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Terminator Salvation
Maniacal killers can be good guys too!
2009
Review: June 5, 2009
Director: McG
Starring: Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Moon Bloodgood, Anton Yelchin
It might help.
THE SETUP:
Humans fight machines in a post-apocalyptic environment. Ho-hum.
DISCUSSION:
I’m not a big Terminator fan [I’ve never even seen the first movie] and don’t find much interesting about this franchise, but I do like special effects and air conditioning, so I went to pass time in this movie one warm day.
We open with some credits that set the tone for what is to follow through just how generic they are. Then it’s 2003 and Sam Worthington as Marcus is on death row for being a notorious maniacal killer or some such. Helena Bonham Carter shows up and gets him to sign a consent form saying they can do some medical research on him rather than just kill him, and he signs. We recognize the name of the company listed at the top as the people who go on to develop the terminators. Oh dear.
Then it’s the future, after the world has been destroyed by nuclear holocaust and machines are running around trying to kill or snarf up the remaining population. We meet Christian Bale as John Connor, leader of the resistance who is prophesized to… well, you know already. He finds some secret lab where machines are developed and ends up waking up Marcus, who’s been having a little decades-long snooze. John goes back to camp where he stays busy grunting and making self-important speeches, while Marcus comes out and eventually runs into Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese, who will end up being John Connor’s father. He is accompanied by a mute black girl who, as one other critic says, “is not one of Will Smith’s children, but might as well be.” They tool around here, get attacked by machines, tool around there, get attacked by machines, etc. Then Worthington hears of John Connor and demands to be taken to him.
SPOILERS, I SUPPOSE > > >
Meanwhile the resistance has found this signal that basically turns the machines off. This could be their big breakthrough! So they so and try to test it a few times, and it seems to work. Elsewhere, Marcus and friends are getting snatched by this big machine that looks like the Wicker Man, which roughly grabs them with a claw and chucks them forcibly into a holding bin, but apparently without injury. Marcus and Kyle try to escape, but it launches motorcycles out of its legs [actually somewhat cool] that chase them to this bridge, where they encounter some other machine that snatches Kyle and snaps into place in a jet-thing. This movie already looks somewhat indistinguishable from Transformers, and these machines-within-machines don’t help, although they’re also the coolest thing going on here.
So Marcus finds this woman Claire who knows how to get to John Connor and takes him there. On the way, Marcus gets blown up by a mine and revealed to be—GASP!—a machine himself! Well, actually a machine-man hybrid. Can they trust him? Does anyone care? John Connor is going to hold him prisoner, but Claire gets him out, blah, blah, and after battling some terminator-eels, they team up to go to machine central and rescue Kyle, because if he dies then Connor will never be born [although he’s here now—what, will he vanish?].
It all ends in a showdown at machine central, where apparently there is a Schwarzenegger cameo as a model under development, although I didn’t catch it. Anyway, Helena Bonham Carter shows up again to lay down some exposition, telling Marcus that he’s a machine they made and they can assume any form and by the way, that signal that’s supposed to turn the machines off was actually all a ruse to draw the resistance out of the woodwork. Shockers! Now Marcus knows that he must save Connor, and this leads to a big but dull battle, after which we find out that performing heart transplant surgery in a tent with whatever primitive materials they can scrounge up is like SO not a big deal!
< < < SPOILERS END
After a friend of mine saw the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, I remember him saying “Okay, so there are two ships firing at each other as they descend into a huge whirlpool, and yet somehow it’s SO BORING.” I was thinking of that as I watched this, as for all the sound and fury, this movie somehow just can’t raise your pulse. The post-apocalyptic atmosphere is flawlessly rendered, yet makes almost no impact. Waterworld was more haunting than this [Holy shit I need to see Waterworld again right now]. Machines attack here, machines attack there, there are bigger machines we’ve never seen before, and yet, ho-hum. There are a number of action sequences and chases, and yet they just sort of happen and then you go onto the next thing. For all of this I blame the director, McG, whose only previous movies were the two Charlie’s Angels films. He obviously knows how to coordinate a big action scene, yet he can’t give it a rhythm or energy that it would take to make it exciting. The entire film has this steady forward momentum, but he can’t module the rhythms in a way that slow you down one minute to ramp you up the next. Even the big story revelations leave one saying “Okay, here are the big revelations now. I wonder where we should go to eat after? I don’t want to end up at Appleby’s again.”
The characters are also a total snore. Christian Bale grunts and bellows as well as anyone, but is unable to bring any spark of life to this script. It’s unfortunate that his well-publicized on-set tantrum had to be over THIS movie. Oh, THIS is the character you have to concentrate so much on? Sam Worthington is good and pleasant to look at, but his character is as generic as anyone else’s. And let’s not forget that he’s a ruthless killer on death row in the first scene. Then he turns into a gruff-but-cuddly action hero who isn’t troubled by murderous impulses anymore. Surely it says something about our culture that we’ve gotten to a point where in order to make a character “edgy” he has to be ruthless multiple murderer. AND that this fact is barely memorable. Everyone else comes and goes without making much of an impression.
Unless you like wasting money or you need to kill time or seek air conditioning, I would skip this. Even if you’re a huge Terminator fan, I would wait for the DVD. The biggest impact this movie has to make you leave the theater in wonderment that so much time, effort and money could be thrown toward making something so absolutely pointless.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
Nah, wait for the DVD, if even then….
