The Terminator is the film that made the careers of both James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger and consolidated a new wave of filmmaking in which the colder, artier Europhile cinema of an earlier generation of Hollywood auteurs — Friedkin, Schrader, Coppola — combined with the high-concept cinema of spectacle and sensation that was inaugurated by Star Wars and carried forward into the eighties by Spielberg. As well as synthesising two earlier strands of cinema, the film also inaugurates the action movie genre, in which the motivating principle is to generate excitement through set pieces and spectacularised, high-tech destruction and death.

The film — which has spawned numerous sequels, TV shows, and comic books, with Cameron now threatening to return for yet another ‘reboot’ — contains any number of iconic moments that have passed into pop-culture lore, from the line ‘I’ll be back’ to the scene in which the T-900, its human disguise burned away, emerges from a wall of fire. A cyborg with a pitiless death’s head for a face, the T-900 is now as much a part of the pantheon of monsters as a Dracula or Frankenstein; and, yet, despite having become so, I’d suggest that it is not the T-900 itself that is the main reason for The Terminator’s enduring appeal. The film has a single and relentless plot mechanism — the pursuit — and while the remorselessness that characterises the T-900 also locates it closer to horror than sci-fi, the horror in the film really derives from something larger and more existential than simple personal danger: the unique position that Sarah Connor, the woman the T-900 pursues, finds herself in.

It is through Connor that The Terminator condenses and intensifies the stakes of a particular human predicament and, as such, perhaps evokes horror less than it does dread. One aspect of this dread is certainly the speed and decisiveness with which Sarah Connor’s life changes. The other is the knowledge that is granted her by Kyle Reese — the soldier sent from the future to protect her — that humanity will be almost destroyed by the rise of an AI called Skynet, that there will be a nuclear war, and that it’s her own child who will eventually defeat the machines, if she can evade the cyborg that has been sent back to kill her. No longer bound into the blindness of the present and forced out of the comfortable if frustrating groove of her days as a waitress, it’s this terrible knowledge and its extraordinary demand that requires of Connor a political and ethical responsibility far in excess of any normal level of commitment.

In this way the film is a dramatisation of becoming political through an enforced entry into history. The first two films chart Sarah Connor’s progress from heedless citizen to — by Terminator 2 — a jackbooted and gun-toting militant. It’s her militancy and her certainty about the future that gets her diagnosed and hospitalised as mentally ill in the second film. The most obvious contemporary analogy for Connor’s situation is the climate movement and the commitment of groups such as Extinction Rebellion — whose name itself chimes in closely with the central conceit of the Terminator films — for whom an inexorable doom awaits that only the most committed action in the present can prevent.  The Terminator also in some ways dramatises and acts out the war in the psyche that comes about through the intrusion of a political or ethical demand, with Reese as the comrade vouching his vision of history and the possibility of salvation, while the T-900 is that horrifying vision itself, continually pursuing Connor.

The Terminator reminds us, then, that we are all subject to contingency: our lives can be ripped away from us at any moment and the call to take a stand may well seek us out. We all exist somewhere along a continuum of historical, political, and ethical commitments, capable of being pushed into a deeper and more active engagement with our times, depending on the circumstances. This ‘radicalisation’ is of course ambiguous, and this ambiguity is another filament in the cloud of dread that descends when we are obliged to consider history, its trajectory, and our response in the face of its demand. It’s this central human problem and our lingering — though diminishing — capacity, at least in affluent countries, to look away from or sidestep it, that The Terminator addresses. Sarah Connor’s inability to go back to the life she had before or to avoid the strictures of the new life she sees coming is what forms the core of The Terminator’s greatness and gives it an enduring resonance over time and across cultures, anywhere the problem of the future looms large.