The Terminator is a low-budget miracle, with certain scenes done using sophisticated front projection and others just shot with James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger breaking windows in an alley without a crew or insurance. It emerged from the slasher-movie economy and rewrote the rules of movies in a way that makes it feel inevitable—they teach Terminator in screenwriting courses, Stan Winston worked on every good effects movie between 1984 and the release of the first Iron Man, and Arnold became a megastar.

When filming 1981’s Conan the Barbarian, Arnold supposedly asked director John Milius to give him very specific physical directions so he could move without thinking, and there’s a lot of that in the Terminator’s physicality. His performance is full of little grace notes no one else has ever really managed as a robot, like the way his eyes move before his head does. As mentioned above, Schwarzenegger was influenced by Yuul Brynner’s unstoppable Westworld death-golem, along with Clint Eastwood’s minimalist line delivery. Comedy would eventually soften him but he’s an amazing, intimidating screen presence here, the embodiment of Kyle Reese’s description of the T-800: “It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop… ever, until you are dead!” In the hands of Cameron and editor Mark Goldblatt, he is a creature that has more in common with Albert Speer architecture than a movie monster.

Arnold is a body designed only for killing, and while we now think of it as the basic element of robots/cyborgs on film, watching his skin get ripped off and reveal the robot underneath is so iconic it’s just how you show the audience a character is a robot now. The mechanical skeleton marching out of a fire, an image that came to Cameron in a fever dream while he was filming the doomed B-movie Piranha 2 in Jamaica, is iconic and justifiably one of the most ripped-off scenes in movie history. One of the more marvelous things about that scene is that a robot skeleton that can’t be killed is less scary than the actor who was playing him.

In Terminator 2: Judgment Day Arnold returns as the titular Terminator, now rewired to protect John Connor and eventually shown developing tangential emotions. T2 is so good and remains so beloved that we’ve all forgotten how the ad campaign spoiled the first hour of the movie, in which Robert Patrick’s police-uniform-clad T-1000 and the more classically hitman-coded Arnold (carrying a rifle in a box of roses like Chow Yun-Fat in Hard Boiled) are both chasing the adolescent John Connor, and you’re crucially not supposed to know who the good guy is until the exact moment John is in the crosshairs.

The fact that the cop terminator turns out to be the evil one makes sense when you remember that before he became a late-in-life billionaire, James Cameron was a libertarian gun nut who hated cops; he’s said he made the T-1000 take the form of a police officer because cops “think of all non-cops as less than they are, stupid, weak and evil.” In the original the cops are completely useless at best, malicious cannon fodder at worst; along with dressing its murderous knife-man villain as a cop, T2 has the reprogrammed good guy Arnold mowing down every cop who wanders onscreen, even if he shoots to maim rather than kill.