Last Saturday, we saw that Sarah and Kyle were spending the night under a bridge. They’d lost the Terminator for a while, but it’s only a matter of time before he finds them again. They make their way to a hotel and grab a room with a kitchen. Kyle then leaves to buy some supplies.

Sarah calls her mother, who is worried, of course, so Sarah gives her the number of the hotel. However, the Terminator has broken into her mother’s home and is impersonating her over the phone. He uses the number to locate the hotel.

How did the Terminator find Sarah’s mom? He’d picked up an address book while at Sarah’s apartment. Now, one would think that the first thing a person might do while on the run is call and warn family members about anyone who might try to use them to find their target. But in Sarah’s defense, not a lot of time has passed, and we can assume that Sarah did try to warn her mother. But it was already too late.

After Sarah makes her fatal phone call, Kyle returns and teaches her how to make explosives. Later, he confesses his love for her, and you can figure out the rest.

A confession of love

However, it doesn’t look like this newly kindled romance is going to last long because the Terminator reaches the hotel. Kyle and Sarah are able to sneak out of their room and steal a truck. The next car chase begins. Kyle begins throwing his explosives but is shot by the robot. Finally, Sarah causes the Terminator to crash his motorcycle, but in doing so, she loses control of her own vehicle and the truck flips over.

The Terminator is stalled

For once, the Terminator has a little bad luck. While lying on the road, he’s hit by a semi. This does nothing but mildly inconvenience the cyborg of course. But when the driver leaves his vehicle to see what he hit, the robot attacks him and hijacks the large truck.

However, the semi happens to be carrying fuel, a fact that Kyle recognizes. After Sarah has pulled him from their wrecked vehicle, he manages to stick one of his explosives into the semi before it picks up too much speed. Just when it looks like Sarah is about to be run down, the truck explodes.

Sarah sees the Terminator crawl out of the vehicle and collapse. He doesn’t move for a while, so she assumes he’s dead and she meets Kyle in front of the flames. However, before long, the Terminator starts after them again. His skin has burned off, leaving only a metal frame, but he is by no means destroyed.

The two run for safety inside a factory.

Kyle turns on all the machines, on the theory that this will keep the Terminator from tracking them. I’m not sure how that is supposed to work, and it does them little good because the Terminator quickly finds them. But the plot needs the machines to be on in order to make the climax work, and I think his strategy was a convenient excuse to have that happen.

It’s a large plot hole because of its implications for the story. To correct it, the film needed to show the Terminator using some sort of tracking mechanism that was disrupted by machinery in an earlier scene.

Inside the factory

Anyway, the Terminator begins backing Kyle and Sarah up a flight of stairs. Kyle tells Sarah to run and begins hitting the machine with a metal bar. This does no good, and the Terminator backhands him to the ground. However, Kyle comes up with a different plan. As the Terminator is standing over him, he lights his last explosive and sticks it to the Terminator, who realizes what Kyle has done and tries to remove the bomb. But the robot isn’t fast enough and explodes in a cloud of debris.

Sarah is injured during the explosion by a piece of flying metal. However, she survives. Kyle isn’t so lucky. Sarah rolls him over and realizes he’s dead. But she isn’t given time to properly mourn because the Terminator has also survived—well, half of him anyway. The robot’s torso begins crawling towards her, and Sarah, injured, is forced to crawl as well.

She moves through the factory at a pace that is agonizing to watch. She finally sees something and has an idea. She crawls under one of the machines with the robot right behind her. When she reaches the other side, it turns out the machine is a press of some kind. She pushes a button and crushes the Terminator.

Once the robot is finally destroyed, the police show up. She gets one brief look at Kyle as his body bag is zipped up before the ambulance takes her away. In the next scene, Sarah is driving a Jeep and expecting a child, Kyle’s child.

The trouble with time paradoxes

Throughout the film, we’ve seen various flashbacks from Kyle’s time in the future, and in one scene, he’s holding a photo of Sarah. It turns out that John Connor knew Kyle was his dad, which is why he sent Kyle to the past in the first place. Neither Sarah nor Kyle knew this, of course, so the time paradox was actually John’s idea, which was prompted by future Sarah, and this begs the usual questions that a time paradox presents.

Personally, I despise time paradoxes. I consider them Orwellian Doublethink, but this one is quite well done. The movie keeps things ambiguous, which is really the only way to deal with this trashy trope. But, as a cynic such as myself would expect, the problems created by future films thanks to this trope are innumerable. I think the time loop is the reason the franchise is currently in dire straits. It gave activists a way to completely negate the earlier movies in the name of their “vision.”

Sarah stops at a gas station, where a child takes the photograph Kyle was seen holding earlier in the film. Then the child says there’s a storm coming, and Sarah says she knows. The Jeep drives towards the storm, and the movie ends.

I enjoyed this film quite a bit, and it would be foolish to claim that it is a bad movie. While many of the rules for reviews are arguably subjective, the test of time isn’t one of them. This film has made its mark on the culture, inspiring countless spin-offs, sequels, and tropes that are still seen today. Even if I didn’t like the film, I would be forced to respect it for its impact. But the movie isn’t only impactful; it’s actually fantastic. So, I would highly recommend it.    

Here are the first two parts of my review of The Terminator (1984):

Terminator: The sci-fi classic forty years on The best thing about this first movie is that it adheres to the classic view of futuristic robots, cold, callous machin2 November 2024es that are bent on one objective. The film doesn’t explain the backstory all in one dump but breaks it up between two scenes and multiple action sequences.

and

Sarah’s son will save the world. A couple of moments in the film reveal waitress Sarah as the decisive military leader she will later become. The hero’s journey is, at its core, an underdog story. This fact makes female action stars ideal, provided the transition to hero is realistic.