The Terminator (1984) and Le Samourai (1967)

With its startling pace, aggressive economy and fierce bite, The Terminator is the perfect movie of its kind, whatever kind it is. For the most part, it is a singularly mean piece of work, frightfully unfamiliar, with its stark visuals, steampunk flash-forwards and throbbing synth score. What appeals most, however, is its simplicity of intent. Although the plot throws up intriguing warps of the mind, the film is, effectively a hunt, from the opening moments, until the crushing blowout of an ending. It's a film defined by movement: Reese, Sarah and the T800 move from place to place to place, shredding away at themselves as they go, heading closer and closer to oblivion. It is this sense of direction, of furtive movement which makes an immediately tangible comparison with Jean Pierre Melville's stunningly poised noir Le Samourai plausible. The sheer restlessness is unusually disturbing. When I recall either film, it is the anxious momentum which plays on my mind, the shadowy crossings and creepings are a point of entry with which to consider both films.

Undeniably, there are startling surface similarities between the two films, even though, in many ways they are so vastly independent of one another's essential meaning. The most overwhelming point of contact is at the fundamental depiction of the two lead characters, Jeff Costello and the T800. Foremost, they are both hitmen, both ideally equipped to execute. Jeff lives by a strict code of conduct, a self-imposed Bushido rigor which he leans on to detach himself from the human world of feeling. The T800 is driven by a code of a different sort, mechanically programmed for a purpose similar to Jeff's nonetheless. Each moves from kill to kill – without compassion or remorse (perhaps each equally incapable of such things) – achieving some kind of masculine ideal: they are the ultimate hunters, tracking their prey through the sodden, morbid city.

It would be willfully ignorant to ignore the cool with which both characters are brought to life. The stoic deadpan with which Jeff conducts his grisly affairs is the potent extrapolation of the Noir man - an unfeeling, haunted anti-hero, not too far removed from its obvious model, Alan Ladd's Raven in This Gun for Hire. Delon's angular face is impenetrable, inscrutable and as coldly affronting as that of any automaton. The instantly iconic introduction to the T800, born from the lightening cracks of split-time necessarily owes much to the awesome novelty of Arnold Schwarzenegger's hideously (gloriously) sculpted body. It inspires a new kind of cinematic wonder, every male in the audience openly envious of his bursting muscular frame and his total physical dominance over everything he encounters. In balance, Jeff offers a kind of dispassionate sex-appeal, he is a hero in total control - he fears nothing because he knows his life is worth nothing. The T800, on the other hand, has no life to speak of, but poses an overwhelming threat to the lives of others. So, they are the two abject terminators: the preset man, the T800 - programmed to destroy - and the reset man, Jeff - self-taught to reject the human feeling that interferes with his willfully meaningless existence. These men of extreme purpose are ever alert, constantly awake and ready for anything. It is the essentially pure nature of their work that allows them to function.

The sharp formal lines of each film are also strikingly evocative, as is the use of hyper-noir lighting, cutting disfiguringly across and through the faces of characters. The films share similar locales, too: side-streets, back-rooms with windows flared temporarily by passing headlights, the soaked, choked subterranea of forgotten passages. The opening of Le Samourai pictures Jeff in his room, doing nothing, switched off. The room itself is almost identical to the motel in which the T800 repairs himself. It is a notably shit little place, bare and measly. These men are made of internal complexities which their external surroundings cannot possibly reflect. As Jeff leaves his room, he stares in the mirror, his face a cold mask, his aspect strangely alien. In the famous comparative scene within James Cameron's film, the T800 fixes himself, ultimately self-reliant like the noir heroes before him, removing his eye with much the same composure as Jeff regards his distant reflection. Later in Le Samourai, Jeff mends his forearm with little fuss, despite his gruesome wound. I have no idea whether or not Cameron was influenced by Melville's film, but these connections are eerily resonant when the film's are viewed as companions.

Ultimately, Jeff, like some Bressonian refugee, cannot refuse his humanity forever, he struggles to retain the distance he has so carefully kept until now, betrayed by his human weakness, his vital inability to act independently from those to which he is fatally, genetically bound - and it is this that feels like the film's real tragedy. Jeff, like all of us, cannot finally maintain a control over the events that shape his life. He is desperate to be the one who decides the way he should live but forces beyond his control deny him that right. He is destroyed by instinct, that which propels us to find love, sex and mess. The moment he lets his guard down is a moment too long. The T800’s doom is sealed by a certain kind of love, too – the mother’s love for her unborn child, a natural protection instinct that proves more reliable, finally than any artificially induced objective. The total simplicity with which both Jeff and the T800 operate is betrayed by the ugly inspirations of creatures less focused than they.

It's for certain that the T800 cannot be reasoned with, but he is not alone. It is not reasonable for Reese and Sarah to evade him because, logically, he is stronger, smarter and more automatically consistent than them. They triumph through their own lack of reason, just as it is destroyed by its absence of such processes. Jeff too suffers from a conflict of inductive thought. In the context in which he has caged himself, it is reasonable to continue to be the remote man of intent. However, behaving in a way that will seal his doom, he entangles himself in a petticoat mess and is ground down by his pursuers. Both Jeff and the T800 are finally brought down by the inconsistency of their environments, an unpredictable world that interferes with their sincere directives. Inhabiting a joyless existence, then, isn’t what it's cracked up to be.

Because of their respective circumstances (Jeff is flesh and blood, the T800 near invincible), they are forced to move in different patterns. Jeff zags and weaves to evade those of superior strength and number (the police). The T800 moves in straight lines, sure, always, of victory. But in this way they are both ghosts or spectres that haunt the city, one melting through the shadows, the other, as in the jaw-raking precinct sequence, walking through walls, leaving behind him a trail of destruction. More often than not, both leave corpses who, if they could talk, probably couldn't describe the ghouls who killed them. They are of the margins, one not even a man, final outsiders, undone by a code that corrupts their own.