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telephone book. There are only three of them and, of course, by the storytelling Rule of Three, it coldly wipes out two before finally locking onto the right one. But by this time she has a helper, Kyle, another figure from the future, this time fully human, who has been sent to protect her by the resistance leader, her son, as yet unborn. The Terminator's seeming invincibility, in that it can never be destroyed, is of course, only a reworking in modern terms of that archetypal motif familiar from so many earlier myths and stories, from Hercules's Hydra to Dracula: the monster's capacity, however many times the hero manages to cut off its head or hack it to pieces, simply to re-form itself and reappear as good (or bad) as new. The film thus becomes like one of those Tom and Jerry cartoons in which cat and mouse repeatedly flatten or blow each other to bits, before they jump up again as if nothing has happened.

Eventually the heroine and Kyle escape just long enough for him to make her pregnant, before a final nightmare chase when the machine closes in to destroy them. Kyle manages in a heroic, suicidal gesture to blow both the Terminator and himself to pieces. But still the machine re-emerges, to crawl relentlessly after the heroine through a gigantic metal press. And it is of course she who, according to the late-twentieth-century's gender-reversal, ends up playing the archetypal role of the hero, by managing in the nick of time to bring the press crashing down, imprisoning and crushing the monster beyond repair. It is as if Perseus or St George had been overcome by their monsters, leaving their Princesses to finish it off. But at least our heroine is now pregnant with the hero of the future, and the film ends with her in Mexico, driving off as a great storm brews up, full of foreboding for the future.

Judgement Day, set some years later, shows the boy John as a young tearaway who had been adopted after his birth by a suburban family because his mother Sarah is locked away in a lunatic asylum. She had been certified as insane because of her babbling on about how her son's father was a man sent from the future to make her pregnant. Again two figures from the future then appear, but this time both are humanoid computers which have been sent to track John down at all costs.

One is the stony-faced Schwarzenegger, re-born from his earlier destruction. When the other, who can take on the outward appearance of any human being, disguises himself as a policeman, we are meant to assume he must be a new protector-figure, sent to save the young hero from the deadly Terminator. But we then learn, after various exhibitions of mutual violence and mayhem, that their roles are in fact reversed. Our old friend the Terminator is now the `goody, sent from the future by John in his adult self, to ensure that he survives to play his future role as resistance leader. The `policeman' is an even more deadly brand of Terminator, sent by the totalitarian computer system to ensure that John and his mother are eliminated. The `good' Terminator saves Sarah in the nick of time from destruction by his rival in the mental hospital, and escapes with her and the boy to a kind of `hippy encampment in Mexico (a typical `inferior realm' in which the seeds of redemption are destined to germinate). Here he reveals he has been programmed to do anything the boy orders him to do. John's mother, watching them play together, sentimentally muses that he is the ideal, strong, protective `father' her son never had; although, being a machine, he of course has no comprehension of human feelings and cannot, for instance, understand why they sometimes cry.

Sarah also now discovers that, at this very moment, a brilliant scientist called Dyson, a black American, is putting the final touches to the super-computer system which is destined eventually to launch a nuclear holocaust and take over the world. She realises she must avert this catastrophe by destroying his research institute. And although she storms into Dyson's family home with all the violence of a Terminator