40 years of "Terminator": He keeps coming back

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It all started with spoiled food: Food poisoning gave James Cameron a ghastly nightmare in which a metal skeleton armed with knives attacked him. This feverish vision gave rise to the science fiction shocker "Terminator" (The Terminator, 1984) – the start of a bumpy franchise and the blueprint for countless imitators.

"The Terminator" is a milestone in science fiction and a lesson in how much you can get out of a tight budget. James Cameron had just 6.4 million US dollars at his disposal for his ambitious project. "Terminator" made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star and boosted the film careers of his co-stars Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn. Only the studio from – came away empty-handed, and that was self-inflicted.

A Terminator for beginners

After a gloomy prologue, "The Terminator" begins in Los Angeles on the night of 12 March 1984. Two naked men materialize in two separate locations, surrounded by lightning strikes. The first is a muscle-bound giant who dresses up and murders two punks in cold blood. The other is slim and unshaven, has a scarred back, and steals the pants off a homeless man in an alley.

Both men are after the same woman: Sarah Connor, an unsuspecting waitress. When the news reports that two other women with the same first and last name have been murdered, the waitress notices that she is being followed by a sinister-looking man. She narrowly escapes death in a club. Then her stalker, of all people, extends an arm towards her: "Come with me if you want to live!"

On the run, Sarah Connor learns that the killer in the club is a cyborg, a robot covered in flesh and blood. The "Terminator" has been sent back in time from the year 2029 to kill Sarah. Kyle Reese, the supposed stalker, also comes from the future and has the task of protecting Sarah.

In the future, an artificial intelligence called "Skynet" is trying to wipe out humanity. When a group of human resistance fighters gain the upper hand, Skynet sends a Terminator into the past to assassinate Sarah. The real target: John Connor, Sarah's still unborn son, is the leader of the future Resistance.

The Terminator is a terrifying figure who seems almost invincible and will walk over dead bodies without a care in the world. The cyborg operates on his own and pursues Kyle and Sarah's trail with deadly persistence. In the process, the machine man unapologetically massacres an entire police station: "I'll be back."

"Terminator" takes just 107 minutes to tell this story. The prologue shows a devastated 2029, in which human soldiers flee from hovering drones and giant armored robots. Caterpillar tracks roll over charred human skulls, plasma beams flash across the battlefield, everything is cold and blue. The film returns to this "Future War" several times – sometimes as a nightmare, sometimes as a memory.

Great effects despite a small budget

The majority of the effects are still convincing 40 years later – all analog manual work. Even the red-tinted "Terminator look" scenes are not computer graphics, but reworked film footage overlaid with assembler code that the filmmakers borrowed from an Apple II magazine.

A closer look reveals that the giant tanks of the future are just miniatures and rear projections –, and not just since the current 4K remaster of the classic. Good eyes also quickly recognize when the real Arnold is replaced by a prosthetic arm and a doll's head during the infamous surgery scene. However, this only minimally reduces the disgust factor.

When only the metal skeleton is left of the Terminator, the endoskeleton moves in a noticeably jerky manner in some shots: a stop-motion miniature from Fantasy II was used here (scale 1:3). Otherwise, the steel killer is still convincing in the finale: an articulated 1:1 figure from Stan Winston Studios was used here, whose movements were controlled live on set by puppeteers.

Fans repeatedly try to iron out the film's supposed weaknesses by replacing the stop-motion scenes or the puppet skull with digital methods. None of these attempts at improvement actually succeed in outdoing the original. Even when the makers of the sequel "Terminator: Genisys" digitally recreated key scenes from the first film at great expense, the result fell well short of the original.

Apprenticed to the "King of the Bs"

Cameron gained his first film experience with Roger Corman, the king of B-movies. He taught him how to get as much as possible out of a small budget. For "Terminator", this meant meticulous preparation with sophisticated storyboards and self-drawn images of how Cameron envisioned the look of the film.

The filming, most of it at night, was not exactly easy. Some of it was filmed without permission – including the scene in which the Terminator haunts the first Sarah Connor in a residential area and the epilogue in the desert. Even back then, some crew members are said to have worn T-shirts that read: "You don't scare me, I work for James Cameron."

Cameron, who had already been considered difficult since his first film, knew exactly what he wanted: When the director wasn't happy with the way the punks confront the Terminator in the opening scene, he quickly reshot the sequence – at his own expense, with buddies in punk outfits, makeshift lighting and a different cameraman. The buddies, Bill Paxton and Brian Thompson, are instantly recognizable to genre fans today, but back then the actors were still little lights.

The casting legend

Arnold Schwarzenegger was not Cameron's first choice for the Terminator. The script described the killing machine as an inconspicuous, average type – and was ultimately intended to pass for human. Early concept drawings showed the face of Lance Henricksen, whom Cameron had met on his first film "Piranha II".

It was the studio that suggested Arnold Schwarzenegger or O.J. Simpson for the role of the Terminator – at least that's how Mike Medavoy, co-founder of "Orion Pictures", tells it in his memoirs. After Schwarzenegger had read the "Terminator" script, he called Medavoy and wanted to know which part he should play – not the villain? Medavoy decided to leave it up to director Cameron and producer Gale Ann Hurd to decide whether they wanted the bodybuilder to play a resistance fighter or a fighting machine.

Cameron remembers it differently: according to him, the studio wanted to force O.J. Simpson on him as the Terminator, but he insisted on Schwarzenegger. Whether Cameron had the power to force such a decision at the beginning of his career is questionable.