The Terminator is James Cameron’s first film, made a star of Arnold Schwarzenegger, is celebrating its 40th anniversary – there’s a 4K restoration out in cinemas – and I’ve never seen it. I’m not wholly ignorant of 1980s action films, it may surprise you to hear. I’ve seen Diehard. I know a single fella in a vest can see off an entire army. But Terminator passed me by and now I’m glad to have rectified that. It’s engrossing, suspenseful, has a personality all of its own and absolutely stands the test of time. That last scene with the crawling, whirring, clanking arm? Best scene ever.
Cameron, who would go on to make Aliens, Titanic and Avatar, was reportedly living out of his car when he sold the script to producer Gale Anne Hurd for $1. He made the sale on the condition that whoever financed it hired him to direct, as unproven as he was. (That said I now realise he had Piranha II: The Spawning under his belt.) She eventually raised $6 million and, as the film went on to make $78 million at the box office, I’m guessing it’s the best dollar she ever spent.
The plot, in a nutshell, is this: a killer cyborg, our Terminator (Schwarzenegger), is sent back in time from a future run by machines ‘that got smart’ and have turned Earth into a devastated nuclear landscape. (Always a devastated nuclear landscape, never lavender fields.) But there is still a pocket of human resistance and his job is to assassinate a young waitress, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton with a Suzi Quatro hairdo), because the machines know that her unborn son will one day lead the fight against them. (What they don’t consider is the fact that if she is eliminated there’d be no need to eliminate her – look up the Hitler murder paradox – but the film takes the prudent course of simply ignoring all that.)
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