The Terminator Is a Christmas Movie

It's become a cliche to call Die Hard a Christmas movie you didn't realize was a Christmas movie. But another '80s classic got there first. Though it doesn't take place during the holidays, The Terminator is a Christmas movie — and one of the purest Christmas movies of all.

While many Christmas stories are about vague notions of kindness, or family, or faith, The Terminator is the rare Christmas story that pulls closely from the New Testament, to retell the story of the birth of Jesus Christ.

No, it isn't obvious on on the surface.

Also Read: 10 Terminator Revelations We Bet You Didn't Know

Like all great sci-fi movies, The Terminator uses allegory to make you think about familiar ideas in a new way. It is the story of a teenage waitress, Sarah Connor, who is hunted by a merciless, unstoppable killer from the future — Schwarzenegger's T-800 iteration of The Terminator. It wants to kill her before the birth of her son, John, who in the future will be the savior of humankind.

Sound familiar? A teenager hunted by a powerful force afraid of the savior? It's the Biblical story of King Herod of Judea, who ordered the "massacre of the innocents" — the murder of Bethlehem's newborns – because he feared that a savior would rise from among them, and would one day seize his kingdom. Like John Connor, this savior would have the initials JC.

And like Sarah Connor, Jesus Christ's mother, Mary, would be visited by an angel. In the Gospel of Luke, the angel Gabriel tells Mary to be not afraid, and that she will soon give birth to the Son of God, though she has never been with a man.

Also Read: Our 7 Favorite Christmas Movies in Disguise

In The Terminator, Gabriel and the immaculate conception are replaced by guardian angel Kyle Reece (Michael Biehn) — a man sent from the future by John Connor himself to protect his mother from the Terminator. Sarah and Kyle fall for each other, and he becomes John's father.

Sarah and Mary have almost the same questions. In the Gospel of Luke, Mary asks Gabriel, "How will this happen? I have never had a man?" In The Terminator, Sarah Connor asks, "Why me?"

An Interesting Aside About Why The Terminator Is a Christmas Movie

Interestingly, James Cameron came up with the idea of The Terminator in Rome, not so far from the Vatican. He has said the film originated with a dream of the metallic, fiery iteration of Terminator we see at the end of the film. But it's hard not to see how his proximity to the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church could influence his plotting of The Terminator. (We cannot find any reference to Cameron commenting on the theory that The Terminator is a Christmas movie.)

Different though their settings may be, it's notable how similar the plots are between the 1984 sci-fi classic The Terminator and Netflix's new Mary, which tells the story of Jesus' birth from his mother's perspective. Consider the very cool. Terminator-esque logline when Mary was announced in April:

"Propelled into circumstances far beyond her control, Mary is shunned following the otherworldly conception of her child and forced into hiding. King Herod’s relentless drive to maintain power at any cost ignites the murderous pursuit of the newborn child that he believes is a threat to his reign on the throne. In a breathless ticking-clock pursuit, the film takes us on a journey as young Mary and Joseph are on the run, smuggling their baby, Jesus."

Of course, in The Terminator, the murderous pursuit comes at bidding of an A.I., Skynet, and not a king.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Christmas Movies

Schwarzenegger has made other, more overt Christmas movies — including 1996's Jingle All the Way and a little-known Christmas in Connecticut remake that he directed for basic cable after completing Terminator 2.

The story of that remake is the subject of Malcolm Gladwell's latest Revisionist History podcast, and when we saw the title — "A Very Terminator Christmas" — we assumed it would be about the fact that The Terminator is a Christmas movie. But it is not. So we wrote this.

Finally, we just have to point out, even though Jesus Christ stops short of saying it at the time of his cruxifixion: He and The Terminator have the exact same catch phrase.

Main image: Arnold Schwarzenegger as The Terminator. Orion.