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She Said...

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.

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