“Come with me if you want to live.” These words, spoken by a sweaty, bug-eyed Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) after temporarily blowing away Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cybernetic assassin from the future, are now recognized as pure pulp cinema poetry. After pointing its three main characters — the T-800 “Terminator,” out-of-time resistance fighter Kyle Reese, and Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), the mother to humanity’s future savior — on an inevitable, dread-inducing collision course for the entire first act, Kyle’s first words to Sarah propel the film into its deadlocked, streamlined chase. Her world is falling apart in real time, and this is the only man who wants to stop that from happening.
The titanic space that James Cameron takes up in popular culture belies just how economic his storytelling instincts are. The Terminator, which celebrates its 40th anniversary with a 4K restoration on Blu-ray (plus a theatrical re-release earlier in the year), isn’t just a debut thriller that’s as lo-fi as it is white-knuckle; it’s the blueprint for everything he wrote afterward. We are guided through sci-fi worlds with immediate emotion, escalating action, and a palpable sense that the clock is ticking to figure out what’s going on. Exposition dumps aren’t exactly what eager superfans will pore over 4K restorations for, but Cameron’s remastered vision of hell leaking backward in time really emphasizes the urgency of making a Denny’s waiter believe she’s the most important woman alive — and why she has to stay that way.
