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No-one had been waiting for it with sweaty palms and high expectations. After all, it starred Arnold Schwarzenegger whose biggest hit to that point was Conan The Barbarian.
As for the director, James Cameron, he was still trying to live down the cringe-making horror that was Piranha 2: Flying Killers.
The American press greeted The Terminator warmly and by the time it arrived on British screens the following year, the movie had attracted something of a cult following.
Cameron's tale, inspired by Harlan Ellison's Outer Limits episode The Soldier, was a fiendishly clever sci-fi thriller in which an unstoppable cyborg is sent back from the future to 1984. His mission: To kill the mother of a resistance leader who will spell doom for his race of metal cohorts.
An unremittingly bleak thriller, it was the perfect vehicle to turn Schwarzenegger from jobbing B-movie actor into an A-list star attraction. Linda Hamilton - Cameron's future wife - played the renegade Sarah Connor while Michael Biehn was her desperate saviour, Kyle Reese.
The movie's release at a time when videos had turned from a novelty item into a household necessity ensured its cult following grew at an exponential rate in VHS form. As Cameron went off to make the sublime Aliens, everyone thought a sequel would be imminent by the late Eighties.
Alas, the rights to the movie proved a logistical nightmare and Cameron would spend months making The Abyss before Terminator 2: Judgment Day finally saw the light of day in 1991.
Despite costing about $100million more than its predecessor, basically the plot features more of the same. The major twist is that Arnie plays the protector as a streamlined assassin - Robert Patrick - is sent to kill the 10-year-old John Connor while mum Sarah tries to kill the man who made the chip which created the villainous computer firm Skynet.
Still following?
Well, you don't need a degree in astrophysics to understand the plot. Just sit back and enjoy as Arnie brings the LA police force to their knees, a pumped- up Linda Hamilton gives the performance of a lifetime as the stressed-out mum and the visual effects wizards at Industrial Light and Magic create cinematic history with their mercurial villain.
Full marks also go to Stan Winston, the make-up guru who went on to breathe life into the Jurassic Park dinosaurs and create those beer-loving frogs in the smash adverts.
After T2 grossed well over $500million worldwide, needless to say there's been much talk about a third entry in the series. However, with Cameron taking a well-earned rest after his Titanic success, it could be 2001 before that sees the light of day.
Schwarzenegger is more than a little keen to reprise the role of the world's favourite cyborg and if his upcoming $100million thriller End of Days flops as badly as Batman and Robin and Jingle All The Way then its production may be a matter of financial necessity rather than personal preference.
© 1999 Roger Crow
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