whole is that it gets better and better with every movie, taking into account new inventions and changes in modern life as it goes along and still managing to make the story work. With The Terminator, James Cameron has written and directed one of the greatest science fiction films of all time, despite the fact that many of the special effects are pretty badly dated (also look for Bill Paxton in his best role until Weird Science!). You walk away from a movie like this looking up at the sky and wondering. That's unheard of.

Science Fiction doesn't get much better than this.