The Terminator Review

What if you were to live with the knowledge that in a single instant, your future and the world around you will be completely twisted into a nightmare? Your life is no longer about paying off a mortgage, getting the car fixed or graduating college, it all boils down to survival. Enduring a war against a force that has no morality or mercy; machines.
In the year 1984, a young woman named Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) reveals just such a crash-course to the future of mankind. A cyborg killer known as a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) has been sent all the way forward in 2029, where the human race is at war with robots run by an artificial intelligence called Skynet. The resistance of human freedom fighters is led by John Connor, and yes there's a reason for the similarity in names, John is Sarah's son. Or at least, he will be. Sarah has yet to give birth to John, or even involve herself in anything in preparing for an eventual war with androids.
But that doesn't matter to the Terminator, because it's ready to kill her before she can conceive John and therefore, cripple humanity's greatest hope for survival.
So resistance soldier Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) follows the Terminator from the future to 1984 Los Angeles to keep Sarah alive. The two run for their lives to find a way to escape the Terminator before the future can be changed.
The start of the Terminator franchise is a beautifully crafted film where what might have been originally a B grade sci-fi plot develops into a movie that is so much deeper. Its script, direction and camera work all help pull you in so that what could have been a simple "let's outrun the robot" turns into "let's outrun the future."
The themes of man vs technology is more multi-layered than what you might think, but it only really remains evident in half of the franchise. What fans remember most of the film is Arnold's show-stopping demeanor that is worth renting the movie for just in itself. Kyle Reese is also a character worth praising though they do use almost every scene he's in solely for exposition.
Once people saw Terminator, they knew a sequel had to emerge from where it was left off. For all the importance at stake with the future, there just really isn't much drama or tension in the present. It's just two people running for their lives, which you could find better (and more of) in any horror flick. Jim Cameron has some great ideas that make this more than your ordinary cyberpunk movie, but they don't really mature until the sequel, Terminator 2: Judgement Day.