‘The Terminator’ at 40: Why James Cameron’s sci-fi epic is unkillable

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You can tell a lot about an era by how it imagines it might end.

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The class inequalities of the mass-production age inform Fritz Lang’s 1927 “Metropolis,” in which the division between the workers and the wealthy has become part of the teetering architecture of a putative city of tomorrow. George Orwell wrote his cautionary totalitarianism satire “Nineteen Eighty-Four” from notes jotted down during World War II, as not only the colossal evils of fascism but also the widening ideological schism between the Western Allied nations and Stalin’s Soviet Union became apparent.

And in actual 1984, writer-director James Cameron refracted Reagan-era gender and body-image politics, fears of nuclear annihilation, and the existential threat posed by burgeoning technologies into the ravaged fatalism of “The Terminator,” a scuzzy, low-budget B movie that somehow launched a legacy almost as unkillable – or at least, as infinitely resurrectable – as its eponymous killing machine. A granite-faced Arnold Schwarzenegger leans so close to the police-precinct reception window that his shades almost tap the glass, as he delivers one of the most famous and frequently parodied lines of all time: “I’ll be back.” But really, “The Terminator” has never gone away.

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Forty years ago this week, Cameron’s second feature after his all-but-disowned debut as the replacement director on “Piranha II: The Spawning” was released. It opens with a man and a machine from 45 years into the ruined future arriving in pre-apocalypse 1984 Los Angeles in two separate crackles of arcing electricity. Their missions are as simple as the speculative physics behind their journeys is complex. The machine (Schwarzenegger) comes to kill waitress Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). The man, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), comes to protect her. Kyle and Sarah fall in love and conceive John, who as an adult will become Kyle’s mentor and the leader of the resistance against the machines.

Onto this slender steel skeleton Cameron grafted layers of surprisingly insightful and evocative thematic musculature. It hints at the way reckless technophilia can lead directly into justifiable technoparanoia. It introduces a blankly amoral, physically mighty antihero onto whom all sorts of inchoate anxieties can be projected. And while it is animated and invigorated by its relish in the chest-beating, masculine-coded drive toward war and destruction and big, big guns, that fetishization is counterbalanced by an unexpectedly sincere admiration for the survivorship of women.

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Cameron then clad his bulked-up cyborg of a sci-fi script in the leathers and chains of a grindhouse-gritty actioner so skillfully that it was hard for many contemporary viewers to see it as anything more than a disposable, R-rated flash in the pan. The box office returns were solid rather than stellar. And the critical reception was mixed, ranging from a Variety rave through to Janet Maslin’s more measured New York Times review, which is admiring of the film’s suspense but dismissive of its “obligatory mayhem,” right down to Richard Freedman’s syndicated pan, which declared “The Terminator” a “lurid, violent, pretentious piece of claptrap.”

It is often the case that films that are products of their time are not wholly embraced until that time has passed, and so it is with “The Terminator,” which has proved to be an ’80s novelty of remarkable longevity. The movie’s own passage through the intervening four decades has only increased its cachet, which is of course ironic considering we’re now in the future it forecast and, for all of 2024’s many horrors, it doesn’t remotely resemble the film’s vision of our world: a forest of charred rubble patrolled by relentless mass-killing machinery, where grimy-faced children eke out a meager existence in grim bolt-holes beneath landscapes littered with human bones. Perhaps the disparity between our reality and the film’s fiction is the reason we can now divorce it from any literal interpretation and appreciate it for its far more evergreen emotional, intellectual and metaphorical heft, as a story less of humanity’s inevitable annihilation than of the insuperable tenacity of the human spirit, however bleak its prospects for survival.

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And here, humanity is embodied in the person of an ordinary woman who has an extraordinary destiny thrust upon her, which is part of what still gives the film its edge of modernity.

The machine – popularly called the T-800 to differentiate it from subsequent Terminator models – cuts a bloody swath of chaos across L.A., hunting Sarah down, endlessly rebooting after injuries that would decommission an even marginally inferior cyborg, before finally getting crushed to smithereens in a hydraulic press, all without once having discernibly changed facial expression. Kyle dies heroically in the final showdown. But Sarah, ostensibly a representation of human fragility, even more heroically survives, to narrate the story into a Dictaphone for John to listen to when he’s old enough to understand simple concepts like “You are older than your own father” and “Congrats! You’re basically the Messiah.”

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There is a feminist critique to be made that Sarah is only of value in the “Terminator” universe because she’ll give birth to a (male) savior. But that cannot detract from the fact that this seminal film closes with her, lonely but empowered, driving to Mexico as a changed woman, equipped with a brand-new sense of herself and her own resourcefulness.

En route, she has the photo taken that, in a nod perhaps to Chris Marker’s landmark “La Jetée” (1962), is the picture that makes future Kyle fall for her and volunteer for time-travel bodyguard duty in the first/last place. The execs at Orion Pictures reportedly suggested Cameron beef up the love-story angle in his screenplay, but it’s in moments like these, rather than in florid voice-over protestations like “in the few hours we were together we loved a lifetime’s worth,” that the film actually hits the destined-but-doomed-romance mark and gives Sarah an added dimension of human feeling.

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Kyle had always wondered what Sarah was thinking about when that Polaroid was taken. Turns out, she was thinking of him. In the end, love – of which no machine is capable – saves the day.

This straightforward sentiment is the axis around which bends and loops a mythology that touches on all sorts of temporal mind games: the Grandfather Paradox, the Butterfly Effect and the would-you-kill-baby-Hitler thought experiment. “One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother,” observed author Douglas Adams in his 1980 book “The Restaurant at the End of Universe.” “… The major problem is quite simply one of grammar.”

And anyone writing about “The Terminator” knows what he meant: The English language is simply not equipped with enough conditional forms to elegantly contain even the foundational paradox of a man sent back in time to father the son who will, assuming he gets born, grow up to be the man who sends him. And let’s not even get into the proliferating tangle of time frames that occur once this little 1984 movie generates novelizations, multiple video games, myriad comic books, five movie sequels, a TV show and an anime series, most of which operate in different versions of the near future, near past or alternate now.

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Back when Cameron was dreaming up the film, the vista was less complicated. The mainstream cinematic environment was far less cluttered with multiverses and quantum shenanigans. And so the film’s futurism is percolated through specifically ’80s filters: Kyle describes the machine adversary as “Defense network computers. New. Powerful. Hooked into everything, trusted to run it all” – language that echoes Reagan’s controversial 1983 announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative (quickly dubbed the Star Wars program). It entailed, among other things, particle-beam weapons, advanced lasers and a complex computer command system – technologies that contemporary critics derisively alleged were still decades away from readiness, but that all embellish Cameron’s 21st-century wasteland and have recurred with regularity on-screen ever since.

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Then, in January 1984, as Cameron was ramping up to begin filming in March, Ridley Scott’s Super Bowl XVIII commercial for Apple Computer aired. In it, an athletic-sexy female rebel takes a literal hammer to a male-coded Orwellian society, with the spot stylishly suggesting that technology (or one particular brand, anyway) might be the means of saving humankind from oppression, drudgery and mass conformity – a slyly denigrating allusion to rival IBM’s bid to establish a home computer monopoly.

“The Terminator’s” very first sequence features a tanklike vehicle crushing human skulls beneath its treads, a shot that resonates wittily in the tire-tread tattoo on the face of Bill Paxton, playing the blue-haired punk who first interacts with Schwarzenegger’s T-800. Such imagery also recalls a line from Orwell’s novel: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

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Both filmmakers using Orwell as a touchpoint in the same year was far from the only parallel between James Cameron and Ridley Scott. Already by the time of shooting “The Terminator,” Cameron had been in discussions about directing a follow-up to Scott’s 1979 scorcher of a sci-fi horror “Alien.” That sequel, “Aliens,” would be Cameron’s next project and would not only be a big success, but in it, Cameron would get to trial-run the origin story of an iconic female lead – Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley – as she evolves from the softer, more traditionally femme version of the first installment into the model of hardcore, gun-toting badassery she would become in the second. An analogous pattern was then applied to Linda Hamilton for her return in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” in which Sarah, last seen wistful and pregnant with a feathery ’80s perm, is reintroduced to us as one long, taut, straggly-haired sinew, doing pull-ups on the upturned bed frame in her cell in a mental institution.

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The body worship in the first film, by contrast, is all masculine. Schwarzenegger first appears naked and crouched like Atlas, a bulging and glistening inverted ziggurat of man, before striding over to survey the twinkling lights of L.A. below with godlike impassivity. Surprisingly, given how indelibly Schwarzenegger and his rolling-boulder physique are now associated with the role, Cameron had originally envisaged the much slighter Lance Henriksen as the T-800, before Orion came aboard on the understanding that its investment would buy a name actor in the role. (One other itch that “Aliens,” a near-perfect film in its own right, allowed Cameron to scratch was casting Henriksen as that film’s cyborg, presumably partly in compensation for his downgrade to the supporting role of human police officer in “The Terminator.”)

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There is even a stray line of dialogue that sounds like a vestigial remnant of that prior incarnation, when Kyle tells Sarah that earlier versions of the Terminators were easily identified whereas the T-800 models are new. “They look human,” he says. “Sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot.” There has never been anything “hard to spot” about Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Mind you, at the time, the Austrian Oak was hardly a movie star. But the early to mid-’80s saw the steroidal apex of the so-called Golden Age of Bodybuilding, and Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia titles, immortalized in the 1977 doc “Pumping Iron,” had made him a household name. Still, the path to his best-known role was not entirely smooth: Orion president Mike Medavoy wanted Schwarzenegger from the get-go, but for the role of Kyle Reese. For the T-800, Medavoy was reportedly keen on O.J. Simpson, though Cameron never seriously considered him, reckoning that the viewing public wouldn’t buy O.J. as a cold-blooded killer.

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Cameron talked Schwarzenegger into accepting the T-800 role instead, even though the actor at that time underestimated the film as “Some s— movie I’m doing. Take about two weeks.” But then, everybody underestimated “The Terminator,” often to its advantage: Both Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd came from the Roger Corman school of stack-’em-high, sell-’em-cheap filmmaking, which gave the production a sense of guerrilla chutzpah that translates on-screen into lean, punky, B movie swagger.

Today, with hindsight, Schwarzenegger’s casting seems especially inspired, precisely because as the actor has aged it has given the character a depth and a pathos that the more high-tech, next-gen terminators, largely lacking the organic element that wrinkles and withers in an unavoidably human, mortal manner, can never access. Indeed, the T-800’s relative obsolescence compared to shiny new, infinitely pliable liquid-metal incarnations would become a thematic mainstay of the franchise almost immediately, as soon as “T2” saw Arnie’s return to the role in a more fatherly protector guise. He became a post-nuclear entity in a makeshift nuclear family, complete with dad jokes and gags about how, despite not yet having been invented, the OG Terminator could be terminally out of date.

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Because despite its microprocessor brain, computer-readout vision and ability to synthesize uncanny replications of human voices, the T-800 is by modern standards an almost quaintly analog piece of kit. And aside from its resilient heroine and its launching of Arnie’s superstardom, one of the great pleasures of “The Terminator’s” world-building is its fascination with old-school mechanisms and machinery. Right down to its most emblematic weaponry – the chunky, pump-action shotgun – the film abounds in dump trucks and punch clocks, coffee makers and answerphones. Through the ages, we delegated so much of our everyday business to such devices, gratefully, carelessly, seldom pausing to wonder where our growing reliance might lead.

So, to watch the film with 2024 eyes is to take a little voyage in technological and sociological time travel yourself. No matter the hits and misses of this up-and-down franchise, “The Terminator” endures as a movie entirely of its time but also so unbounded by time that – with respect to the limits of English grammar – it could still and will always, in the near or far distant future, perhaps someday have already long ago happened.

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