Arnold Schwarzenegger is a time-traveling robot who destroys as much of Los Angeles as this film’s fairly small budget allows while he tries to kill sweet, bumbling waitress Linda Hamilton. Her future son leads the eventual human rebellion against the oppressive machine overloads of the post-Apocalypse age and Arnie’s gotta nip that in the bud. Bottom line: Stuff blows up, bodies fly, and Arnold hulks around and gets roughly the same amount of dialogue (about nine words) that he got in Conan the Barbarian. The action hardly stops, except for Hamilton and Michael Biehn’s sex scene, which—gasp!—is actually an important part of the story.
A great movie and a sci-fi action classic with lots of ultra-1984 moments, like the neon-filled dance club, the girl who constantly bops around listening to a Walkman, a music score drizzled in synthesizers, and a basic premise that’s grounded in impending nuclear war.
This is the film role for which Arnold Schwarzenegger will be remembered. This also was director/co-writer James Cameron’s breakthrough. Cameron started out doing special effects work on B-movies for Roger Corman and directed Piranha II: The Spawning before he hit the jackpot with this.