For many of the great speculative science fiction classics, the future is not yet a reality. Manhattan Island had not yet been converted into a maximum security prison in 1997. No manned space mission before or after 2001 has reached Jupiter. 2010 wasn’t the year we connected. The flying cars and bio-engineered replicants of Blade Runner’s dystopian Los Angeles didn’t exist in 2019, and the hoverboards of 2024 don’t actually float, unlike the wheel-free skateboards of 2015 in Back to the Future Part II.

But what about the future of James Cameron’s The Terminator? You don’t have to worry that “the machines” will rise from the ashes of a nuclear fire or a decades-long war to wipe out humanity. We still have five years until Los Angeles 2029 AD is a post-apocalypse ruled by AI, and there’s certainly not a zero percent chance that robot tanks will crush a grim landscape of human skulls as a group of survivors flee from the laser fire. drones from above. The technology that helps plagiarize high school dissertations today could be the same technology that will destroy humanity tomorrow.

The point is that James Cameron has the unique ability to see the future, at least as far as the movies are concerned. His reported fiascos, such as Titanic and Avatar, have been some of the biggest hits in film history, his effects work has set new standards and trends in CGI and 3D, and his understanding of ‘strong’ women, however limited at times, has been imitated by blockbusters that are usually male-dominated. Perhaps he couldn’t be expected to predict what might happen to the world in forty years, but he has been consistently and uncannily ahead of everyone else in the industry. And it all started with The Terminator.

Like many directors of a previous generation, Cameron had graduated from the Roger Corman film school two years earlier with Piranha II: The Spawning, and he joined with another Corman scholar, the producer Gale Anne Hurd, to make The Terminator the feeling like a more good debut film. But one of the remarkable things about the film is that it feels like an evolutionary step forward, with Cameron retaining the B-movie ethos of one of Corman’s rousing, violent New World cheapies while doing the expansive world-building he later became known for. The budget was $6.5 million, but the film more than plausibly exists in the same universe as a sequel costing about 15 times as much. As rough designs go, it is erratically polished.

Although Arnold Schwarzenegger was a rising star at the time, having parlayed his fame as a champion bodybuilder into a magnetic lead role in Conan the Barbarian, Cameron gives him the introduction of a future action icon. Deposited naked and alone after traveling back in time to modern-day Los Angeles from 2029 AD, Schwarzenegger is not yet identified as a cyborg, which would make him appear vulnerable if he didn’t have, well, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body. His cool composure makes him terrifying as a seemingly indestructible killing machine, but Schwarzenegger has the charisma to make him funny too. When he outright demands that a trio of giggling street punks hand over their clothes, it’s laughable to the point where he throws them around like rag dolls.

Schwarzenegger’s Terminator has been sent to LA in 1984 to kill Sarah Connor and his programming isn’t particularly subtle: he gets some clothes, bypasses the wait for semi-automatics and artillery (shout out to Corman favorite Dick Miller as the poor gun shop owner ), and simply searches every Sarah Connor in the phone book until he kills the right one. The real Sarah (Linda Hamilton) rightfully panics when the two women in front of her in the phone book are reported dead on the local news, but she is saved by a stranger named Reese (Michael Biehn), who has come from 2029 to save her. protect. . As he explains, an AI defense network called Skynet will become self-aware and cause a nuclear holocaust that wipes out most of humanity. The Terminator has come to ensure that her future son John, who leads Reese and others in the rebellion, is never born.

Cameron approaches The Terminator like an outlaw who brings the gang together for an escalating series of heists: there’s Schwarzenegger, Biehn and Hamilton, whose combination of steeliness and compassion would carry over to his take on Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Aliens. Then Bill Paxton gets a role as a crazy punk in a mohawk and Lance Henriksen appears as a cop who tries to solve this bizarre situation. He has effects wizard Stan Winston design the cyborg’s chilling endoskeleton and a score by synth composer Brad Fiedel that makes it simple boom-boom boom-boom-boom percussive sound as effective as John Carpenter’s homemade theme for Halloween. For a director known for his increasing budgets, he makes the most of whatever resources he has.

Like the somber WarGames the year before, The Terminator tapped into the specific concern that technology would exacerbate the nuclear fears that had simmered in the culture during the Cold War. It seemed possible that computers would inherit the fallibility of their creators and machine their way to global destruction. Cameron would complicate that theme with Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but it brings the right amount of genuine fear to the modern, grimy urban Western that pits flesh against metal and delivers the goods.

The half-awkward, half-endearing seriousness of Cameron’s later films also takes shape in The Terminator, especially in a romance that develops between Sarah and Reese. (John Connor’s true origin is a brain-melting example of the time-travel paradox.) Lines like “I ran into time before you, Sarah” have a sledgehammer quality that Cameron as a writer would never shake, but his films are imbued with how feel it, because he means it.

Audiences who walked into a B-picture in 1984 came away with a lot more than they bargained for, because in a sci-fi shoot-’em-up, Cameron seems like everything in the world is at stake. When Sarah Connor finds herself in the middle of a storm, the symbolism may be obvious, but we’re right there with you. That’s the Cameron touch.