The Terminator at 40: Why Arnold Schwarzenegger’s gun-toting robot thriller has never felt more relevant

There’s a tantalising moment midway through James Cameron’s breakthrough movie, The Terminator (1984). Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), the resistance soldier from the future who has come back to 1980s LA, is warning the everywoman hero Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) that a cyborg (Arnold Schwarzenegger) wants to kill her. This Terminator, he cautions her, is “part man, part machine” and controlled by microprocessors. “It has sweat, bad breath, everything.” Sarah says she is “not stupid” and knows “they can’t make things like that”.

“Not for 40 years,” Kyle replies.

Well, 40 years have now passed. And while Arnie’s cybernetic T-100 may still be a pipedream, there’s never been a better time to assess just how well Cameron’s chrome-plated vision of the future sits today. This was, after all, the movie that turned Schwarzenegger, who had previously made his name on Conan the Barbarian movies, into a global superstar. The Terminator spawned multiple sequels, often to diminishing returns, but its own status as a defining classic of 1980s action cinema has long been assured.

Its story has the undertow of a Greek tragedy. The cyborg is trying to murder Sarah Connor before she can conceive her son, John Connor, the rebel leader whose destiny is to defeat an army of self-aware robots. The story of Arnie’s casting is itself the stuff of movie myth. The director had developed the idea for the film after falling ill and having a “fever dream” about a metal skeleton emerging from a fire. He originally thought about Lance Henriksen (who had appeared in his earlier movie Piranha II) playing the Terminator – and even completed art work with Henriksen in full metallic regalia.

“Jim prepared an airbrush picture, a conception, fully painted, of Lance Henriksen with the skeletal face and the red eye,” producer and co-writer Gale Anne Hurd remembers. “Literally, that was before we even got the movie financed.”

Orion Pictures, who eventually came on board as co-financiers, notoriously suggested OJ Simpson (then at the height of his Hertz commercials fame) as a better option – an idea Cameron quickly scotched. More helpfully, Orion also recommended Schwarzenegger to play the hero Kyle Reese. Initially wary, Cameron and Hurd bonded with the actor after meeting him for a lunch at a swanky LA restaurant and discovering they couldn’t afford to pay the bill.

“What star would work for someone who couldn’t even pick up a lunch tab?” Hurd remembered thinking. Instead of walking away, though, Schwarzenegger said he had had exactly the same experience earlier in his career. From then on, the filmmakers and their actor – cast instead as the villain – got on famously.

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Schwarzenegger’s first appearance, when the Terminator turns up in Los Angeles in front of a startled garbage collector as naked as Adam, gave the movie an immediate mythic force. Soon after follows that astonishing shot of him looking out over night-time LA, as if he is the master of all he surveys.

The former bodybuilding champ is playing a serial killer who doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear – and yet audiences quickly embraced him. He has a mere 17 lines but one of them – “I’ll be back” – is the phrase that came to define his career.

Once dismissed by snobbish detractors as low grade sci-fi, the film is now embraced by everyone from genre fans to academics. Earlier this summer, a conference at Bangor University, which Hurd herself attended, included papers on everything from “Gender and Technology in the Terminator Franchise” to “Sarah Connor’s feminist legacy”.

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“I think it [The Terminator] is a fantastic film for thinking about the Reagan era, Reaganomics, the Strategic Defence Initiative and all the changes in US society: the growth of multinational corporations, personal computing, genetic engineering and all these things,” conference organiser Professor Nathan Abrams, who has taught the film for years, explains.

Co-organiser Dr Elizabeth Miller points out that Sarah Connor was a groundbreaking figure in Eighties action movies. “She doesn’t have anything beyond the capabilities an ordinary woman would have but yet she is the central figure,” she says. “She’s not Wonder Woman but the whole plot revolves around her.”

Academics still sometimes overlook the humour Cameron brought to the material – a lightness of touch that contrasts well with its apocalyptic themes. Certain scenes here (Sarah’s smutty phone conversation, Schwarzenegger’s computer-generated swearing) could come straight from frat comedies such as Porky’s (1981). Other more macabre moments (the Terminator killing Sarah’s roommate and her boyfriend), would fit comfortably into the slasher films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) that were gaining traction at the time.

“Jim and I had a lot of discussions about tone. We wanted the film to be intense action, pretty relentless but you need to break that up,” Hurd says, in respect to the screenplay’s comic interludes. “Regardless of how dark the world is, or how dangerous, I think it is important always to inject humour.” Hurd and Cameron were in fact fans of Ealing comedies, in particular The Man in the White Suit (1951), and discussed them while working on the screenplay.

Another influence was George Miller’s Mad Max (1979), from which they took the idea of splicing complex plot exposition into the middle of frantic action scenes. “It’s very difficult to have a film where essentially everyone stops to discuss things that the audience needs to know at that point. You really need that information communicated – but everyone goes to get popcorn. They’re not going to go to get popcorn in the middle of an action sequence or a car chase.”

One of the enduring pleasures of the film is the way Cameron pulls elements from the Roger Corman exploitation movies on which he and Hurd cut their teeth with radical aesthetic and intellectual ideas. He managed to be cheesy and highbrow at the same time.

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Although Cameron had a small army of special effects technicians and make-up artists (led by the renowned Stan Winston), he was filming in Los Angeles on limited resources. He later told the BBC that for one important shot when Arnie wasn’t around, he recruited a junior runner to stand in. Cameron only had an hour before he had to give the camera back and so covered the young assistant’s shoes in black tape to match the Terminator’s boots and got his close-up that way.

“It’s actually, you know, Randy’s, you know, penny loafers with black tape on them,” he observed – referring to what many fans have always believed were Arnie’s big feet.

This may be a hard-edged dystopian genre movie but it also contains some of the same romanticism that, a decade later, made Titanic so appealing to teen audiences. “I came across time for you, Sarah. I love you. I always have,” Kyle tells the young Californian waitress. Like Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack in Titanic, Kyle is a dashing, self-sacrificing figure, ready to give his own life to keep his beloved alive.

An enduring mystery is why Biehn didn’t achieve greater recognition. Whereas Titanic made DiCaprio into the biggest star of the era, The Terminator failed to turn its likeable and charismatic male lead into a household name. Perhaps you can call it the Boris Karloff syndrome. Mention the 1931 Universal horror classic Frankenstein and few film fans today remember that Colin Clive played the leading role as Henry Frankenstein – but they all know Karloff’s name.

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The Terminator did strong box-office business and then had a spectacular after-life on VHS. In 1985. A gun-toting, sunglasses-wearing Schwarzenegger was on the cover. “He’s the thing that won’t die in the nightmare that won’t end,” reads the block-capital writing on the back.

With this kind of marketing, it was little wonder that Arnie stole the show.

Cameron’s big-budget sequel Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) was another triumph – slick, expansive and with Schwarzenegger’s robot killer miraculously transformed into the good guy. It had none of the B-movie crudity occasionally found in the original. That crudity, though, was arguably what made the first film so special. It was a grungy exploitation movie whose classic status was confirmed in 2008 when the Library of Congress chose it for preservation in the US National Film Registry. (Terminator 2 achieved the same distinction in 2023.)

Not so long ago, Hurd happened to visit the Pentagon, the headquarters of the US Defence Department. In some of the offices, Hurd was startled to notice posters of The Terminator. “It turns out it is a film that has endured and remains in people’s consciousness,” the producer (whose credits since then include everything from AMC’s The Walking Dead to blockbusters such as Aliens (1986), Armageddon (1998) and Hulk (2003)), says, with evident understatement.

It’s not only senior US defence officials who think The Terminator is still relevant. Inventor and tycoon Elon Musk is another fervent admirer who has picked up on the film’s prophetic warnings. I ask the producer if, 40 years ago, she and Cameron were genuinely frightened of the dark side of artificial intelligence or whether the idea of Schwarzenegger’s Terminator was just another genre movie conceit.

“There are a number of factors that go into that. First, Jim and I were both significantly affected by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the spectre of HAL [the film’s computer with a mind of its own]. There is a reason why we called the nightclub in the film ‘Tech Noir’. It’s that we considered the film to have a cautionary perspective on the future of technology, if we don’t pay attention. Jim and I knew that AI and robotics were going to be developed. There was no question in anybody’s mind and we wanted people to consider the consequences. Once you open Pandora’s box, you can’t put everything back in again.”

With that box now firmly wrenched open, the movie does indeed seem more topical than ever.

In the Eighties, Hurd argues, “people loved the film as a rollercoaster ride, as entertainment. [But] now there is the added context of everyone talking about artificial intelligence, everyone talking about robotics. If people aren’t worried about the extermination of humanity, they’re worried about losing their jobs.”

The Terminator is re-released in UK cinemas this month in a 4K restoration. “He’s back” the new poster predictably proclaims over a familiar image of Arnie in those shades but the truth is that, since 1984, he has never really been away.

‘The Terminator’ is back in cinemas in the UK and Ireland from 30 August