The Terminator character kills the other two Sarah Connors and anyone who gets in his way in “cold blood.” Even when someone shoots it, it gets up as if nothing happened and keeps going. It is a machine that can walk, talk, and speak like a human, with the bonuses of mimicking voices and being almost physically indestructible. It is less intelligent than a human but superior as a military unit because it does not feel the human weaknesses of pain, love, and fear. It is the pinnacle of AI.
The Terminator is also a representation of Death. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” by Jonathan Edwards, an influential Christian sermon in the Great Awakening, portrays God as unstoppable, that only God’s mercy prevents sinners from going straight to Hell. Reese blows up a eighteen-wheeler with the Terminator in a massive explosion and it survives, and even when he puts a grenade right in its metal body it’s upper half chases Sarah. From a religious standpoint, the Terminator represents this God-like figure, unstoppable and inevitable once Sarah is doomed for a crime she has yet to commit. From this standpoint, Reese is an angel, dropping in from another time to save Sarah and do battle with the Terminator.
In most movies, there are good guys and bad guys, but the bad guys are people too and they were likely hurt by other bad people to make them like they are. Even though he’s a downright terrible person, I can sympathize with Voldemort - he’s a guy with serious childhood issues and a mental disorder, which is why he became a merciless killer. But we can’t and don’t sympathize with the Terminator character because he is an unfeeling death machine working for other unfeeling death machines, quite unlike robot portrayals in Transformers, making the conflict in this movie very black-and-white.
