The Terminator

In the vast family of film monsters, there is Frankenstein’s creature, a mass of decaying flesh; there is the invincible and destructive robot Gort, sent to reason with mankind in The Day the Earth Stood Still; and there is also the shark that devours everything within reach of its teeth in Jaws. And sometimes, the monster can take human form, when it becomes an irrational predator pursuing its prey with sadism, like the nameless reckless driver in Duel. Because it brings together all these myths within a single character, the Terminator embodies the absolute monster, the ultimate prototype of the killing machine: indestructible, soulless and merciless. He possesses the relentlessness of a bounty hunter, the cold-bloodedness of a serial killer and the violence of a psychopath. If he haunts the collective imagination with such force, it is because he confronts humanity with its own inhumanity, with its anxieties about an uncertain future and an unstable world that is destroying itself in its frenzied race for progress. He is not only a body with over-developed muscles and the stature of a colossus, but above all a frozen mask that crumbles as the nightmare reaches its climax. He is a monster with a human face, his features expressionless, rigid, implacable. He is the harshest allegory of a film genre that, in the 1980s, glorified the virility of its actors. He is the very essence of cinema: a machine for fantasies, a machine for spectacle, a machine that pushes characters to their limits by bombarding them with multiple cameras. An indomitable metal skeleton, he is that terrifying creature who feasts on the nightmares of the heroes he pursues. The Terminator is a pure cinematic construct, transcending genres and preconceived notions."" (François Giraud; dvdclassik.com)