Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as the terminator, a cyborg built by a race of machines bent on the extermination of mankind and sent back in time to the year 1984 to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). The machines want her dead before she has the son who will grow up to lead the humans against them. At the same time a human soldier Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) is sent back by John Connor (the future leader of the human resistance) to protect Sarah.

Terminator is a classic sci-fi thriller, with fairly decent physics, and even provokes a fair amount of thought (at least for an action film) on the nature of time travel. The car crashes are not overdone; cars don't ramp and flip over when they shouldn't (like they do in many other movies). And for the most part there were no sparking bullets. However, there were a few flaws. At one point, Reese shoots a car to cause its gas tank to explode. Arnie also fired far too many rounds from the guns he was carrying. And there were a couple of spots where people should have been cut up by broken glass.

Time travel can't be taken too lightly, either. However, in the writers' defense, it's difficult to come up with plausible explanations for time travel in works of fiction. And, they did gloss over their explanation without too much mumbo-jumbo, rather than try to explain what they couldn't. It's a bit of a stretch when they claim the fields around bio-mass allow for time travel while metalic objects cannot be sent back, but there's no way to say that's definitely impossible. And hey, a little poetic license is acceptable in cases like that. Having Reese turn out to be the father of John Connor was interesting. That means John sent his own father back in time, thus causing himself to be born. It's also interesting to note that John wouldn't have existed if the machines hadn't tried to make sure he never existed. It's actually a legitimate theoretical possibility that such causal loops could exist.

Overall, Terminator is impressive for the originality it displayed in the early '80s, which it was able to pull off with relatively little impossible physics.