The Terminator at 40: did James Cameron see into the future?

For many of the great speculative science fiction classics, the future has not come to pass. The island of Manhattan was not converted into a maximum security prison by 1997. No manned space odysseys before or after 2001 have reached Jupiter. 2010 was not the year we made contact. The flying cars and bioengineered replicants of the dystopian Los Angeles of Blade Runner were not in place by 2019, and the hoverboards of 2024 do not actually hover, 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? No need to worry about “the machines” rising from the ashes of a nuclear fire or a decades-long war to exterminate mankind. We still have five years until Los Angeles 2029 AD is a post-apocalypse lorded over by AI and there’s certainly not a zero per cent chance that robot tanks will crush a grim landscape of human skulls while a pocket of survivors scurry from the laser fire of drones from above. The technology that helps plagiarize grad-school dissertations today could be the same technology that annihilates mankind tomorrow.

The point is, James Cameron has the singular ability to see the future, at least as far as the movies are concerned. His reported fiascos, like 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 narrow at times, has been imitated by blockbusters typically dominated by men. Perhaps he couldn’t be expected to predict what might happen to the world in four decades, but he’s been persistently, uncannily ahead of everyone else in the industry. And it all started with The Terminator.

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

Though Arnold Schwarzenegger was a rising star at the time, having parlayed his fame as a champion bodybuilder into a magnetic lead performance in Conan the Barbarian, Cameron gives him the introduction of a future action icon. Deposited naked and alone after traveling back in time from 2029 AD to contemporary Los Angeles, Schwarzenegger is not yet identified as a cyborg, which would make him seem vulnerable if he did not have, well, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body. His cool self-possession makes him terrifying as a seemingly indestructible killing machine, but Schwarzenegger has the charisma to make him funny, too. When he flatly demands that a trio of giggling street punks hand over their clothes, it’s laughable right up to the point where he tosses them around like ragdolls.

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

Cameron approaches The Terminator like an outlaw getting the gang together for a escalating series of heists: there’s Schwarzenegger, Biehn and Hamilton, whose combination of steeliness and compassion would carry over to his conception of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Aliens. Then Bill Paxton gets a bit part as a goofy punk in a mohawk and Lance Henriksen turns up as a cop trying to sort this bizarre situation out. He has the effects wizard Stan Winston designing the cyborg’s chilling endoskeleton and a score by the synth composer Brad Fiedel that makes the simple bum-bum bum-bum-bum percussive sound as effective as John Carpenter’s homemade theme for Halloween. For a director who’s become known for ballooning budgets, he gets the most out of every resource he has.

Like the dismal WarGames the year before, The Terminator tapped into the particular worry that technology would worsen the nuclear fears that had simmered in the culture through the cold war. It seemed possible that computers would inherit the fallibility of their creators and machine-learn their way to global annihilation. Cameron would complicate that theme with Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but it brings the right amount of real-world anxiety to the modern, grimy urban western that pits flesh against metal and delivers the goods.

The half-clunky, half-endearing earnestness of Cameron’s later films also takes shape in The Terminator, particularly 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 came across time for you, Sarah” have a sledgehammer quality that Cameron would never shake as a writer, but his movies are suffused with feeling anyway, because he means it.

Audiences in 1984 walked into a B-picture came out with much more than they expected, because Cameron makes a sci-fi shoot-‘em-up seem like everything in the world is at stake. When Sarah Connor drives right into a storm, the symbolism may be obvious, but we’re right there with her. That’s the Cameron touch.