Looking Back At James Cameron’s ‘The Terminator’ On Its 30th Anniversary

Thematically too, it remains resonant. The technophobia it elicits (ironic considering Cameron’s real-life embrace of all that is new-fangled and gadgety), is manifested in the macro narrative of the killing machine, but also in the small details, like how it’s Ginger’s walkman that distracts her from the carnage happening in the bedroom, or that it’s an answering machine that betrays Sarah’s whereabouts or that the digger that Reese watches idly while waiting in the car triggers a flashback to the future and to the ruined landscape of skulls being crushed beneath the treads of massive tanks. And it’s a paranoia that if anything has grown in the intervening decades as we knit the machines we create and nominally control ever closer into our lives. The gloomier among us, in fact, could suggest that we don’t have to worry about humanity’s coming obliteration at the hands of sentient machines: it’s already kind of happening and we’re going along with it.

So yes, if you choose to find it, in “The Terminator” there is despair, there is doom and there is death, to be sure. But perhaps what makes it so beloved is that really the main arc, unusually situated in a young woman, is of the painful but irrevocable discovery of inner self-worth and resourcefulness. Reese dies for her; but it is up to Sarah ultimately to save herself, her unborn child and therefore the future of humankind. And that’s the ridiculous truth of movie storytelling that Cameron has leveraged time and again, and did so for the first time here: let the personal play out against as enormous a backdrop as you like — an apocalypse, a planetary invasion, the sinking of the biggest ship ever built — and we as viewers will invest all the drama of a crumbling civilization into one person’s survival, or one person’s vanquishing of their personal demons. “The Terminator,” on a shoestring budget with a B-level cast, created a franchise, launched the King of the World TM, gave birth to one of the most recognizably iconic of movie characters, and instantly became part of the pop culture vernacular. But it is also simply one of the best stories James Cameron ever told, a pared back, tense, impossibly engaging, swift-moving, time-hopping movie of ideas that, with its dodgy hairstyles, sci-fi paradoxes and cronky effects, yet also its undiminished dynamism and internal kinetic energy, feels like it was beamed here intact from thirty years ago, ever ready to thrill us all over again. The obvious concluding quote here should of course be some reference to “I’ll be back,” but the thing is, “The Terminator” never really went away.