Terminator Salvation: Officially The “Feel Disappointed” Movie of the Summer

Posted by ScuzzBuster

May 28, 2009

t41shet First I guess I should warn anyone reading this review considering Terminator Salvation that I am a mild apologist for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Yes, I enjoyed that unapologetically even though I fully admit that it was a very pale followup to Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which I still consider one the greatest sci-fi action flicks of all time as well as number one on the list of most influential digital effects films of all time in the article I’ve been picking away at for the past 4 months chronicling the most influential digital effects films of all time. Okay, I’ll get around to finishing that article this summer. In any case, this makes it very difficult to reconcile the fact that even though I think Terminator Salvation is a much better movie than T3, I have some serious problems with it.

I’m not big on recounting “anecdotal” reviews from casual moviegoers heading out of the theater, but I think the most revealing one sentence review came from one of the two gentleman walking out of Salvation ahead of me: “What the hell were they thinking? Did they see any of the other films?”
t4gain Well, my initial reaction is that the director McG, whatever the hell that means, did in fact view the other films. I haven’t even checked the box office take for T4’s opening weekend yet by I’m going to make a bold prediction that this is going to sink fast and straight over the next 2 to 4 weeks because this ride isn’t really very interesting, adds little or nothing of value to Terminator mythology and is lacking in the basic element any action film needs to at least make a decent box office showing: fun. This movie is a big boatload of no fun, no character development and, very little consideration or respect for what has attracted fans to the Terminator series to begin with.

With this in mind, the big plan here has been to make this grandiose prequel/sequel trilogy to round out the saga. I’m not sure that the studio is going to be real keen on the several hundred million dollar investment it’s going to take to make T5 and T6 at this point.

funmachinewar This was supposed to be the film we had been hoping to get a peek at even as we walked out of of T2 all those years ago. A gritty futuristic war film of mankind against the machines looked cool as hell in flashes in the earlier flicks. What we really hadn’t considered at the time are some of the questions that immediately rush to the forefront while watching this one. For instance, if the machines are so damned advanced and badass is it really the most logical extension of Skynet’s technology to develop 50 foot tall bipedal humanoid-like robots that shoot projectiles? I mean, in all honesty couldn’t they have just continued to nuke the hell out of every major and minor population center on the planet until the radiation killed everything not caught in the initial blasts? Couldn’t they just napalm the crap out of every humanoid on the planet with air bombardment rather dedicating entire major factories to coming up with human shaped robots with biological skin to infiltrate and kill one person at a time? Yes, I know, that’s the basis for the first two films, but in the world of Terminator Salvation, where mankind is reduced to a handful of pockets relying on hand guns, a severely depleted military and eating plates of rotting coyote corpses, how saavy do the machines really have to be to finish us off?

Now granted, I would happily be overlooking these little logical flaws had I walked out of this film whistling happily and being overtly sexually aroused by how cool and exciting it all was like I was a couple of weeks ago dancing out of the Star Trek opening at 12:30 on Friday morning, but these are the logic lapses you tend to spend a long time mulling over during the extended periods of boredom and mediocrity of a big budget film that looks about as technically advanced as the original Mad Max.

We are given a sufficiently skillful brooding performance by Christian Bale as John Conner. Wanting to know more about John Conner? You won’t get anything resembling any real character development here. We have him yelling and shooting a lot interspersed with melancholy scenes of him listening to tape recordings of Linda Hamilton’s voice telling him the things he needs to know about Skynet. Forgive me on this, but shouldn’t he have gotten the complete earful and education on this between meeting the T-800 in T2 and judgment day in T3? I mean, how much additional insight did mom really have that he wouldn’t have known by that point?

The real flaw here with Conner is that if we’re going to pivot the success of a trilogy of films on this character we need to relate to him and at least see some type of development and drama around him. All we know is that he’s a pissy young soldier who puts his own interests (ie: saving Kyle Reese) ahead of just about anything else. Well, that and his wife his pregnant. I guess this is the same chick he ended with at the end of T3. Forgive me on that, I said I enjoyed T3, but I didn’t enjoy it enough to ever watch it again after initially seeing it in the theater.

sam Let’s continue to hit some things that really nagged me about Terminator Salvation. The story at hand, what little there is of it, centers on this convicted killer (Sam Worthington) who signs his body to science over while on death row in 2003. When he wakes up clueless 15 years later he finds himself trying to figure out what the hell is going on. I can’t go too far into what happens with this character without spoilers, but suffice to say that whatever happened to him in the intervening 15 years severely compromises not only what we know about Terminator mythology from the previous films, but seems to come in to direct conflict with the current state of Skynet and the Terminator technology as established in this film, too. His entire existence is never really explained to even make sense within the context of Terminator Salvation. He’s simply some awkward rogue element that suddenly the entire saga relies on us not asking any real questions about until the final cheesy overwrought emotional heart tugging moments at the conclusion of this movie. In the end, I stopped caring about what the hell this character was about anyway and was simply just saying to myself “you gotta be kidding, this is the best they could come up with to put a cap on this thing?” It had the emotional punch of throwing the ending to Beaches or Terms of Endearment on to the end of a war movie.

reese The only character that really worked even partially apart from a small supporting role for the always bad-ass Michael Ironside, was Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese. Ironically, he was the only actor in the Star Trek film I disliked in his annoying turn as Pavel Chekov. Yelchin gave a fairly entertaining few scenes as the young Kyle Reese, but it was lost in the rest of the mess.

cyclet4 All around, Terminator Salvation was really a disappointing and unspectacular addition to the Terminator series. However, I didn’t totally hate it. There were a couple of good action sequences, but only one really kick ass action set piece a little over half way through that was an attention grabber. This involved a massive (and as I mentioned earlier, totally illogical) humanoid Terminator attacking a group of human survivors at a gas station transitioning into a kick ass truck/motorcycle chase that ended up being the only sequence that really even held a candle to the most exciting moments in T2. Of course, also begging the question of why Skynet would need motorcylces, but forgivable since it was the only “great” sequence in the film. And again, Christian Bale’s performance was fine, but the entire screenplay was lacking of any real substance around him.

I imagine this film will make enough that they’ll continue to move forward with T5 and probably finish this thing out and I’ll give those a shot, but ultimately I imagine there are a lot of fans my age that walked out of Terminator 2 about 18 years ago, young stupid and jazzed as hell at seeing one helluva film that will be debating endlessly on the drive home after this one wondering if there really was anything worthwhile here. Maybe just enough to say that that hardest of the die hard Terminator fans may get something out of it, though probably not from a couple of completely puzzling and awkward tips of the hat to specific lines in the first two films. I’ll spoil it for you right now, Yelchin spits out a “come with me if you want to live” and we get an “I’ll be back” that’s uttered that officially convinces me that it should be against federal law for anyone other than Schwarzenegger to utter that line in a major motion picture. Quite frankly, the way those two lines are thrown in don’t inspire a “that was cool” reaction nearly as much as they inspire a “what the hell was that?” reaction.

t41 Quite honestly, with the way the screenplay is structured there’s really almost no good explanation or backstory given to allow movie goers with no understanding of who John Conner and Kyle Reese are to know why the hell Reese is so damned important in the first place other than a couple of passing, off-hand references to him going back in time and being vital to the future of the human race. So there we have the dreaded issue of not being enough information for anyone that doesn’t know the story and way too much reliance on people that do to fill in the massive gaps of relevant information in the screenplay to tie this in any meaningful way to the rest of the films.

For those of you just wondering if you should wait for DVD or Video on Demand for this I will let one spoiler go now, so you can stop reading if you care…
For the record, the rumors are true and we do get a rather meaty action scene with the governer of California near the end, but it was done in such a manner that I’m not even sure that they needed him to actually do anything for it, but we do get a couple of naked Arnold’s going wacko. So enjoy if you must.

My final recommendation? If you read this far, be your own best judge.

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