We owe it to ourselves to keep reissuing 1984's The Terminator so as to show youngsters raised on Titanic and Avatar that James Cameron once achieved ten times the dramatic effect on point-whatever of the budget. This was Cameron, off the back of the instructive failure of 1982's Piranha II: The Spawning (an actual film, kids), reasserting control in staging a war of the machines, presaged by an opening scroll: "The final battle would not be fought in the future. It would be fought here, in our present. Tonight..." The addition of that one extra word was not only a stroke of genius, but the first real demonstration of Cameron's undeniable showman instincts, immediately alerting audiences that the trashy-looking B-movie they've walked into will, in fact, be something urgent, spectacular and potentially even universe-altering. (Roll up.) What will you witness again (or, if you're very lucky, for the first time)? In passing, exactly the leisurewear you might expect from a mid-Eighties movie operating on a tight budget, for one thing. Cameron figuring out how to produce as well as direct, and thereby get the best out of the limited resources allotted to him. Most significantly of all: the Rise of the Schwarzenegger. By 1984, Arnold had juiced and powerlifted his way to being the only effect a movie really needed to hook us: an unsmiling, apparently inhuman heavy, with muscles upon muscles and a distinctive yet unplaceable accent, beamed down onto the screen from who knows where. Here was someone who really needed figuring out, stat. Cameron rightly sensed thrills could be had just from putting his star in suburban and inner-city surroundings (which the actor would later govern over in reality), and letting him lumber through relatably cramped homes and modest backyards. (Historically, filmed intrigue has often been a matter of putting something somewhere it shouldn't be.) He is, of course, a terminator with a mission: to rid the world - or just downtown L.A. - of women called Sarah Connor, including the waitress played by Linda Hamilton, peering out from beneath a vast mane of poodle hair that forms a spectacle in itself. Only one other figure around matches this monomania, and that's Cameron himself, yanking this story along from sundown to sun-up, and trying to do it all fast, cheap and with the maximum possible impact.
If it hadn't become the phenomenon it did, we might more easily discern flaws in The Terminator. The future scenes appear an obvious victim of the shoestring accounting, most often resembling the first Mad Max movies rerouted inside a Laser Quest: it's to Cameron's benefit that he gets them out of the way as quickly as he does. And though Hamilton lays some of the foundations for what would be developed, over subsequent instalments, as the legend of Sarah Connor, you may still find yourself cringing at the basic conception of women as babes and babymakers: the waitress's flatmate Ginger (Bess Motta) gets to demonstrate but one characteristic ("wears Walkman", part of Cameron's wider warnings about encroaching tech) before meeting her fate. Still, we're barely allowed to notice, let alone consider. The pleasure of revisiting The Terminator in 2024 lies in seeing a SF/fantasy movie that properly moves, that shows rather than tells, and largely avoids big exposition dumps. (That opening scroll may be the only notable example of overwriting.) Yes, Cameron only shot in the real L.A. because he likely couldn't afford studio space, but he's breathlessly inventive in what he achieves there: peerlessly storyboarded and executed chase scenes, machine-honed timing (shrink leaves the cop shop, killer walks in), one tremendous fireball, and a sex scene that counts both emotionally and narratively - indeed, a sex scene on which the whole franchise was contingent. Was there a nightclub shootout before this, or was it just that Cameron's idea of a nightclub shootout was so exciting it made nightclub shootouts a thing? (Now you can't walk into a multiplex without seeing one.) Similarly, who else would pause for an aside in which the robot is seen repairing himself? Terrifying as this tech might be, Cameron was tinkerer enough to be fascinated with the way it worked. Paring its dialogue down to the tersest essentials, such that the entire plot could be summarised in eight words ("Come with me if you want to live") or three ("I'll be back") if you were pushed for time, it remains one of the few movies of this period that might be claimed as properly mythic. This critic rides hard for Aliens, but there is an argument Cameron - for all his riches and excesses, for all his very great successes - has never truly surpassed what he pulled off here.
The Terminator returns to cinemas nationwide from Friday.
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