History Film / TheTerminator

** The film itself is also unusual compared to its successors in the sense that it's played much closer to a horror film than an action film, even following some SlasherMovie tropes; Wiki/{{Wikipedia}} even used to classify it as a horror movie, to boot.

* EightiesHair: The scene where Sarah and her roommate are primping at home could be put in a time capsule as evidence of 1980s hair. The crowd at Tech-Noir display a whole range of examples, from punk spikes to Music/{{Madonna}}-clone to ''Series/MiamiVice''.

** In the novelization, Kyle deliberately shoots the Terminator's arm after it had its laser sight pointed at Sarah. If he'd shot it anywhere else, it would have killed her anyway. This shot is the one that injured its arm in the scene we see later. Further, this fact is actually included in the film but Kyle's amazing shot is very obscured by a FreezeFrameBonus. In slow motion, you can actually see the shotgun slug knock the Terminator's arm away just as it fires.

** Deleted scenes show that the pipe bombs Sarah and Kyle use in the final chase scene weren't actually acquired to kill the Terminator. A subplot had Sarah come to the realization that even if they managed to destroy the T-800, Skynet would just send another one after her and keep going until she was dead. This marks a [[CharacterDevelopment notable shift in her character]], where she goes from frantically running and relying on Kyle to pressuring him to help her destroy Skynet once and for all. She planned to use the pipe bombs to blow up the Cyberdyne Systems facility that would eventually create Skynet. This also explains that her and Kyle ending up in the Cyberdyne robotics factory at the climax [[ContrivedCoincidence wasn't an accident]], they were deliberately planning to blow the place to hell. This storyline would later be followed up on as a major subplot of the sequel.

* AmmunitionBackpack: Terminators in the future sequences wear a pack to fuel their lasers.

* AnkleDrag: In the climax, as the [[WhoNeedsTheirWholeBody legless T-800]] keeps grabbing for Sarah's ankle as she crawls away from him, staying barely ahead.

* AnthropicPrinciple: The film relying on an IdiotBall or ContrivedCoincidence (Sarah just keeps making unlucky phone calls!) to make sure the Terminator can keep being on their tail. If the film is a cat-and-mouse tale not set in a small, confined space (ship, island, mansion, etc.), there has to be ''something'' that happens that keeps the mouse from easily getting away. Either the Terminator has a special way of tracking them or it doesn't. If it has a special way of tracking them, there wouldn't be much point in Reese trying to get Sarah to flee, and would instead try to set up an ambush of some sort. If the Terminator ''doesn't'' have some special way of tracking them then the plot either has to set up contrivances to allow the chase to continue (as it does in the film) or the quarry escapes and the chase (and the film!) is over. So, eliminating these contrived plot devices would change the nature of the story, and not necessarily in a good way.

** Averted with the pipe bombs Kyle throws at the T-800 during the CarChase. While they don't seem to do anything more than make a cloud of smoke, even though they would have created tons of shrapnel that would have, at least, popped the bike's tires, it's a very accurate portrayal. Beside the realistic visuals, blast is shown to be very destructive, when bomb is in direct contact with target, and fragmentation is also realistically uneven. Modern grenades use notched wire or ready fragments for a reason.
* ArtisticLicenseBiology: The writers have [[WordOfGod admitted]] the whole "only things surrounded by living tissue can go back in time" rule has no scientific basis and was conceived purely as a DramaPreservingHandicap, as otherwise Reese could just bring a {{BFG}} or two back with him to kill the Terminator and the movie would be over in five minutes.

** After the RobotWar, a shot of a menacing robot turns out to be a garbage truck.

** During the future flashback, a family appears to be watching television, until a RevealShot shows [[HowTheMightyHaveFallen they've lit a fire inside the smashed television set.]]

* {{BFG}}: The future Terminator's laser cannon.

* BodyguardCrush: Kyle's attraction to Sarah is due to John Connor showing a picture of her, which led to Kyle volunteering for the mission. [[spoiler:This leads to Sarah conceiving John Connor in the first place.]]
* BottomlessMagazines: Noticeably averted with reloading scenes or magazines running empty. An exception is the parking garage chase where sloppy editing caused Arnold to fire numerous times from a pump-action shotgun without racking the slide or inserting more shells. Or driving. Also it's not clear where Kyle Reese got the spare shells to reload his shotgun, since he is not shown taking any spare ammo when he steals it from the police cruiser early in the film. One must assume that at some point between then and the shootout at the Tech Noir, Reese must have found some way to acquire more ammo, perhaps by stealing it from a sporting goods store.

* BurnBabyBurn: Sarah Connor's picture burns in a symbolic manner in one of Kyle's dreams.

** Terminator invokes this upon the police officer [[BullyingADragon who kept telling him to go away and refused to let him see Sarah]]. This is what Terminator meant when he said "I'll be back".

* CherryTapping: The protracted way that the Terminator murders Matt (Ginger's boyfriend). By this point in the narrative, it has been established that the machine can [[AndShowItToYou kill a human with one punch]], not to mention that it also had a pistol (which it even used to kill Ginger after it dealt with Matt). So this trope is being played straight when the Terminator insists on spending several minutes throwing poor Matt around like a ragdoll until the latter finally dies.
* ClarkesThirdLaw: The police dismiss Sarah's claims of the Terminators abilities through mundane explanations, suggesting that PCP exaggerates strength and FeelsNoPain while being able to shrug off gunshots due to body armor. This attitude leads to the Terminator conducting a raid on the police station, proving Kyle and Sarah's claims.

* CoincidentalBroadcast: After the Terminator kills several victims, the police make sure that there's a news broadcast about the killed Sarah Connors. When Sarah is fetched from the restaurant, the newscaster conveniently adds "To recap:" and then repeats the entire story.

* CombatBreakdown: A very drawn-out example happens during the final encounter with the Terminator. Both it and the heroes begin with a car chase. Then both vehicles crash. Kyle was shot during the chase, and the Terminator is then hit and dragged by a truck, leaving both with a limp. The pair runs into a factory to try and lose the Terminator, but winds up trapped and forced to fight in close combat. A resulting explosion leaves the Terminator blown in half, Kyle dead, and Sarah with a severely injured leg. Sarah and the Terminator are both reduced to crawling and the chase continues.

* ConcealmentEqualsCover: {{Averted|Trope}}, as during the Terminator's rampage through the police precinct, he can be seen killing officers by shooting through walls and desks with high-powered, automatic assault rifles and shotguns, exactly as it would happen in real life.
* ContagiousCassandraTruth: In the middle of the film, Sarah Connor seems happy to accept the psychologist's explanation that Kyle Reese is a paranoid schizophrenic, and the KillerRobot is just a man on PCP. By the beginning of the second film, she's locked up in a mental asylum for insisting that Reese's story about the impending apocalypse is true, as well as acting on that belief...
* ContrivedCoincidence: In a case of really bad timing, Sarah calls Ginger, letting the Terminator know that he hasn't successfully killed Sarah Connor just moments after killing Ginger.

* ArtisticLicenseGunSafety: In reality, very few gun stores keep live ammo within a customer's reach on the countertop for reasons that should be obvious even if you haven't seen the film and know what becomes of the gun shop owner. Some stores might have crates of ammunition for sales or special deals on the floor, but gun store employees would pull their own sidearms on any customer who grabbed a box of ammo and had a live weapon in their hands at the same time. Not that a mere sidearm would have any hope of intimidating, much less stopping the Terminator, of course.

* AssholeVictim: The T-800's encounter with the three punks, its first human contact after it arrives in the present day. They start by making fun of the Terminator, but things turn deadly when one of them stabs it -- to no effect. The cyborg responds by [[AndShowItToYou ripping the punk's heart out]]. This is the first hint that the Terminator is '''not''' to be fucked with, and no-one will shed any tears for the dead punks.

* BaitAndSwitch

-->'''Lt. Traxler''': [''shows Sarah a BulletproofVest''] Sarah, this is what they call body armor. Our tac guys wear these. It'll stop a 12-gauge round. This other individual must have been wearing one under his coat. Feel that.\\
'''Sarah''': [''feels the vest''] But what about when he punched through the windshield?\\
'''Det. Vukovich''': He's probably on PCP. Broke every bone in his hand and won't feel it for hours. There was this guy once, you see this scar...?\\
[''Lt. Traxler shoves the armor into Det. Vukovich's chest.'']\\
'''Det. Vukovich''': Thank you. [''Det. Vukovich takes the vest and leaves.'']

-->'''Sarah''': So is Reese crazy?\\
'''Dr. Silberman, a psychologist''': In technical terminology...he's a loon.
* SquashedFlat: [[spoiler: Sarah finally destroys the T-800 for good in a massive industrial press, turning it metal junk.]]

* ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill: A staple of the franchise. When he kills the first Sarah Connor, for example. [[spoiler: The Terminator gets blown up ''twice'', run over at least twice, and shot God knows how many times, and is ''still'' chasing after Sarah. It takes her luring it into a massive industrial press that flattens it into paste before it's ''finally'' dead.]]

* UnsafeHaven: Lt. Traxler assures Sarah Connor she'll be safe in the police station since more then 30 officers are on duty inside. Unfortunately, he doesn't know (or rather, [[CassandraTruth doesn't believe]]) the assailant pursuing Sarah is an armored cyborg from the future that is virtually immune to small arms fire, and he's able to blast his way through the police quite easily.

* VillainsBlendInBetter: Early in the film, the T-800 has a much easier time securing a disguise, weapons etc., while Reese seems to be simply lucky. This is because A) Reese, having grown up after the war, knows little about pre-apocalypse society, while the Terminator can presumably draw on files given to it by Skynet and B) the Terminator can simply take what it wants due to being unstoppable by 20th Century standards. Averted later on, as Reese slowly regains some humanity (better highlighted in deleted scenes) while the Terminator ''loses'' its humanity, with even its flesh starting to rot.

* WhamShot: [[spoiler: At the end of the movie, while Sarah's at a gas station in Mexico, a boy takes a picture of her with an instant camera. After she gives him four bucks for it, she takes a look at it; [[StableTimeLoop it's the same picture John Connor will eventually give Kyle]].]]

-->''[[TheStinger I'll be back.]]''

* UnsafeHaven: Lt. Traxler assures Sarah Connor she'll be safe in the police station since more then 30 officers are on duty inside. Unfortunately, he doesn't know the assailant pursuing Sarah is an armored cyborg from the future that is virtually immune to small arms fire, and he's able to blast his way through the police quite easily.

* UncannyValley:
** [[InvokedTrope Deliberately invoked]] by Arnold's make-up artists. Not only was his face liberally sprayed with vaseline to give his skin a faux-artificial appearance, but his eyebrows were shaved to subtly creep out the viewer even more. In-story, the Terminator gets his eyebrows removed when Reese blows up a car and it runs through the flames anyway. That's also when Reese makes TheReveal about the Terminator's cyborg nature.
** The survivors identified the 600 series by their rubber skin and such.

* DeathBySex:
** [[spoiler:Sarah Connor's roommate Ginger and her boyfriend]] have just finished making love when the Terminator breaks in looking for Sarah.
** [[spoiler: Kyle Reese makes love with Sarah before the climactic fight. He even says that John's father, i.e. him died before Judgement Day. This is foreshadowing.]]

* TruthInTelevision: When Reese knocks out his guard during the Terminator's rampage through the police station, he's knocked out instantly when Kyle rushes him and hits him in the chest with their knee. This might seem far-fetched but this is possible with a technique called a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver_shot liver shot]], although it's notable that Kyle was raised to fight against machines, not humans so it's unclear if he truly knows this move.
* UnbuiltTrope: This film set the gold standard for depictions of a chillingly bleak RobotWar post-nuclear BadFuture, with its mountains of human skulls, flattened cities patrolled by mechanical horrors, and human survivors living in painfully squalid holes in the ground. In spite of this, it also tempers this seemingly impossible vision of HopelessWar with an unusually optimistic message, the whole point of the movie is that, despite how far they've fallen and how little they have to fight back with, humanity still '''[[{{Determinator}} wins]]''' and has Skynet on the ropes so bad that the seemingly invincible machine intelligence gets desperate and has to resort to time travel to save itself.

* AluminiumChristmasTrees: When Reese knocks out his guard during the Terminator's rampage through the police station, he's knocked out instantly when Kyle rushes him and hits him in the chest with their knee. This might seem far-fetched but this is possible with a technique called a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver_shot liver shot]], although it's notable that Kyle was raised to fight against machines, not humans so it's unclear if he truly knows this move.

** Played straight when a terrified Sarah tries to contact the police from Tech Noir. She calls the LAPD emergency line and is put on hold. After trying for a while to get help she gives up and calls Ginger, explaining, "I tried the police and they keep transferring me around." And this is ''after'' Lt. Trexler made getting in contact with the last Sarah Connor in the phone book a top priority since she's almost certainly the killer's next target. (Of course, the {{Irony}} here is that the police are likely transferring her because they're too wrapped up in trying to find the person out to kill her as well as attemtping to contact Sarah herself.)

** At the end of the novelization, two techs discover the Terminator's CPU amongst the debris in the factory. Knowing they have made an exciting discovery, they decide to set up their own company, which becomes Cyberdyne Systems.

* AmmunitionBackpack: The Terminators in the future sequences wear a pack to fuel their lasers.

** May 12, 1984 was a Saturday, not a Thursday. This may be due to the fact that the script was written in 1983, which did have May 12 fall on Thursday.

* ArtisticLicenseGunSafety: In reality, very few gun stores keep live ammunition within reach of a customer on the countertop, for reasons that should be obvious even if you haven't seen the film and know what becomes of the gun shop owner. Some stores might have crates of ammunition for sales or special deals on the floor, but gun store employees would pull their own sidearms on any customer who grabbed a box of ammo and had a live weapon in their hands at the same time. Not that a mere sidearm would have any hope of intimidating, much less stopping the Terminator, of course.
** Kyle steals a gun that has been ''left on the seat of an open and unlocked police car''. One sincerely hopes the incompetent cop who did was summarily fired for his gross stupidity.

* CopKillerManhunt: The T-800 massacres an entire police station in an attempt to get to Sarah Connor. Radio reports later reveal that quite predictably a national manhunt was started for the mysterious gunman. The cops are still looking for the shooter in ''Film/Terminator2JudgmentDay'' to get justice for the officers who were killed on that night.

* DeathByIrony: [[spoiler:The Terminator is ultimately destroyed by an unstoppable, remorseless machine. In this case, a large pneumatic press that Sarah lures him into.]]

* EvilSmellsBad: The Terminator's flesh takes a lot of damage, both due to combat and its own surgery to repair damage. Late in the movie, one scene shows that the flesh is dying and starting to rot, as it's turned noticeably gray and is attracting flies. A janitor asks if [[SmellsOfDeath there's a "dead cat in there"]], but the Terminator responds rudely and resumes its chase against Sarah.

* NoNameGiven: The [[AllThereInTheManual only way]] anyone would know the name of the janitor, or the female soldier fighting alongside Kyle Reese, is from the {{novelization}}.

* NoPlaceForMeThere: A deleted scene had Kyle Reese breaking down in tears as he laments that he doesn't belong in the world of 1984, which to him feels like paradise compared to the hellhole future he comes from. And knowing it was all doomed just made it worse.

* TraumaButton: Kyle gets triggered of painful war memories when he sees heavy equipment at work, particularly their rubber tracks, while he's hiding in a construction site, since it reminds him heavily of the killer machines Skynet built to wipe out the dwindling numbers of humans left and when those machines' tracks ran through piles of human skulls.

A sequel with a [[SequelEscalation much bigger budget]] and a marked [[GenreShift shift]] towards more action, ''Film/Terminator2JudgmentDay'', came out in 1991.

A sequel with a [[SequelEscalation much bigger budget]], ''Film/Terminator2JudgmentDay'', came out in 1991.

''The Terminator'' is the first film in the ''Franchise/{{Terminator}}'' franchise and the second feature film directed by Creator/JamesCameron. Released in 1984, the film differs from its successors in its ActionHorror angle, compared to the more strictly action-focused direction of later installments.

* While Ginger's hapless boyfriend didn't have an icicle's chance in hell of beating the Terminator in hand-to-hand combat, he hung in a lot longer than anyone would expect, even managing to tackle the cybernetic killing machine hard enough to make it stagger back.

* PoliceAreUseless: Downplayed. The police are shown to be highly intelligent, figuring out the pattern of the killings almost immediately, take advantage of the power of the press to warn Sarah Connor, and can readily explain the mysterious gunman's seeming invulnerability. They're just WrongGenreSavvy. Furthermore, their armament in the precinct station (up to [=M16=] rifles) demonstrates they're definitely ready for most disturbances. Unfortunately, the Terminator is just [[ImmuneToBullets too tough]] for them. After the police station massacre, a radio newscaster reports that a state-wide manhunt for the Terminator was underway.

** Reese initially steal's a police officer's Smith & Wesson Model 15 reolver and a stolen pump-action police shotgun, classic "good" weapons, though he does saw off the shotgun's barrel for easier concealment. Later, after escaping the police station, he uses Lt. Traxler's police revolver, another "good" gun.

* DidntThinkThisThrough: At the end, Reese takes on the Terminator with a metal bar. Damaged or not, it's still a near indestructible metal robot and makes him pay for it. [[spoiler:When he sticks a bomb on it he jumps down some stairs and it still gets him killed. Turns out being six feet from a bomb isn't much better than 2.]]

* FailedASpotCheck: A big guy matching the description of the Sarah Connor killer walks into a police station and asks to see Sarah Connor, and the police officer at the front desk doesn't seem the least bit suspicious. Not that he would have been much of a deterrent to the T-800 either way.

** The street punks whom the T-800 mugged for their clothes. In fairness to them, they could not have known it was a killer cyborg from the future impervious to blade weapons, but they are still confronting a really muscular guy who was either mentally unstable or on some drugs to be walking stark naked and unaware of it.

One night in 1984, two men emerge naked from two separate electrical storms in UsefulNotes/LosAngeles. One stays low and out of sight to avoid the authorities. The other, played by Creator/ArnoldSchwarzenegger, picks up a phone book so he can find women named Sarah Connor-- and kill them. When a young diner waitress also named Sarah Connor (Creator/LindaHamilton) hears that two people with her name have been killed within a day, she begins to worry about the killer coming for her next. As the killer murders two people in Sarah's home in an effort to find her, Sarah hides in a nightclub; the killer catches up with her there, but she is rescued by the other man, Kyle Reese.

* {{Determinator}}: Both Kyle Reese and, of course, the Terminator, the latter being ''the'' TropeCodifier (if not the partial TropeNamer).

* HeadCrushing: A desperate Sarah Connor manages to activate a hydraulic press, which crushes the relentless killing machine that's been pursuing her the whole time. While the evil robot's power supply is in its thorax, its "brain" is in its head, which is shown being SquashedFlat until its RedEyesTakeWarning go dim to indicate that it has permanently deactivated

* ATeamFiring: ZigZagged. Like most '80s action films, most characters fire everything from the hip, and how effective it is depends on who they're shooting at. Reese, Vudovich, and several others hit the Terminator dead-on with hip-fire, but of course, it has [[ImmuneToBullets little effect]]. The Terminator, meanwhile, both hip fires ''and'' uses proper aiming techniques, which works fine against the police, but is less effective against our heroes.

* ClothingConcealedInjury: During the first car chase between the Terminator and the protagonists, he is hit in the eye by one of Reese's shotgun blasts. After some repair work, he uses his sunglasses to cover up the injury.