The Terminator

No. This is the trunk, and the thing worth knowing before you start is that it is not a science fiction epic. It is a slasher film with one idea, made for about six million dollars, in which an unstoppable killer walks through Los Angeles looking up a waitress in the phone book.

The economy is the achievement. Cameron had no money for the future war, so you get it in forty seconds of flashes and the rest is implied by two exhausted people telling you about it. The machine is a man in sunglasses for most of the runtime because a man in sunglasses was affordable, and the stop-motion endoskeleton in the final reel works precisely because you have spent ninety minutes imagining what is under the skin. Schwarzenegger has sixteen lines in the whole film.

The plot is a closed loop and it is airtight. Kyle Reese is sent back to protect Sarah, falls in love with her, and fathers the son who will later send him. Skynet's attempt to prevent John Connor is what causes him. The chip and the arm left in the factory are what let Cyberdyne build Skynet. Nothing can be changed because everything has already happened, and the film's famous last line is about a storm coming rather than a storm being avoidable.

Two notes. Harlan Ellison brought a claim over similarities to his Outer Limits episodes, settled with an acknowledgement added to the credits. And Judgment Day argues the exact opposite of this film's fatalism, which is the most interesting thing about the pair of them.