James Cameron: The Terminator (1984)

It is hard to think of a larger leap forward in filmmaking craft than the one that James Cameron took when he made The Terminator in 1984. While it’s debatable, as Aren recounts in his review of Piranha II, whether one should even consider that exploitation cheapie his first film, what is undeniable is that The Terminator emerged fully-formed as a cinematic masterwork. It shows Cameron’s vision for science fiction spectacle, engaging with themes that he would return to time and again, and displays a technical bravado that makes the film’s $6.4 million production budget an astonishing fact. Like the titular character, the killing machine from the future portrayed by Arnold Schwarzeneggar, the film seems to emerge out of a bolt of lightning, uncompromising and fully fleshed-out. The Terminator remains not only one of James Cameron’s best films—one that would define the trajectory of his oeuvre in telling a story about humanity's relationship to technology and displaying an optimism in the midst of darkness—but simply one of the best science fiction films of all-time.

And The Terminator is, first and foremost, that: one of the greatest science fiction films ever. The elegance and clarity with which Cameron tells his story of a time-travelling assassin robot from the future belies the complexity and challenge that time travel stories pose. Few time travel stories are ever really satisfying, given the paradoxical and fatalistic dynamics of the story mechanics. How does one maintain a sense of openness and suspense when the future is known? How do you avoid or explain the inevitable paradoxes that time travel into the past raises without it seeming contrived? It takes a particularly strong command of character and story to stick the landing. One method is simply to keep the audience from thinking about the mechanics too much, as someone like Robert Zemeckis does in a film like Back to the Future (great film, but don’t think about the time travel paradoxes too much).

But The Terminator doesn’t rely on narrative sleight of hand to accomplish its feat. It delivers on its time travel mechanics in a way few science fiction works outside of the classics of the written genre do. It owes a great deal to works such as Robert Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps,” satisfying the audience by drawing the temporal loops together seamlessly. The Terminator is not merely a cold exercise in plot mechanics, even if its time travel plot actually makes sense. Cameron’s film provides narrative, intellectual, and emotional payoff by having the temporal loop fulfill the romantic plot; the character motivation and the time travel mechanics share the same motivation, and their realization is emotionally satisfying. When we realize that Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) is himself the father of John Connor, we realize his own future is dependent on not only travelling back in time and preventing the Terminator from killing Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) before her son is born, but in consummating that love he has carried for her across time: “I came across time for you Sarah. I love you. I always have.” The warm heart of the film lies in the conceit that love, forged amidst the industrial wastes of eighties-Los Angeles, transcends the forces of a future dystopia of chrome steel and non-stop war.

The Terminator is fundamentally a love story, but it's a fairy tale story about a love that stretches across time, a love at first sight, and the possibility that one could fall in love with an image and then fully satisfy that love. With the film’s interest in the power of the image, we could consider The Terminator as the anti-Vertigo. In Hitchcock’s film, Jimmie Stewart’s Scottie falls in love with the false image of Judy as Madeleine, which leaves him vulnerable when his idealized image proves to be a lie. In contrast, for Kyle Reese, the image of Sarah Connor functions as an icon, a photograph that testifies to the reality of the past and her eventual raising of the saviour of humanity in the future: John Connor. It’s iconoclasm versus iconography. And say this for James Cameron: he believes in the images he puts on the screen so that we might also believe in them.

Perhaps it seems silly and overblown to speak of this film about killer robots and time travel in such mythic and spiritual terms, but the religious symbolism is there for anyone to observe. It’s been noted many times that Sarah Connor is a Virgin Mary figure, an ordinary woman called to greatness by circumstances, destined to give birth to a saviour with the initials “J.C.” However, Cameron’s faith is not so much in religion, but rather in the human ability to persevere in the face of adversity. As is recounted in The Futurist, Rebecca Keegan’s biography of Cameron, as a high school student he rejected the Lord’s Prayer and the Anglicanism of his youth growing up in Southern Ontario in favour of “converted agnosticism:” a provisional belief that this world is all that there is, but one open to having his mind changed. At the same time, the young Jim Cameron’s interest in world religions and their mythic resonance was something even his mother and father recognized in him and that would continue to be present in his future films. In some ways, it is Cameron’s lack of certainty about the spiritual realm that pushes him to put his faith in humanity, in the necessity for us to find our way through the disasters that are sure to follow us.

And The Terminator is certainly a portrait of a dark future. The film opens in the year 2029, as machines wage war against a remnant human resistance over the nuclear blasted ruins of Los Angeles, where, in that most potent image, the tank-treads of future hunter-killer robots crush mounds of human skulls underneath. As a child growing up in the 1960s, Cameron was always aware of the danger that nuclear war posed to human life: as he says, “I realized that the safe and nurturing world I thought I lived in was an illusion, and that the world as we know it could end at any moment.” The Terminator confronts the viewer with that world, expanding on the theme of nuclear annihilation to suggest that the very technologies that we have created could very well be our undoing. On either side of the film’s opening credits—credits which run displayed over the futuristic logo of the film’s title to the strains of Brad Fiedel’s incredible propulsive and mechanical musical theme—the images of destructive machines are contrasted. In 2029, the futuristic war machines wage war on the remaining humans; in 1984, a garbage truck lifts a giant dumpster up. Seemingly harmless, but in its mechanized power lies the latent potential for destruction that leads to the former.

Cameron displays an intuitive knack for that kind of visual metaphor and comparison that seems clear and natural rather than contrived. In The Terminator he crafts images with a kind of comic book poetry, demonstrating the strong influence of comic book artist Jack Kirby throughout his works. His shots have a power both in their individual composition and in their juxtaposition. He usually frames shots for maximum clarity rather than drawing attention to their composition. He favours medium wide shots of settings and action scenes, moving to close-ups that put the focus on his actors’ faces to emphasize their emotion and humanity. His supporting characters are drawn from a cast of memorable and recognizable types, and over time he has built a stock repertoire of actors who have continued to work with him time and again. In The Terminator, Cameron would bring back Lance Henriksen from Piranha II, but it also debuts his work with other actors, including Bill Paxton in a bit role as a punk that the Terminator brutally dispatches early in the film, as well as Michael Biehn as the time-travelling hero, Kyle Reese.

But The Terminator would most importantly mark the first collaboration between Cameron and then rising action star, Arnold Schwarzeneggar, completing the transformation that would make him a household name and one of the biggest stars on the planet. The studio pressured Cameron to consider the Austrian bodybuilder, hot off his role in John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian, for the role of Kyle Reese. Cameron was skeptical. His Kyle Reese is a hero, but also a thoughtful and gentle lover. But after a bonding lunch between him and Schwarzeneggar Cameron realized he had found his killer machine in a man whose body was a carefully sculpted work of art (the studio, for their part, suggested O.J. Simpson, but Cameron didn’t think people would find him believable as a killer…).

Schwarzenegger’s first scene has him appearing in a ball of lighting high above Los Angeles, in Griffith Park, to the astonishment of the aforementioned garbage truck driver. The reveal of Arnold’s body is shot fully naked from behind—clothing and other items cannot be transported back through time in this conception of time travel technology. Shortly thereafter, Arnold walks to the hillside surveying his hunting ground and the night skyline of the City of Angels. Losing some of the bulk from his bodybuilding days (on the set of Conan the size of his biceps had caused some issues with sword handling), Arnold is at his peak physicality. His glimmering muscles suggest both a machine hardness and potential for physical violence, but also an aesthetic achievement in their own right. 

This promise of violence is soon fulfilled as the naked Terminator is confronted by a set of punks in the park. Mocking his mechanical responses to their comments about his lack of clothes, they are soon dispatched brutally as the Terminator rips the leader’s heart out with his bare hands when they refuse to give him their clothing. It’s the film’s first demonstration of the Terminator’s power and the film’s first truly shocking scene. The Terminator stares at the bloody heart in his hand, glistening in blood, and showing no emotional reaction to his feat of violence. The Terminator seeks out a phonebook (a quaint reminder of the days when we all just listed our names and addresses in public) and rips out the page with the listings of the name “Sarah Connor.”

These scenes of the arrival of the Terminator, including his acquiring of a massive arsenal of guns in a gunshop murder in what was then contemporary Los Angeles, are intercut with the introduction of our two heroes, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn). Each of them is in their own way a foil to the thematic resonances of the Terminator. Kyle Reese is the moral opposite to the time-travelling Terminator. He’s a knight of light, hunting the dark clad villain. He arrives similarly naked, and soon finds himself hunted by the police, seeking clothing and weapons in trash strewn alleyways and nighttime department stores. But Kyle is also a chivalric ideal. His devotion to the idea of Sarah Connor I mentioned earlier is not just one of iconographic devotion, but the devotion of a knight to the unattainable object of his love, sworn to protect her.

Kyle is resourceful and smart. He rigs up a shotgun under the trenchcoat he gets from a homeless man. When he finally tracks down Sarah and the Terminator in the aptly named “Tech Noir” nightclub, his ragged appearance and obsessive stare causes Sarah to mistake him for the man hunting “Sarah Connor.” Kyle leaps into action saving her from the Terminator’s attack, but he also basically kidnaps her, taking action against her protests, like so many heroes in classic Westerns, relying on the stark reality of the situation to bring her around to believing him about the outrageous truth of his mission.

But Kyle isn’t an unthinking action hero. He’s tortured and reflective as well as decisive in moments of action. Later, when Sarah asks him about his future, his “future flashback” scene offers a portrait of the grim realities he has faced. In these moments, Cameron is able to indulge in his future world building, seeding just enough information and future action for us to buy the reality of this world. The scene of the future Terminators infiltrating the underground resistance and Kyle losing the iconic photograph of Sarah in flame, one that we will see again at the film’s end, offers that comic book poetry I mentioned. It’s not overwrought, but the elements manage to evoke an intense longing and sense of desperation while being very accessible.

In preparation for the role of Kyle Reese, Biehn researched life in the underground Polish resistance against the Nazis. Biehn plays Kyle as a man who has seen the worst, but still has hope. His casting utilizes his hollow eyes and ability to show pain and fear, but he also has a bright spark in them. He knows what the Terminators can do. They are monsters who “Feel no remorse. No pity. And absolutely will not stop until you’re dead!”

Our second hero, and the protagonist, is Sarah Connor. She is the viewer’s stand-in to this story, a person from contemporary reality who learns about the grim future at the same time we do. Cameron would become known for putting women in the lead roles in his films, and it’s significant that Sarah is our protagonist. She’s not a mighty Amazon or a kick-ass #girlboss. We first meet Sarah Connor on her motorbike, on her way to her job as a diner waitress. She is somewhat hapless and disorganized. She arrives at work late and finds herself mistreated by her boss and the diners she’s serving. A kid puts a scoop of ice cream in her pocket without her realizing. The ironies of the scene are many. Her day is about to get a lot worse after she hears on the breakroom television that someone has murdered another woman named Sarah Connor. But those daily, small indignities? As her co-worker mentions, “In 100 years, who’s going to care?”

It is essential to the film’s effect that James Cameron makes Sarah Connor a put-upon, every-woman. As Cameron’s screenplay describes her, she is “19, small and delicate features. Pretty in a flawed, accessible way. … Her vulnerable quality masks a strength even she doesn’t know exists.” Linda Hamilton plays her as a fairly normal young adult woman, but over the course of the film she manages to portray a transformation into a woman who you can see being the mother of the saviour of the world. But at the start, she’s struggling to make ends meet, and she’s not particularly great at her job. Later that evening she gets stood up by her date. As she says to Kyle Reese after learning of why she’s being hunted by the Terminator, “Do I look like the mother of the future? Am I tough? Organized? I can’t even balance my checkbook.”

But Hamilton imbues Sarah with a complexity that makes you believe it’s true. She’s pretty and cool, yes—there’s a reason almost every good looking girl in a comic book for the next decade, by everyone from Frank Miller to Jim Lee, looked like Sarah Connor, complete with the perm and shoulder pads—but it’s more than just being attractive. She sells the transformation from hapless waitress to mother to the future. There’s an archetypal element here. As I noted above, she’s a true Marian figure. She’s not already great and chosen for her greatness. Greatness is thrust upon her. And through her ability to grasp what is happening to her and to persevere, she becomes the hero that we imagine.

Sarah must learn as we do. The film finally pairs Sarah and Kyle in the “Tech Noir” nightclub, but once they survive the shootout in the police station, in which the Terminator puts to rest any chance that the authorities will be able to protect her, brutally dispatching the two hero cops played by Paul Winfield and Lance Henriksen, she must put her faith in Kyle and the message from the future that he bears.

It should be commented on once again how well Cameron really manages to sell the mythic resonances of the story without being overt. While people point to films like Star Wars as rightly owing much of their success to the updating and repackaging of classic mythical archetypes, in The Terminator, Cameron is just as successful. But it’s not noticed as much, since The Terminator is ostensibly in our own world, not a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… 

Cameron also demonstrates himself a master of genres and he draws on sources filmic and contemporary as well as mythic and archetypal. We often think of The Terminator as science fiction-action, but it has more than a touch of horror to it. It’s appropriate given that the idea for The Terminator came to Cameron in a nightmare he had in Rome during the editing of Piranha II, of a chrome torso dragging itself across a floor with kitchen knives. The atavistic and primal fears of the nightmare merge with the technophobic vision of the future, providing a strong emotional reaction. Specific film connections only deepen the emotional effect of the film. 

The Terminator as a film, and as a character in his unrelenting and steady pursuit of his targets, owes a lot to a film such as John Carpenter’s Halloween from 1978. The Terminator is a kind of slasher villain. Like Michael Myers in Halloween, he is patiently tracking down his target, inevitably killing those who get in the way. The Terminator kills Sarah’s roommate and her boyfriend, just as Michael Myers kills Laurie’s friends on Halloween night (Cameron would later cast Laurie herself, Jamie Lee Curtis, in his 1994 film, True Lies). Like Michael Myers, the Terminator is inexpressive and physically imposing. The Terminator is a villain from the future (rather than the past, like Michael), but his foreboding inevitability suggests the atavistic fears of the bogeyman as much as Carpenter’s villain.

In combining action, romance, and horror in a science fiction scenario, James Cameron hits upon some many of those themes that he would come back to again and again in his later films, not just the sequel to The Terminator. The film helped to define a genre that would become known as “tech noir” (the name of the film’s aforementioned night club). Like a noir, it features a dark urban setting, with ordinary and flawed characters fighting against forces they hardly understand. And like other dystopian science fiction films that would follow, particularly films like The Matrix, The Terminator explores the dark side of humanity’s relationship with technology, 

There’s an irony in the fact that the film so acutely diagnoses the threat that our own technology poses to us given that Cameron himself is such a gearhead and technological wizard. His interest in special effects goes back to his childhood viewing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is appropriate since HAL 9000 is a kind of spiritual father to the Skynet of the Terminator films.

The special effects of The Terminator had to live up to his vision, and thankfully they more than do. The robots and prosthetics were created in collaboration with Stan Winston, a struggling makeup artist who would subsequently go on to great acclaim in further works with Cameron in Aliens and T2, and such landmark works of visual effects as Jurassic Park. As the film progresses, the human flesh on the outside of the Terminator is gradually worn off and damaged until it eventually emerges from the exploded gas truck a pure chrome skeleton, a fearsome metal monster that is like a truly scary progeny of the stop motion skeletons from Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts. Even blown half to pieces, the Terminator doesn’t stop until Sarah manages to crush it in a hydraulic press in a factory. 

The final action scene ratchets the tension until we can no longer bear it and Sarah hits the button: “You’re terminated, fucker.” Less a cheesy tagline and more a cathartic cry of victory, it is nonetheless emblematic of Cameron’s reliance on brief quips to convey the dialogue at key moments in his films 

The Terminator has been destroyed, but Kyle is dead at the hand of the techno assassin, after spending the night with Sarah and conceiving a child with her, earning her trust and her heart as well. Sarah has learned a lot about making plastique and fighting the Terminator—the film manages to make an evening that begins with weapons manufacture and field dressing and ends in a passionate sexual encounter seem truly magical—but most importantly she is armed with the knowledge of the future and what she must raise her son to do. The film ends at a gas station in Mexico, as Sarah has her Polaroid picture taken by the gas station attendant’s son—the very picture that Kyle would cherish as his icon of Sarah. The boy says something in Spanish and gestures to the clouds in the distance. “He says there’s a storm coming,” his father translates. “I know,” replies Sarah before she drives into the coming storm as Fiedel’s Terminator theme kicks in and the credits roll.

It’s mythic, it’s action packed, it’s romantic. It’s a perfect ending. The Terminator has had such an impact on the genre, both cinematically and even in comic books and video games, that it’s hard to overstate its impact. Without The Terminator, and its visions of future war, would we have the armoured weapons (later elaborated on in Aliens) of the Halo video games or the noir-inflected science fiction comic books and films of the 90s, like the aforementioned Matrix? It really is an amazing achievement for what was basically the first film Cameron had real control over, but it’s equally amazing in terms of its vision, both for what he puts on the screen and Cameron’s thoughts about technology and the future.

Today, we live in a world where hunter killer drones and robotic warfare are reality, if distanced from our day-to-day lives in North America. Near the film’s end in the factory, the then contemporary robotic arms and machinery of the factory help Sarah and Kyle defeat the Terminator, not simply offering ironic commentary—the robots of the past help defeat the robots of the future—but showing viewers that the world we live in is already futuristic. Likewise, The Terminator is a science fiction of the present. Despite the time travel mechanics we already live with the threat of the technologies Cameron portrays from A.I. to nuclear war.

Cameron would return to the world of the Terminator for one sequel, the equally though differently amazing T2: Judgment Day, in 1991 (my only criticism of that wonderful action film is that it somewhat undoes the gloriously self-contained ending of this film). Cameron sold the rights to his then producer (and later wife) Gale Anne Hurd (who shares a writing credit despite only offering edits on the script) for a dollar in exchange for the guarantee to direct the first film. This means that Cameron doesn’t get paid for any future spin-offs he wasn’t involved in (though he did provide a story outline for the most recent sequel, Dark Fate). Nonetheless with The Terminator he put everything on the table and succeeded. It confirmed the almost uncanny professionalism and vision that would become Cameron’s hallmark, through his ability to make something with almost nothing. I mentioned at the start the film’s $6.4 million budget, but I want to emphasize how really astonishing that fact is. Cameron managed to make a film that’s a romance, a compelling action film with multiple big shoot outs, and a lived-in vision of a future world on a shoestring, relatively speaking. He’s never worked with such a small budget ever again, but if there’s one thing that The Terminator anticipates is that Cameron will always get the most out of the resources he has, whether six or six-hundred million.

The Terminator remains one of Cameron’s best films in a filmography littered with hits and classics, despite the later bigger budgets and awards accolades. It established the themes and filmmaking style, combining technological advancements with deep human emotion as a winning combination that remain as compelling today as they were in 1984. Maybe more so. As Kyle Reese must go back to 1984 to save the future, so viewers who return to The Terminator today are treated to the film where the seeds of the future of Cameron’s cinematic achievements would be sown.

10 out of 10

The Terminator (USA, 1984)

Directed by James Cameron; written by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd; additional dialogue by William Wisher; starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn, Paul Winfield, Lance Henrickson, Bill Paxton.

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