The legacy attached to the Terminator franchise is perhaps incalculable; as a series, the very fabric of James Cameron's sci-fi classic - and its sequels - are ingrained into society. The very sight of Arnold Schwarzenegger, after all, is enough to provoke reactions of "It's the Terminator!" all these years later ("I'll be back" has also been said so many times that we don't want to hear it anymore). So this was the movie that started it all, written and directed by James Cameron, and featuring Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton as Kyle Reece and Sarah Connor respectively. Tight, thrilling, and loaded with ground-breaking special effects, The Terminator is a triumph. And despite its pretensions as an action movie, the plot is excellent: tasked with protecting the leader of a future resistance before he's even born, soldier Kyle Reece travels from an apocalyptic future to the 1980s and must ensure that said leader's mother - Sarah Connor - isn't murdered by the Terminator, a robot that has been dispatched by sentient machines to kill her. The pace of the story is near-on flawless, Arnie is surprisingly excellent in a role that could have been embarrassing, and the rich mythology (which would be expanded in the sequels) proves to be endlessly intriguing; who imagined that Cameron could top himself with the follow-up?
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
