The Terminator at 40: did James Cameron see into the future?

The 1984 sci-fi thriller offers a grim view of the dangers that ‘the machines’ might pose for humanity as well as one of the most thrilling experiences of the decade

For many of the great speculative science fiction classics, the future has not come to pass. The island of Manhattan was not converted into a maximum security prison by 1997. No manned space odysseys before or after 2001 have reached Jupiter. 2010 was not the year we made contact. The flying cars and bioengineered replicants of the dystopian Los Angeles of Blade Runner were not in place by 2019, and the hoverboards of 2024 do not actually hover, unlike the wheel-free skateboards of 2015 in Back to the Future Part II.

But what about the future of James Cameron’s The Terminator? No need to worry about “the machines” rising from the ashes of a nuclear fire or a decades-long war to exterminate mankind. We still have five years until Los Angeles 2029 AD is a post-apocalypse lorded over by AI and there’s certainly not a zero per cent chance that robot tanks will crush a grim landscape of human skulls while a pocket of survivors scurry from the laser fire of drones from above. The technology that helps plagiarize grad-school dissertations today could be the same technology that annihilates mankind tomorrow.

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The Terminator at 40: did James Cameron see into the future?

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