I loved The Terminator, and I don’t mean that in the polite way people say they love an old film they haven’t sat through in years. It’s the movie that kicked off a whole generation of sci-fi action films, the one everyone else spent the next decade copying, and it’s also, if I’m being honest, the most likely preview we’ve got of where things end up when our robot overlords finally take over everything. Arnie is awesome as the unstoppable machine and Linda Hamilton turns into a sci-fi icon over the course of about 100 minutes, which is not something many films can say about their lead. This is my The Terminator review, and it’s going to be a gushing one, so if you came for a balanced take with a list of flaws you’re in the wrong place.
A killer from the future and a waitress who doesn’t believe any of it
The setup is about as lean as sci-fi gets. In 2029 Skynet, the machine intelligence that wiped out most of humanity, is losing its war against the human resistance led by John Connor, so it sends a Terminator back to Los Angeles in 1984 to kill John’s mother before he’s even born. The resistance sends one soldier after it, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), to protect her. And the woman in question, Sarah Connor, is a waitress having a bad week who has no idea any of this is coming. The Terminator’s method is horribly simple, it gets the phone book and starts working through every Sarah Connor in the city, and the news reports of the first killings are where the film gets its hooks in. You know what’s coming before Sarah does, and the gap between her ordinary little life and what’s walking towards her is where all the tension comes from.
I love how little time it wastes. There’s no long prologue about the war, no ten minutes of explaining Skynet, just a naked man arriving in a crackle of lightning and a punk who makes the mistake of mouthing off to him. Arnie’s first scenes are so blunt they’re almost funny, which, a bit like his role in The Running Man, is half the fun of watching him, but the film never lets you laugh for long because the next thing he does is kill someone without a flicker. The Tech Noir scene is where it all comes together, Sarah hiding in a noisy club because she thinks it’s the safest place in the city, the Terminator walking in through the crowd, and Reese getting there with about a second to spare. From there it’s one long night of running, a car chase, a stolen car, Reese explaining the future in short bursts between near misses, and Sarah slowly working out that the crazy man with the shotgun is the only one telling her the truth. It never slows down long enough for you to question any of it, which is exactly how a film like this should work.
Arnie as the machine and Linda Hamilton as the person who outlasts it
What makes the Terminator so scary is that it doesn’t want anything except the job. It doesn’t gloat, doesn’t monologue, doesn’t get angry, it just keeps coming, and Arnie plays that perfectly with that dead stare and the stiff way he turns his whole head to look at things. “I’ll be back” is the line everyone quotes, but it’s the police station scene straight after it that I always think of, the car through the front doors and the methodical way he clears the building looking for her. It’s a horror film really, a slasher with a shotgun, and the fact that the killer is a machine makes it worse because you know there’s no reasoning with it.
Then there’s Sarah, and this is where the film becomes more than a great chase movie. She starts out as someone who can barely process what’s happening, scared, disbelieving, clinging to Reese because he’s the only one who seems to know anything, and by the end she’s the one telling a dying soldier to get up and move. Linda Hamilton makes that change feel earned rather than sudden. By the time she crushes what’s left of the Terminator in the hydraulic press she’s become someone completely different, and that’s the Sarah Connor everyone remembers. The quieter Sarah from the first half matters just as much, because it’s watching her get there that makes the last act land. Reese gets a lot of the film too, and Biehn sells a man who’s seen far too much and is falling for a woman he only knew from a photograph, which is an odd sort of love story but it works.
The future we’re all heading for
Skynet is barely explained in The Terminator, which is part of why it works so well. All you get is Reese’s description of the war, the burned-out ruins, the hunter-killers, people living in holes in the ground, and a few flashes of that future in his memories. The machines aren’t characters, they’re just there, a whole world that decided humans were the problem and set about fixing it. That idea has been around in sci-fi for a long time, the Butlerian Jihad in Dune is the war people fought so they’d never have to live with thinking machines again, but The Terminator is the version that gets under your skin because it starts in a normal city with normal people.
Watching it now in 2026 that part hits harder than it used to. We’ve got AI writing emails and driving cars and answering questions, and every time some company announces a smarter system I think of Reese explaining that Skynet “saw all people as a threat” and decided our fate in a microsecond. I’m only half joking about the robot overlords. The film doesn’t preach about any of this, it’s too busy being a chase movie, but the idea sits underneath every scene and it’s why the series kept coming back to it, the same way The Matrix later built a whole trilogy around machines that won. What I love is that The Terminator does it with almost nothing, a handful of future scenes on what’s obviously a small budget, and it still feels more frightening than a lot of films with a hundred times the money.
Why it still works after forty years
Some of the effects haven’t aged well, the stop-motion endoskeleton in the factory finale looks like exactly what it is, and the clothes and the synth soundtrack could only be 1984. None of that bothers me. If anything the low budget is why the film feels so tight, there’s nothing in it that doesn’t need to be there, and the stop-motion has a jerky, wrong quality that I think makes the endoskeleton creepier than slick CGI would. The factory chase is still one of the great endings in sci-fi, the Terminator burned down to its metal skeleton and still crawling after Sarah with half a body.
It also set up everything that came after, the time loop where Reese turns out to be John’s father, the idea that the future is already written, Sarah heading into the desert with a storm on the horizon. Every later Terminator film is either building on that loop or trying to break it. And I’ll say this for it, I don’t think there’s a scene that drags. It’s 107 minutes of somebody running for their life and it never once lets up, which is a lot rarer than it should be, and it’s a big part of why it still feels like the template every other killer-robot film gets measured against. The influence is everywhere, from the cold machine villains in later sci-fi to the way films like Ex Machina play with what a machine actually wants, but none of them have that same relentless forward pull.
10.0 out of 10. It’s one of those films I’d happily put on any night of the week, and I’d tell anyone who hasn’t seen it to stop reading this and go and fix that. Is Sarah Connor’s change from waitress to fighter the best character arc in 80s sci-fi, or does Reese deserve more credit than he gets? Tell me in the comments.
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