Parallels with the Terminator

I can't find any discussion, and I'm surprised I can't, about this films close parallels and symmetries with The Terminator. My thoughts last night were:

I have always heard The Brother from Another Planet is a kind of minor classic, and I've always liked John Sayles, so I'm checking it out. And right from the first few minutes, I couldn't stop thinking: I am not sure there are two movies that mirror each other so closely as this and The Terminator. Here we are, in 1984. Two Roger Corman School of Filmmaking grads in Sayles and James Cameron make science-fiction movies about a fish out of water being pursued by relentless inhuman automatons into a present-day, urban environment, and both are totally self conscious about the times in terms of culture and technology (obscure examples of 80's pop constantly coming from radios, and that sort of fetishistic obsession with video games that marked '80's films trying to be current.)

Sayles's movie is innocent, mostly fun, whimsical in a lyrical way; the Terminator is grim, message-obsessed, deeply involved in a theme of self-destruction. Brother's characters play video games and struggle against injustice as survivors and imperfect companions whereas the Terminator's characters are tragically oblivious both to the Terminator's violence and what their future holds. In Brother there are two pursuers, in Cameron, one Terminator. Sayles imagines compassion from another world, Cameron a future that confirms all our worst fears. One movie's about black culture, the other mostly about white. New York City's dynamic Harlem for Brother, a very middle-America kind of LA for Schwartzenegger. Sayles's film engages race and subcultures on a level that's relatively serious given the tone of the film, and quite sincere; Cameron uses these as a shallower background. Brother has hokey, fun chase and fight scenes; for The Terminator, bloody violence and harrowing suspense are the core of the film's appeal. No one believes Michael Biehn's articulate, prophetic ravings; everyone in Sayle's film becomes engaged with Joe Morton's Brother because he can't speak, and they see in him what they want to see, like a Zelig or Forrest Gump.

For all the oppositions in style and theme, bracketed by the strikingly similar plots I mentioned, the two films have odd rhymes, especially in their sci-fi tropes. Both involve a character purposely removing his own eye from its socket. Both depict the transmission of people the other world (outer space or the future) with flashing lights in empty urban lots encased by chain-link fences. Both have a fascination with working-class characters.

Now, I haven't looked up the story behind these two films, and as of writing this I haven't read anyone else's account of these parallels (no doubt many have noticed them). And it's obvious Sayles and Cameron must have had professional connections to each other from the Corman days -- there's the actor overlap (Joe Morton, the Cyberdine scientist whose family is threatened in T2 plays the lead as The Brother). But even so, the symmetrical and common features of these two films are striking, and fun to check out.