He Said, She Said: Terminator Salvation
By Caroline Thibodeaux
June 1, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Last week, the Big Daddy and I went to a movie that we had both been looking forward to for a long time. Terminator Salvation - the fourth entry in the Terminator franchise - starring Christian Bale and directed by McG had opened the previous day. When I plan to write about a film I make every attempt to avoid all the spoilers, reviews, rumors, murmurs and rants surrounding the movie's opening. While not an exactly impossible feat, it's never easy. Especially when the movie in question is a $200 million summer tentpole from Warner Bros. bearing the imprimatur of Terminator. The retooling and rebooting of a franchise this popular is just too much of an absurdly conspicuous event to the movie-going public. Word and innuendo were getting out and around big time and most of it wasn't that great. First of all, what kind of a Terminator movie do you make without Arnold? And secondly, not only was the star of the new film caught in an on-set expletive-filled tirade, but the guy responsible for Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle was in charge. (He's also an Executive Producer on Chuck, which is one of my favorite TV shows, but there's an unwritten rule somewhere that McG never gets credit for doing anything good no matter what.) Certainly, months before and especially the entire week leading up to opening I had heard aplenty. But none of that served to dim my excitement and anticipation for this movie.
And how could I not be jazzed? After all, the story of what happened to the planet after Skynet destroyed most of humanity was about to get told. Previously, the audience had only been given glimpses and images of the post-Judgment Day war between the humans and the machines in the earlier films. The promise of a whole film devoted and dedicated to futuristic post-apocalyptic ass-kicking is the stuff that summer popcorn movie dreams are made of – at least as far as I'm concerned.
Unfortunately, all of my dreams did not come true. Succinctly put, the movie is not god-awful horrible by any means, but it could have been and should have been so very much more in so very many ways.
A lot of positive elements are in place but they may have been squandered. Sort-of newcomer Sam Worthington plays Marcus Wright – a convicted killer on Death Row who donates his body to science in an attempt to atone for past sins. A genius cancer-stricken doctor (Helena Bonham-Carter) from Cyberdyne Systems has more than likely turned him into a Terminator, but his kind hasn't been seen before and no one is ever quite sure what he might do. Marcus has that attractive Jason Bourne-ish thing going on. He's a dangerous mix of mystery man/killer/soldier/spy who desperately wants to know what he is and how he got there. Like Moon Bloodgood's resistance fighter, you may want to help him or hold him, but the innate possibility that he just might kill you in the morning remains. Throughout his journey of self-discovery, Worthington displays a fine, steely presence. There are times when his Aussie accent slips in accidentally, but other than that he's exceedingly watchable. With a performance characterized by depth of intensity, he is more than up to the task of sharing the screen with Bale.
Bale, on the other hand is greatly underserved by the script and the direction. His John Connor, as much a leader of the Resistance as he is a reluctant messiah reaching out to the remaining pockets of humanity armed with a ham radio and everything his mother ever told him, never quite becomes compelling enough and it's not entirely his fault. Not for one moment do you see the man who inspires countless others, like Kyle Reese, to soldier on in the face of certain annihilation. It's almost as if writers John Brancato and Michael Ferris expect the audience to do all of their legwork for them. We all know that John Connor is this amazing leader who has a remarkable ability to inspire his soldiers, but we only know that because we saw the first Terminator movie and Michael Biehn told us so. This film was the great opportunity to see Connor in action, striving and working towards ascending to this height – to show why this is a man that other men are willing to die for. There's just not enough in the movie to inform us (to liberally paraphrase Dennis Green) that he is who they said he was. I almost wish the "What don't you fking understand?!!" diatribe had made it into the film. That would have at least given Bale something interesting to play.
In uneven fashion, there are patches of blah here and there interspersed with some neat action sequences. I especially enjoyed a series of scenes where Marcus attempts to escape L.A with a teenaged Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) and a mute little girl named Star (Jadagrace) in tow. There are T-600s and Hunter-Killer flying machines as well as a 50-foot-tall Terminator with a gun for a head all trying to track down and destroy this sorry little band. Even in the year 2018 with hardly any folks left, driving down the Freeway is still its own kind of miserable hell.
The biggest thing that's missing from this sequel is the center. This is also the film's most egregious error. The first 2 Terminator films had the wonderful focal point of Sarah Connor and how her life is inexorably changed by the appearance of the T-800 into her world. Even with all manner of killer cyborgs, explosions, sentient computer systems and nuclear holocaust afoot, the emotional center of those films relied on her relationships with Kyle and later the adolescent John Connor. The strength she finds in herself through her love for them and that same strength which she then turns around and passes on to them is what provides the breadth of soul to those two movies. Passion like this is sorely missing in Salvation until the denouement and by then it feels almost ungraciously tacked on. In simple terms, somebody needs a heart and somebody loses one. It's too bad this movie only finds its heart when it's too little, too late.