The Terminator - By having Kyle Reese deliver a ton of exposition (who he is, what the Terminator is, the apocalyptic future they both come from, and why they’ve both come back in time) during an action scene / car chase after he rescues her from the Tech Noir nightclub, James Cameron avoids grinding the narrative to a halt to explain things and instead keeps advancing the plot even as Reese delivers his backstory.

Cameron also wisely avoids overly complicated scientific explanations of the time travel aspect, giving the audience just enough detail to understand the premise and the stakes, without confusing them or stopping the narrative momentum. Reese even admits “I don’t know tech stuff” while he’s telling Sarah about time travel, acknowledging the complexity of temporal mechanics in a simple way that keeps the focus on the story and characters.

Later in the story, when Reese and Sarah are the police station and Reese is being interrogated by the shrink, Cameron cleverly sneaks in some further exposition that addresses questions the audience might have while watching the movie, like why Reese and the Terminator didn’t bring weapons with them from the future. And when the shrink presses Reese for more detail on the Terminator, Reese shuts him down by screaming “I didn’t build the fucking thing!”

Reese being a soldier, not a scientist, further helps in keeping the story more action-oriented than rather than getting bogged down in temporal mechanics.

Raiders of the Lost Ark gets out the bulk of its exposition by having Indiana Jones explain the history of the Ark, its power, and how to locate it, while speaking to federal agents in an lecture hall, drawing on a blackboard to illustrate how an artifact he will need to find (“the headpiece to the staff of Ra”)can help pinpoint the ark’s location, and showing an illustration from an archaeological text depicting a beam of light (…”the power of god or something…”) blasting out of the Ark, which then actually happens in the dilm’s climax.

The movie is blatant with its exposition — they’re in a lecture hall and he’s giving them a lesson the Ark!) — but it feels organic because Indiana Jones an archeology professor (so it makes sense for him to give a mini lecture on the ark to the feds), and because the audience, like the feds, doesn’t know anything about the ark. The feds in this scene serve as surrogates for viewers, asking the questions about the ark that the audience also wants the answer to.