The Terminator Essay Example

align="justify">To comprehend and contemplate the scenarios presented, one must understand the plot/concept in the film.

The Synopsis for The Terminator is not difficult to grasp, it all starts with: “... An indestructible, invincible, inhuman cyborg Terminator T-800 (Schwarzenegger) [who] is sent back from the future year 2029 to 1984 to eliminate Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), who will one day be the mother of a son (an off-screen John Connor) who will lead a human Resistance movement-rebellion against the evil cyborg leaders of Earth's future.

At first, the killing machine mistakes other 'Sarah Connors' located in a Los Angeles telephone book for the real one and eliminates them. Another teleportation time traveler is Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), a nuclear holocaust survivor who volunteers for the future John Connor on an opposite quest to rescue and save innocent Sarah's life and ensure the conception and delivery of [John Connor] (who becomes a Resistance leader and his future boss).

While both of them, Sarah and Kyle, are on the run from the terminator, on one night they lose all inhibition and create John, letting the audience know that Kyle was always going to be John’s father that is why John sent Kyle back in time]. (Dirks, 2009) But they must first escape when the Terminator finds them, and amid a fuel truck explosion, they must fight the machine being within an automated factory The terminator injures kyle who tries to sacrifice himself by blowing up the terminator but only tears the machine in half.

The robot then chases Sarah through a tunnel. Sarah then presses a button that drops a heavy piece of metal on the cyborg, crushing

it. ("The Terminator (1984)," 2010).

In the end even though Sarah has survived this assassination attempt, she has yet to truly bypass the worst that has yet to come, the calm before the storm. The theme present within the film is the power of machines, this is because during the time this film was written and created, Director James Cameron used his work to parallel what was going on in society and the world.

Threats of nuclear war, launching of space shuttles, and advancements in the medical (Embryo transfer) and science (Strategic Defense Initiative) communities hit close to home and thats what gave this film the ability to haunt audiences for years. As machines become increasingly more powerful and elaborate, being awarded greater responsibility in work places, many individuals don’t see technology as a way of making their workload and life easier but that artificial intelligence will someday soon reap disastrous repercussions for humankind in a negative way that can not be undone.

As predicted many individuals cannot believe this futuristic outcome, because how could Earth ever face the fate proposed? And although the The Terminator is only a fictionalized account, it does warn that people shouldn’t become overly confident, as technology is growing and become smarter as well as better, living one to think anything we once thought impossible is within the realms of possibility.

Using the first two Terminator films side by side. Paul Brains, author of “Terminator vs. Terminator: Nuclear Holocaust as a Video Game” states that, The point of The Terminator is to reach that final scene in the film and make the preceding film a necessary consequence of its ending,

whereas the point of Terminator 2 is to reach an ending in which neither that film, nor its predecessor, were necessary in the first place. [Making it] contradictory, but contradictions are inevitable in any time-travel story that does not follow [the inescapable] forward-pointing arrow of time. They succeed only by ignoring their own illogic, or like Terminator pointing it out only to dismiss it.