— It is not the machines that will destroy us, it is ourselves. However, we will use machines to do it.
— James Cameron
What I didn't quite realise about The Terminator until this viewing is that this highly efficient screenplay has about the same body fat as Arnold himself. And all of those lines ("I'll be back..") hit the spot in the same way that I gather one gets from reading Dante in the original Italian. Also apparent is how funny this was in a low-key way: the "your mother..." line is just a throwaway by the police chief, and is indeed even funnier as it isn't insisted upon.
Watching the 2024 4K remaster in my local cinema (!), ironically one thing I particularly noticed was the soundtrack's idée fixe for the T-101: the four mechanical, highly rhythmic and essentially atonal pulses are a scary mechanistic simulacrum of a human heartbeat. One can speculate that it is this what the film's dogs find so disturbing. Still, those visuals are still impressive, and kudos to whoever managed this remaster to not hide the (now somewhat apparent) switches between scale models, masks etc.
Incidentally, if anyone knows why James Cameron (clearly) dislikes cops and psychologists so much, I'd love to know.
Though it hides under the guise of chronological experimentation and scientized language, the particular brand of time-travel movie popularized in the early 1980s almost always reinforces the idea of linear Christian chronology, in which “destiny” must remain unknowable to the characters, and even minor deviations from the fated sequence of events can cause catastrophic outcomes. It plays on the idea of a natural timeline of events (the term of a pregnancy) disrupted by technological means (a time machine, a suction machine).
— Lauren Collee (Los Angeles Review of Books)
The purest expression of Cameron’s raw, handcrafted talent as an artist, storyteller, technician, and genre enthusiast. Cameron’s intense momentum and prescient ideas sustain the film today, even after repeated viewings and a deep saturation of its iconography into the culture. […] Virtuoso filmmaking over a B-movie template.
— Brian Eggert (Deep Focus Review)
In the post-apocalyptic future, reigning tyrannical supercomputers teleport a cyborg assassin known as the "Terminator" back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, whose unborn son is destined to lead insurgents against 21st century mechanical hegemony. Meanwhile, the human-resistance movement dispatches a lone warrior to safeguard Sarah. Can he stop the virtually indestructible killing machine?