TERMINATOR Film Double

A week of rogue machines, unstable realities, artificial intelligence, cybernetic bodies, corporate paranoia, cosmic dread, and a very cranky robot policeman.

This program traces a century of cinema asking the same uncomfortable question: what happens when human intelligence develops an Artificial Intelligence it can’t fully control?

The answer, judging by this week’s films, is never good.

Join us in FOMO Cinema this Friday 22 May for our TERMINATOR Film Double. Watch Cameron build the nightmare in 1984, then expand it into one of the defining blockbusters of the 1990s. Two films, one future war, and a reminder that Skynet doesn’t take Fridays off.

20:00 THE TERMINATOR

James Cameron | 1984 | USA | 1h47m | Presented in the original English audio with English subtitles

THE TERMINATOR looked at the future rise of Artificial Intelligence and said: yes, but what if it also looked cool AF in a leather jacket?

THE TERMINATOR is James Cameron’s first great machine nightmare: low-budget, relentless, and built around the fear that the future has already decided you’re a problem.

Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a machine sent from the future to kill Sarah Connor, a waitress whose unborn son will one day lead the human resistance against Skynet. Kyle Reese, a soldier from that same future, arrives to protect her. From there, Cameron keeps the film brutally simple: one woman running through Los Angeles at night, pursued by something that doesn’t negotiate, doesn’t hesitate, and doesn’t stop.

Before the franchise became larger and more mythology-heavy, THE TERMINATOR was lean, nasty and almost completely unsentimental. It has more in common with grimy low-budget thrillers than with the cleaner blockbuster science fiction that followed it. The Terminator moves through police stations, nightclubs, motels and phone books, turning everyday city spaces into part of the hunt.

The lore around the film is now part of its appeal. Cameron wrote it after a fever dream in Rome, imagining a chrome torso dragging itself from an explosion. Schwarzenegger was first considered for the role of Kyle Reese before everyone involved realised he’d be far more unsettling as the machine. The result gave cinema one of its most recognisable figures: sunglasses, leather jacket, dead expression, no wasted movement.

I’m including THE TERMINATOR in this week’s FOMO FUTURE SHOCK program because it turns artificial intelligence into a survival problem. Skynet doesn’t want dialogue, companionship or moral compromise. It reaches one conclusion and builds the tools to enforce it. The film’s vision of AI warfare may still feel exaggerated, but the fear underneath it hasn’t aged at all.

22:00 TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY

James Cameron | 1991 | USA | 2h17m | Presented in the original English audio with English subtitles

TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY is the only film I can think of that takes the killer from the first film and turns him into the father figure for the sequel.

Years after the events of THE TERMINATOR, Sarah Connor is no longer an ordinary woman caught in the machinery of the future. She’s a prisoner, a mother, and the only person who fully understands what’s coming. Her son John is now the target. Skynet sends a more advanced machine to kill him, while the resistance sends back the same model that once hunted Sarah, this time programmed to protect.

The reversal is the film’s great move. Schwarzenegger’s Terminator becomes both weapon and guardian, while Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor arrives almost as a sister figure to Ripley in Cameron’s ALIENS: hardened by trauma, physically transformed, and forced into action because nobody else understands the scale of the threat. Cameron was never afraid to place women at the centre of action cinema, and between ALIENS and TERMINATOR 2 he helped popularise the female warrior archetype that would shape blockbuster filmmaking through the 80s and 90s.

The production lore still matters because the spectacle genuinely changed cinema. The T-1000’s liquid metal effects helped push digital visual effects into a new era, but Cameron never lets the technology become the whole point. The chase sequences, practical stunts and industrial locations keep the film physical. It’s huge, but it still feels heavy.

I’m including TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY in this week’s FOMO FUTURE SHOCK program because it gives Skynet’s future war its most popular form. The phrase “judgment day” entered the culture as shorthand for the impending 'singularity'. The film turns AI apocalypse into family drama, action cinema and mass entertainment, then somehow makes all three work.