Terminator Salvation

Review by Jason Gaston

 

Judgment Day has come and gone and now, bereft of time travel and Arnold Schwarzenegger himself, the time has come for the resistance to rise and battle the forces of Skynet for the very survival of the human race.

In the resistance, we find John Conner, now all grown up into a broody Christian Bale directly off the set of Batman Ruins the Movie.  With Terminator Salvation, we get more of the same grumbly gravely grunting that works for Batman for some reason, but in Terminator it becomes tedious and ridiculous very quickly.

Christian's Conner is not the leader of the resistance, but rather just a man who is growing into legendary status thanks to the myths around him.  This doesn't set well with resistance command who have a very big mission on the way to stop the metal menace once and for all in a plan so perfect that there's absolutely no way it could possibly fail.

None whatsoever.

Next into the fray comes a man named Marcus Wright who we last saw on death row shortly before Judgment Day.  He doesn't know where he's been for the last few years or how he survived death at all, but when he meets up with a young teenager named Kyle Reese, who we all know is John Conner's future daddy, Wright gets some direction - he has to find John Conner whose voice encourages them to keep fighting over the radio.

I hate to be the one to say this, but… it’s bad. Not  Batman and Robin bad, but bad to the point of that it needed two or three rewrites to become good.  The problem with Salvation is its inane need to shoehorn characters into the movie that has no right to be there.  John Conner, for example, was completely unnecessary.  This wasn't a John Conner movie, it was  a Marcus Wright movie and the movie, rightfully (pardon the pun) should have focused on him.  That was where the drama was, that's who the most compelling character was and yet, we kept coming back to Mr. Grumbly-Pants anytime the movie started to get entertaining.

Sam Worthington plays Marcus Wright and shines in this movie.  He is the de facto star doing an admirable job communicating the confusion and desperation of a character trying to figure out himself and the world around him. His journey is one of the few things that Terminator Salvation gets right and, as an actor, I see Mr. Worthington going places in the future.

Speaking of the future; The future we saw in the first three Terminator movies was bleak and dark and truly horrifying. James Cameron, the director of Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Jonathan Mostow who directed the criminally underrated Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, obviously grew up in a time when the very real specter of nuclear war hung over all of our heads and were able to recognize and comunicate the true horror of an atomic holocaust  to a Cold War audience. Now, we’ve got McG, admittedly an accomplished action director, who doesn’t bring any of that deep rooted fear to the movie. The battle scenes from Terminator Salvation could have easily come from Afghanistan or Iraq, but he doesn’t even try and capitalize on that parallel.

The future, under Skynet rule just doesn’t seem that terrifying.  Mostly, it just seems inconvenient.

There is some light at the end of the Tunnel of Fail as the final act of Terminator Salvation does not disappoint.  The action and story go into overdrive and, in a sense, the Terminator movies come full circle in a way that is just – awesome.  I have no other way to describe it and I refuse to ruin it for anyone who still wants to see it.

The action and special effects in the final confrontation are amazing and, if the entire movie was like this – this high caliber and this entertaining, I have no doubt in my mind that Terminator Salvation would have been a worthy entry into the Terminator saga.

Terminator Salvation is not a horrible movie, but for a summer blockbuster it is frustratingly average and definitely the least entertaining entry into the Terminator franchise – and I’m counting the TV series in that assessment.  Still, it’s not horrible. Not as awful as Wolverine at least.

Take it or leave it, it really wouldn’t matter one way or another but if you’re a fan of the old movies, missing the last thirty minutes of Salvation would be a Terminal mistake.