Critics reviews

Were the 1980s the last period when popular Hollywood movies consistently had something to say? A sleeper hit in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan's 1984 reelection, this dystopian, technophobic time-travel crash-fest, shot in a style suggestive of Jack Kirby's comic books, made James Cameron's career, boosted Arnold Schwarzenegger's, and more than holds its own against the current crop of digitally-enhanced superhero films.

A breathlessly efficient B-movie of choreographed momentum and comic-book-panel compositions, The Terminator showed sci-fi could be as brutal and lean as the starkest pulp; Schwarzenegger's angular physique would never be put to more perfect use.

As science fiction with a time-travel and alternate-worlds premise, "The Terminator" is the start of something interesting that it never engages or develops—and that's because the movie is conceived and realized not as a science-fiction film but as an action film. "The Terminator" blows itself up to distorted proportions, leaving its basic, central, crucial, and finest inspirations far behind.

There's no place for sentimentality in the universe of "The Terminator," although gallows humor and tenderness are allowed. From the instant that Schwarzenegger's nude cyborg rips a punk rocker's heart out, "The Terminator" establishes itself as a relentless. mainly visceral experience that owes less to "Star Wars," "Close Encounters," "E.T." and other then-recent science fiction spectaculars than to the lean and mean horror flicks of Carpenter-Hill.