As Terminator: Dark Fate nears release in cinemas, marking a return to the franchise for both James Cameron and Linda Hamilton, Greg D Smith takes the opportunity to step into the time displacement equipment and go back over the entire Terminator cinematic franchise to see if this selection of movies still holds up today. Beginning with 1984’s The Terminator, Cameron’s debut big feature born of a fever dream and which almost never made it to the big screen, but which now holds a place in the Library of Congress as a piece of cultural significance. Just how good is this debut for both Cameron and star Schwarzenegger?

There are few genre movies as beloved as The Terminator. As the launchpad for the careers of both director and leading star, it comes with a huge amount of nostalgia value attached. It’s also a film which ‘purists’ will insist is better than even its wildly more commercially successful sequel, citing its scrappy, noir-ish pulp nature, low production values and excellent animation and practical FX design by the legendary Stan Winston. When I sat down to re-watch it, for the first time in quite a few years, I was shocked to discover that whereas it’s true that The Terminator is probably the best version of the story the franchise has sought to tell over the years, it’s also quite astoundingly overrated in many ways. It skirts with profundity without ever really grasping it, half-posing big questions it has no interest in providing answers for and using some tasteless visual and narrative shorthand to evoke a point it never shows any intention of exploring. That said, it is – for what it is – a fascinating exercise in genre filmmaking, blending tropes from various genres into one coherent whole, and laying a template which has yet to be bettered.

Let’s start with that genre thing – The Terminator is a science-fiction movie, right? It’s about time travel and robots and a future war in which half of humanity is wiped out. However, it’s also a chase movie, a desperate thriller set in a contemporary (for the time) Los Angeles, all neon lights, dive bars and not a single person without a cigarette. It has strong elements of a slasher movie too – a central antagonist who is apparently unstoppable, implacable, kills a series of young women and apparently ‘resurrects’ several times before finally being brought to an end by our central heroine. It’s quite possible that this blurring of genre lines is one of the movie’s strongest features, and one of the reasons it has demonstrated such lasting appeal. Cameron takes elements from everywhere, and blends them in such a way that – unless you’re looking for it – you don’t really notice. The point is, people who like Sci-fi are just as likely to like this movie as people who like horror, thrillers, even romance are.

Cameron has gone on record many times with the story of his inspiration for the film – the dream of a metal skeleton emerging from flames which forms one of the more enduring images from the movie’s third act showdown (and one the franchise would go on to re-use many times). It’s a concept movie then, of the type which Cameron often makes. His sci-fi is generally thought of as the type that’s more cerebral than the average – Aliens is a commentary on the Vietnam war, The Abyss is…well, whatever The Abyss is. Renowned throughout his industry as one of the best, Cameron’s reputation is solidly built on the foundation of this, his earliest major success. But like some of his later works, when you start to really examine The Terminator, there is little originality to be found. The story of a lone mother who will give birth to the child who saves humanity isn’t exactly the freshest of concepts, after all. Even the idea of the tragic time-loop in which the Connors find themselves – John sending his father back through time to both become his father and then instantly die – is not a particularly innovative use of the concept of time travel. Of course, the associated concept of the Terminator itself forming the genesis of its own kind is a little more creative, but this is one of those points which the theatrical cut leaves aside, and even the deleted scenes which formed this basic subplot focused more on Sarah’s (not Reese’s) desire to simply stop the war from ever having happened (making much more sense of the sudden decision to build plastique and the reason they end up where they do). Perhaps Cameron (or the studio) felt this much of a loop in everything would feel a little too contrived, maybe he just wanted to save the idea for the sequel, but it can’t help but feel in hindsight like the movie might have felt a little more complete had this stuff been left in.

But that lack of conviction in what the movie could do is a pervasive theme when one really starts to examine it. Starting from the core concept – one which as a child I had somehow misremembered/embellished in my mind. Skynet becomes self-aware and declares war on humanity. But why? To me, as a child who saw it for the first time, I had the idea fixed in my mind that Skynet had become self-aware and realised that humanity was the biggest threat to the future of the world – an ecological commentary which would have felt cutting edge in its relevance in the 80s. A computer, absent any emotional attachment to the dominant species whose rampant consumption was slowly choking the very planet on which said computer existed, making a rational calculation to eradicate that species and preserve its own existence. But in actual fact, The Terminator never elaborates on precisely why Skynet develops this genocidal impulse towards mankind beyond a vague throwaway statement that it ‘got smart’ and ‘saw all humans as a threat, not just the ones on the other side.’ This is of course one of the most fertile elements of the sci-fi genre – the concept of artificial intelligence and what it might mean for the future of humanity were it ever to be created. Unfortunately, like most of the elements from which Cameron so deftly weaves the movie, it’s a concept he merely apes rather than using, borrowing the visual and narrative language but leaving aside the substance. It could of course be argued that Cameron isn’t seeking to make a hard sci-fi thought piece here but a simple action movie, and that this is therefore an acceptable shortcut to take. After all, all he needs from Skynet is for it to be a boogeyman. But even an action movie bad guys needs some sort of drive – Cameron arguably recognises this by having the main antagonist be the terminator itself, and it’s mission be one of self-preservation as much as anything – if it kills Sarah Connor, it will preserve the existence of both itself and its creator. However, it feels, in hindsight unsatisfying that Skynet’s own motivations beyond self-preservation as part of a war it started are never explored. Why did it see humans as a threat? Why did it act to murder as many as possible in a heartbeat? It doesn’t matter, says the screenplay, look at this breathless action set-piece and don’t think about it.

And that use of shorthand delves deeper and gets a lot more distasteful. Consider Reese’s descriptions to Sarah of the future – of humans rounded up to be slaughtered in camps. Of some – like himself – being branded with barcode tattoos and put to work in those camps burning the bodies of others. A ‘superior race’ visiting wholesale industrialised slaughter on another sounds eerily familiar, and it’s difficult to imagine, with so many correlations, that the echo of the Nazis campaign of extermination of the Jews in this is accidental. Doubtless, Cameron sees it as an effective and quick shorthand to convey to his audience the horror of the enemy Reese faces in the future, but it’s done in a way that the comparison feels tacky in the execution. Cameron never really addresses this horror, never gives the Reese character the narrative time or space to explore the numbing terror of his previous existence, nor that of humanity as a whole. Worse, he doesn’t even give Reese (in the theatrical cut) any motivation to attempt to halt this horror – the only reason one might possibly assume someone would use such gruesome parallels in a narrative sense – but instead limits him to a man who travels through time because he fell in love with the idea and image of a woman he’d never met and wants to save her life. Even John Connor, future leader and saviour of humanity doesn’t send his best soldier back in time with a mission to prevent the evils Skynet will visit upon the world, but simply to save his mother and ensure his own existence.

It’s odd that this smallness of vision contrasts so greatly with that of the machines – though Skynet arguably also sends the T101 back in time to preserve its own existence (both by eliminating a threat in its own present and by gifting the technology of the terminator to that earlier time to begin its own development), one can also posit a grander design here. Skynet loses the war and sends back an agent to simultaneously preserve and partially re-write history in its own favour. Connor sends back his own agent just to ensure he himself can be born into the horrors of a war that, if he’d stopped to think on it for a moment, he could have instead attempted to end. Sci-fi in this area often tends to dwell on the imagination and unpredictability of humanity being a factor which no machine – however sophisticated – can replicate or anticipate. Here, it’s the machines who demonstrate the greater imagination, and the effect is oddly disappointing.

But leaving aside the philosophical failings of the movie, how does it work as a pure action piece? Very well, in fact. It’s an article of general knowledge that Schwarzenegger was originally being considered for the Reese role, and that he took extensive training with weapons to look so proficient with them in the film. His dialogue runs to 17 lines, and his performance relies more on the simple fact of his impressive stature and his ability to maintain a curious blankness which goes beyond simple ‘wooden acting’ and into something altogether more sinister. Schwarzenegger has been the butt of many a joke for his acting talents, but the unsettling nature of his body language, posture and delivery all combine in a very deliberate performance that no simple ‘dummy’ could have provided. It’s easy to see why he – the antagonist – went on to become the star of this franchise as time went on.

Opposite Schwarzenegger you have Linda Hamilton’s young Sarah Connor and Michael Biehn’s Kyle Reese. Biehn has something of a reputation for typecasting in the industry, having played more soldiers than anything else (and having done so for Cameron in no less then three separate properties). Hamilton doesn’t get as much to do here as the movie’s sequel would show she was capable of, but what she gets she ferociously commits to. The journey from frightened college student victim to toughened badass fighting for her life is a convincing one, showing the range of what Hamilton can do. It’s a pity that some of her best parts were left on the cutting room floor – her coming up with the plan to break into Cyberdyne and destroy Skynet at source shows a hint of what the movie tries to tell us she will be in years to come. As I’ve said above, perhaps Cameron had his reasons, but for me it’s a miss. Biehn similarly does his best with what he’s given (his dialogue in hindsight makes you realise how gifted the man is – it’s difficult to imagine many other actors managing to pull off some of the lines he’s required to deliver with the same sort of intensity and raw energy without it just looking like scenery-chewing). What’s genuinely impressive is the way in which the relationship between Connor and Reese grows and develops over the course of the movie. We learn of course that Reese has always loved Sarah, but it’s hard to shake the notion he’s a little disappointed when he first meets her, and their early interactions don’t exactly foreshadow the genuine attachment which grows between them.

Given the time in which it was made and a relatively low budget, it’s a film which still looks the part too. Sure, the stop-motion animation of the terminator endoskeleton is a little obvious now, as are the puppet scenes of its upper torso and so on, but they don’t look so terrible as to ruin the film, and its pace and breathless quality, with the chase being very much on from the first moment to the last, hold up well for a modern viewing.

Ultimately, it feels a shame that the movie promises so much more than what it delivers. As an action movie of its time its sharp and well-executed. As a genre piece it feels lacking, paying vague lip service to concepts and ideas in which it likes to clothe itself without ever really bothering to engage with them. It’s a movie which acts as if it’s a lot smarter than it really has any intention of being, and knowing that, it feels oddly disappointing that it should have been selected for the honour of inclusion in the Library of Congress. Then again, perhaps it’s cultural significance is measured in what it made audiences (like young me) feel it might have been about, rather than what it actually was about.