The Terminator (1984)

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In a simple but efficient stroke of plotting, the future John Connor is able to send back a trusted lieutenant to protect his future mom: Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn, in what remains his best screen performance). Much of the film's kick, both at the time of its release and still today, comes from watching the two antagonists, Reese and the Terminator, treat the urban landscape as just another battlefield, in which everything is merely material for an ongoing fight. The Terminator doesn't care, because it has no feelings; and Reese doesn't care, because he knows that everything around him will be incinerated in just a few years. Collateral damage to vehicles, buildings and people doesn't concern either of them.

The police, led by Lt. Traxler and Det. Vukovich (Paul Winfield and Lance Henriksen, both superb), are ill-prepared for this kind of adversary. They're used to dealing with criminals, not soldiers, and in the case of the Terminator, they don't understand why shooting him repeatedly doesn't put him down for good.

(As an aside, one can understand Cameron's interest in writing the script for what became Rambo. The character of John Rambo in First Blood treated the American small town that proved so inhospitable in much the same way that Reese and the Terminator treat L.A., and those police were equally unprepared.)

As Sarah Connor, Linda Hamilton convincingly traces an arc from average girl to terrified victim to angry skeptic who's sure Reese is crazy and, finally, to horrified acceptance of the evidence of her own eyes as the Terminator keeps coming for her. It's the credibility of Hamilton's transformation that makes the emotional bond between Sarah and Reese so compelling. They really do have no one but each other on whom to depend. When Reese first explains to Sarah that he's been assigned to protect her from the Terminator, he says: "It's just him and me." Eventually, though, it's him and them.

The Terminator pre-dated the CG era that its sequel famously inaugurated, but its combination of mechanical effects, prosthetics, animation, opticals, miniatures and rear projection still holds up, because Cameron has always used effects in service of a good story, rather than creating a story to service the effects. The film also demonstrates Cameron's early mastery of editing rhythms and camera angles to create visual energy with as much impact as the most striking special effect. Look closely at the edits following the Terminator's famous "I'll be back" line, or the accelerating series of cuts when the Terminator has commandeered a tanker truck and is trying to run down Sarah while Reece attempts to bomb the truck. The director would work with much larger budgets on future projects (think of the helicopter/limousine rescue in True Lies), but his editing template for edge-of-the-seat action was already well-established in The Terminator.