Something steps out of the dark in 1984 carrying one name and no capacity for anything else. Skynet, the artificial intelligence that will grind the world down decades later, has sent a cybernetic assassin back from 2029 to find Sarah Connor, an ordinary young woman whose not-yet-conceived son grows up to lead humanity against the machines. The resistance sends one soldier after it, Kyle Reese, carrying a warning and orders to keep her alive.

James Cameron directed and co-wrote the film with Gale Anne Hurd, who produced it, and the two of them built a chase that behaves like a horror picture. The pursuer does not negotiate, tire or lose interest, so the tension sits in distance rather than mystery: how many rooms, how many streets, how much time. Casting Arnold Schwarzenegger as the machine instead of the hero set the tone for everything else. He plays the Terminator with no wasted motion and no expression to read, and the film lets the camera stay on him until that stops being funny.

Michael Biehn gives Reese the jumpiness of a soldier who has never lived through a quiet year. Linda Hamilton starts Sarah small and unheroic, which gives the story somewhere to travel. Lance Henriksen and Paul Winfield work the police end, filing the whole thing under lunacy, which is how it would sound from a desk. Come for science fiction at street level: a grimy cyberpunk 1984 of bars, motels and overpasses, with one machine walking through it on foot.