HE'S BACK AGAIN

James Cameron's sci-fi classic 'The Terminator' is returning to cinemas to mark its 40th anniversary and it has never felt more relevant. Geoffrey Macnab looks at the making and legacy of a film that hardwired itself into the public psyche

- Geoffrey Macnab

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 T100 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 artwork 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.”