Terminator Salvation review
Looking for a solid, big-budget summer action film? Terminator Salvation won’t disappoint.
Director McG packs his movie with enough explosions, chases, gunfights and scenes of fiery carnage to fill two Die Hard flicks, plus half a season of 24. The action is gritty, ultraviolent and sometimes ambitious. The bulk of this movie was made for people who love to see shit blow up.
But I have bad news for Terminator fans. This joyless movie has none of the thrills, spirit or heart we’ve come to expect from the franchise. Most of the action looks very cool and surprisingly realistic, but it lacks any real suspense or tension. The drama is dull and the characters act like lifeless shells, much like the movie’s robot Terminators, seemingly walking, talking and fighting only out of obligation. They bark and yell at each other in shorthand instead of having actual conversations. It’s like watching ridiculously armed cavemen trying to communicate.
The tedious and witless script and the one-note performances actually made me long for the good ol’ days … of Terminator 3! At least that movie was fun, gave us a John Connor worth rooting for, and delivered a kick ass ending.
Terminator Salvation is a hard movie to like. It’s grim and gray, in look and in spirit, and it never gives us a chance to get to know, much less warm up to, its central characters. The movie relies on our familiarity with the young John Connor (from T2 and T3) instead of trying to make us like or care about Christian Bale’s adult John Connor. So Bale, who is normally a very fine actor, is given little to do but scream at robots, fire guns and dodge bullets.
We know even less about Sam Worthington’s Marcus Wright, Terminator Salvation’s other hero. The movie never bothers to deliver any identifiable motivation or purpose for his heroic actions; he just simply does whatever the plot wants or needs him to do.
The story plays out like mediocre fanfic. Like the characters, it seems to be fueled by a sense of obligation rather than inspiration. Here’s how this thing unfolds:
Marcus is sentenced to death and resurrected fifteen years later as a cyborg with a human brain and heart. He wakes up in post-Judgment Day L.A. and runs into Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) but loses him after a giant Decepticon, er, Terminator Harvester attacks. He later runs into a Moon Bloodgood-shaped resistance fighter who instantly falls in love with him and leads him to John Connor’s camp.
Connor figures out that Marcus is a machine, freaks out, chains him up and yells at him for a while. Later, Moon Bloodgood helps Marcus escape. Connor’s army goes apeshit and bombs the frak out of their own grounds while trying to kill Marcus. He gets away with half of his face ripped off, and convinces John that he can help him find and save Kyle Reese.
Marcus breaks in to Skynet Central, where Skynet — which chooses to look and talk like Helena Bonham Carter for no good reason — tells him he was programmed to do every single fucking thing we’ve seen him do in the movie just to make John Connor fall into its trap. This includes randomly bumping into Kyle Reese, Moon Bloodgood and Connor himself. It makes no sense.
Skynet’s trap for Connor involves trying to kill him the same way they’ve tried and failed to kill him in every other movie — by having Terminators punch him and/or shoot at him a lot. This too makes no sense.
We finally get a pretty cool, if too brief, fight scene between Connor and an old friend. Marcus saves the day, but he has to sacrifice himself to save Connor’s life. Since we’ve been told that Marcus is a convicted murderer who has no emotional attachment to John Connor or anyone else in the world, this ending rings very, very false. With the human resistance leaders dead, Connor and Reese fly away in a helicopter and Christian Bale mumbles something like “Skynet is still out there, so we’ll do all this again in the sequel” in a final voiceover.
It’s pretty terrible. And not only because the writing is lazy, the emotional beats ring false, and the actors are given nothing interesting to do.
Terminator Salvation can’t decide who its leading man should be. Is it Marcus Wright or John Connor? Nobody knows. The dual stories/leading characters never gel in a satisfying way. It’s frustrating and it makes the movie feel like a tedious mess.
I love the Terminator franchise, but this movie did nothing to move the overall story forward in an exciting or a compelling way. If there is another one, I hope the story is more focused and the filmmakers remember to deliver emotionally instead of purely banking on stunts and nostalgia.
Other thoughts:
- Why does John Connor randomly scream out his own name four-hundred times in this movie? We get it, you are John Fucking Connor!
- So blasting Alice in Chains and Guns N’ Roses attracts killer Skynet motorcycles, but giant bonfires and exploding landmines don’t?
- Anton Yelchin apparently thinks the young Kyle Reese should sound like Scrappy Doo after 20 straight years of smoking. He is wrong.
- Why do people think Common is an actor? The guy just stands around looking grumpy and mumbles three or four obvious lines in every movie he’s in. And he does this very badly.
- The Arnold cameo actually looked pretty damn amazing. Too bad it only lasted for a few minutes.
- The Hydra Terminators, or whatever they’re called, were also pretty cool. Smart move not relying completely on CGI for those.
- Moon Bloodgood should play herself, Moon Bloodgood, in every movie she’s in.
- Was Bryce Dallas Howard really pregnant during the filming of this movie? Is that the only reason her character was pregnant?
- And who flies a pregnant lady into a battlezone and then lets her run toward the giant explosions?
- Who knew cassette tapes from the 1980s could sound that good after 34 years of wear and tear, includung a major nuclear disaster?
- I really miss Summer Glau and Thomas Dekker.
- John Connor!
Review originally published May 23, 2009 by Airlock Alpha.
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