Visions of the Future: The Terminator (Dir James Cameron, 1h 47m, 1984)

James Cameron wakes from a dream of steel and fire. The year is 1981, and he is ill with a fever; inside the fervent atmosphere of Roger Corman's (slightly mad, but very lucrative) studios, he's made a name as a model maker, and will spend the very early 1980s continuing in special effects work for Escape from New York  and Galaxy of Terror. Now, editing his first feature, the lurid and unapologetically schlocky Piranha II, he's fallen ill, and been scared awake by a visitation, a nightmarish vision of a chrome skeleton, a mechanical machine, emerging from fire. This dream will not only birth a film, but a franchise that continues to this day, of machines and men from the future writing-and rewriting-mankind's fate. It will make Cameron a household name, and will make one of its stars a one-word colossus of cinema. James Cameron has just created The Terminator.

Like its titular vision, there's a remarkable efficiency to The Terminator. For those from an unwritten future, from the top, cod-Austrian accents. Two men are sent back in time from a distant war-torn and post apocalpytic future of 2029. The first, soon revealed to be a flesh-covered mechanical cyborg, is the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101, or the Terminator for short (Arnold Schwarzenegger, straight from Conan the Barbarian (1982)). His mission is to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), the mother of the unborn savior of humanity, John Connor. The other figure is Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), a human freedom fighter sent back from 2029 by Connor's yet-unborn son, John, to protect Sarah and ensure John is born to rally a humanity on the brink to extinction. So begins a chase for both to find Sarah, and, once Connor has found her, to protect her from the unrelenting machine, that will take them across Los Angeles, through tense setpieces, to a stark and bruising denoument.

What is immediate striking about the film is its pace, and its melding of genre; we begin in hard science fiction, with a battle in 2029, only for both the T-101 and Reese to arrive in a cyberpunk vision of LA of 1984-Bill Paxton's punks, who the machine accosts and steals clothes from, dress more like something from an imagined 2000s than 1984, whilst the taut chase between Reese and cops through a department store and back allies owes a debt to Escape from New York's dystopian 2000s. The genre changes again as the T-101 becomes a slasher villain, an unrelenting killing machine that slowly tracks down Sarah, murdering two of her name sakes as it goes, before, as its three main character collide, and a gunfight turns into a breakneck chase, it resolves into an action film. All this in under half a hour, with briskly paced scenes keeping the film taut and in constant motion.

This sense of economy carries through to the film in all aspects, most notably the film's central trio. Whilst Reese's backstory is fleshed out the most, he is our window into the future of 2029: through this we see an embattled but determined humanity defending their quarters from infiltration by, and doing battle with, the Terminators. This is the future he is fighting for, and the one that John's birth will bring; perhaps Cameron's greatest moment of braveur is the recreation of the tank that rolls over human skulls at the beginning of the film in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), only to pull back and show off the film's much higher budget, and infinitely improved visual effects.

Yet, for all of this, it's Adam Greenberg's cinematography, the heft and momentum of Mark Goldbatt's editing, and the bold decision to shoot much of the film without permission, stretching the $6.5 million budget to breaking point, and Reese is front and centre of many of these scenes, in the "present" and "future" Los Angeles. Even Brad Fiedel's score is pared back, often consisting of a synthesiser or two, recorded directly live onto the film's audio tracks, the metallic hammering of the main theme now iconic and updated for Terminator 2 with heft and the taut, John Carpenter-esque score continuing the trend of relentless, efficient energy, most of the film's tracks building on minimalist driving synth basslines, a manifestion of the mechanical even in the film's score.

Schwarzenegger launched his acting career from this film; Conan is a charming performance but largely relies on the Austrian's bodybuilder physique and faltering English; in another possible version of 1984, Cameron goes with Lance Henriksen, or, despite his reservations in believing the former football player could be a believable killer, OJ Simpson. The Terminator is something altogether more actorly, and ironically, less human: Schwarzenegger's refined movements, especially his inhuman head movements as he hunts for Connor, head moving as one rather than moving his eyes, and his work behind the scenes in teaching himself how to reload guns without looking and not blinking when firing weapons, all add to the horrifying uncanniness of the machine. Much has been made-and quoted-of Schwarzenegger's incredibly sparse dialogue (17 lines, 58 words in all), but it's the way he spits them out, often mimicing and parroting lines back that makes him chilling.

Nowhere is this more notable than, when on the hunt for Connor, the Terminator arrives at the police station that it later storms, and is turned away. Looming forward, the machine announces "I'll be back", a line that follows Schwarzenegger as his catchphrase to this day. Against Arnold's performance is perhaps one of the few elements that belies the film's age and comparatively low budget, the look of the machine underneath. This would mark the arrival of special effects wiz, Stan Winston,who would later create makeup and puppets for Batman Returns, Jurassic Park, and Terminator 2, and whose exposed machinery beneath the flesh add a further sensibility to the film-that of horror. The film's denoument is haunted by the very visitation that emerged from Cameron's dream, and whilst the rubbery flesh of the Arnold puppet's head and arm occasionally looks fake, this is with forty years hindsight and advancement in the field; the Terminator remains nightmarish.

Against this metallic nightmare, Cameron places flesh and blood; whilst he would elaborate on the action heroine trope in the latter half of the 1980s and early 1990s with Sigourney Weaver in Aliens and Linda Hamilton again in Terminator 2, it is in Hamilton's initial version of Sarah Connor that the film finds its drive: Connor's growth from waitress to innocent on the run defended by Kyle Reece to increasingly determined combatant, to the beginnings of the freedom fighter hinted at in her son's future is not just a natural progression of the increasing stakes of the battle against the Terminator, it's superbly portrayed by Hamilton as her desperation in the face of the seemingly unstoppable man-machine gives way to growing confidence and determination.

Sarah Connor is the heart of The Terminator, that human resistance against the unstoppable machine, and forty years on, the Terminator franchise, for all its sequels, theme park rides, and even an anime, a deeply human parable of resistance, a cautionary tale of technological advancement, and one of the truly iconic science fiction films

Rating: Must See

The Terminator is available via streaming on AppleTV, and on DVD and BluRay from MGM in the UK and via streaming on Apple TV, and on DVD from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment in the USA

Next week, David Lynch takes us to Arakis, in his flawed 1984 science-fiction adaption of the Frank Herbert novel. Dune.