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One guy is as big as a water buffalo, never speaks, and starts randomly killing people almost as soon as his feet hit the ground. The other seems somehow more...human. Except of course that he’s got crazy eyes, is covered with grievous scars and likes to steal clothes from homeless people. But unlike his counterpart, he seems to experience pain, and dreams of a shattered post apocalyptic future every time he closes his eyes for more than five minutes. We’re not sure who he is, but it’s not hard not to somehow feel something for him.

As soon as the sun rises, both men start looking for people named “Sarah Connor” using a strange 20th Century technology called a “phone book”. While the Water Buffalo begins hunting them down and shooting them in the face, the other guy seems one step behind him the whole time, content to observe for now. (If you think about that for a minute, which one is the real sicko?) Meanwhile, the police get wind of the killings and manage to get in touch with “our” Sarah. Before long, The Water Buffalo, the Skinny Guy and the LAPD are all headed to the same spot on the map. And of course, they converge for what has to be the greatest car chase/running gun battle between a robot, a soldier from the future and a waitress from Culver City ever put to film. Ever.

You and I know the story of The Terminator today, but at this point if you’re sitting in a theater in 1984, you’re probably completely confused. Fear not - it turns out the Skinny Guy is named Kyle Reese (Biehn), and was sent from the future to protect Sarah from a pitiless killing machine called a Terminator (Ah-nuld). Apparently there’s a nuclear war in the near future when machines decide that humans are not efficient enough at killing each other off. They decide to finish the job, but a freedom fighter named John Connor organizes the remnants of the human race and fights back, defeating the machines and saving the world. According to historical records, John Connor is the son of a dorky waitress from Culver City named - wait for it - Sarah Connor.

That’s right, in a last ditch effort to survive the machines send back an infiltration unit to find the mother of their enemy and “retroactively abort” him, as one character puts it. The rest of the film is little more than an extended car chase, whereby Sarah and Reese hope to either escape the Terminator and live out their lives in hiding, or kill the thing and actually sleep at night again. Sure, this probably sounds like the kind of film that has few brain cells to spare, but you’d be wrong about that. Just as with Avatar, James Cameron was good enough to squeeze a pretentious social message in between all the explosions and bloodshed.

But unlike Ferngully 2: Smurfs in Space, the message is at least somewhat muted. It bears consideration that our dependence on machines is unhealthy and dehumanizing, and the story of the Terminator is no doubt intended to be a metaphor for this. That’s nice, but Cameron is hardly the first sci-fi writer to point this out, and in fact he was sued by Harlan Ellison for allegedly lifting the story from an old episode of The Outer Limits. But this is not why we love The Terminator, and James Cameron is free to pry my Blackberry from my cold dead hands. I admit that I’m dependent on it and if it wants to kill me then at least I know it’ll be on YouTube ten minutes later.

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