Movie Review – Terminator Salvation

Column, Movies, Review | Eli | May 22, 2009 at 11:08 pm

connor Terminator Salvation is an incredible cinematic achievement. Unfortunately, that achievement happens to be making Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines look great. It pains me, greatly, to say it, but Terminator Salvation is a really, really bad movie.

MCG, obtuse and obnoxious director, strives for the efficacy that James Cameron brought to the original classics, but he fails as Gepetto to bring any life, magic, or wonder to the robots at his disposal. Opening titles mimic the first Terminator, but with advanced graphics, pretty much matching the rest of the film. It’s striking that MCG tries in earnest to match Cameron’s superior T1 and T2 action beats, but is unwilling to go all in with the mandatory R rating. Without powerful violence available, much of the movie falls flat.

Sam Worthington’s introduction as Marcus Wright as a yokel death row inmate in (random) Longview, Texas, is painfully, painfully bad. Helena Bonham Carter is a cancer ridden corporate spokesman for Cyberdyne, trying to get his body for ‘research.’ Carter is a good actor, but for her caliber, this turn as ailing villain is meager. The dialogue is laughable. He killed his brother and two police men, but the audience is not informed what circumstances led to this evil (one imagines a trailer park scuffle over the last Coors Light Silver Bullet.) Nor are we offered the standard bit about the evil corporate villainess trying to escape her impending death and achieve immortality. Why is she dying if this is not her motivation to advance the Cyberdyne agenda? These are not strong plot devices by any stretch of the imagination, but some character exploration is in order here!

When Marcus is strapped down to receive his lethal injection, arms outstretched, the film beats us over the head with Christian undertones. Yes, Marcus, on the cross, face your accusers, have you nothing to say? If naming the film Salvation isn’t thematic revelation (pardon the pun), the film obsesses over overt scenes from Golgotha.

The first act proper starts with a high point in the film, a sweeping battlefield snapshot that captures an immense amount of destruction and modern warfare. Human tech is still at Gulf War levels, the machines enjoying the sum of advanced technology. As a guided missile falls into a farm of satellite dishes, A-10 Warthogs strafe with napalm, MH-6 Little Bird helicopters deposit assault teams, and Huey helicopters deliver John Connor. This moment lasts under a minute, but is great work of classic level quality. If only the movie could maintain this kind of excitement things would have been so much different. The producers must have had some great military advisers, because the equipment and weaponry rings true, an admittedly difficult feat.

John’s exploration of the bowels of this Skynet complex is a glimmer of possibility. The Resistance refuses to use night vision goggles, opting instead for tension building flares and gun mounted flashlights. (Here is the first of the glaring deleted scenes from the trailers, Connors encounter with a T-1 rising from the water gone.) Imagery of cadavers, limbs missing, sown together for good measure, pushes the mind lightly into the horror genre. This is the only tonal shift given into bloody territory, another could-have-been wish for the audience.

Connor’s rise to the surface and subsequent crash in a Huey helicopter is great. A helicopter crash has never been done so well. As he walks across the desert and fades into nothingness, feel the movie fading away from a strong beginning into the dull ether of calamity. John Connor’s assault outfit is troublesome, his collar prominently layered with wool, seemingly itchy and hot in desert combat, but perhaps I’m splitting hairs.

Marcus emerges from the cratered Skynet facility, covered in placental mud, screaming into the rain. More Jesus symbolism as our protagonist emerges from the earth after prolonged internment, a scene that should convey more power than it achieves. A short while later he is hanging with Kyle Reese and his kid partner (another Cameron throwback via Aliens’ Newt) whose psychic abilities to sense mechanical danger should really come a little bit quicker. Anton Yelchin is a fantastic Michael Biehn, in turn a great Kyle Reese, catching the dorky quirks of the original surprisingly well. Yelchin is the best part and the only heart available.

An L.A. set is competent, but the addition of Krazy Klown toy factory sign, on the main drag, complete with menacing It clown face, is unnecessary and anachronistic to the environment. Instead of making things menacing with referential evil clown signs, how about making the machines more threatening and deadly. A T-600 chases down the motley crew, bested by some calculated booby traps (Reese and kid claim to be the only ones hanging around the city, apparently hoisting train axles by themselves). The T-600 is okay, but not as threatening as the simple red eyed skulls glaring into the camera of yore. Also, the new terminators seem to be an excuse to utilize the Minigun of T2 fame.

Connor takes some time to hop into the ocean for a little pow-wow with resistance command in a rickety sub. Michael Ironside is doing what he knows playing General Ashdown, giving Connor a hard time, and introducing the subplot about a radio signal that shuts down the Terminators. The Russian general is particularly bad, but the whole idea of a perfectly diverse human command with a leader from each continent is politically correct lameness.

As Marcus and Kyle escape in a Jeep, fans will smile at the appearance of hovering Terminator drones straight from Terminator 2: 3D, the theme park feature at Universal Studios (also the most expensive per minute movie ever made, and the only sequel worthy of the T2 legacy). Hydrobots also play a role, originally called Silverfish, axed from T2 due to budgetary and effects constraints, but featured in the arcade game. Attention to these details is wonderful but superfluous in comparison to the film’s ultimate failure.

They make their way to a group of generic apocalyptic survivors at a derelict gas station. Typical post apocalyptic conflicts aside, a gigantic Terminator shows up to capture some humans. The derivative Transformer starts blowing up escaping vehicles. The explosions are spectacular, groundbreaking even. Plasma weapons are updated graphically and utilized properly for some sci-fi stomping. The problem is in copying lesser franchises for ideas instead of mining your own superior action film genealogy. Why try to be so contemporary when classic ingredients would work so much better. The giant bot could have easily been replaced with an HK tank and avoided such obvious copycatting.

A chase that ensues with Mad Max 18 wheeler and Bat Pod style Moto-Terminators is spectacular, if derivative. MCG obsesses over a shifting polarity of Terminator 2, humans in the giant tow truck, robot motorcycles. Reese plays out some of his outstretched arm poses from the first Terminator, pump action shotgun and all. The chase is wonderfully frenetic, the HK confrontation on a spanning bridge awesomely memorable. Marcus is an action star, but gets thrown into the river. He skips across the surface in a well done shot (take notes X-Men Origins: Wolverine, this is how you show someone flying across the water at high speed).

The movie goes completely downhill from second act on out. Hillbillies attack a resistance fighter and Marcus saves her. Marcus, revealed as a hybrid Terminator, is hung on another makeshift cross, tortured, New Testament style, by unbelieving Resistance fighters. She returns the favor by breaking him out of Resistance HQ. Connor comments that Skynet has ‘never come this far’ watching a doomed A-10 on radar. Later, Hydrobots show up in the river right next to his headquarters. Perhaps the Resistance should have taken the time to clear out the Terminators from the nearest body of water. The heroes are on their way to Skynet central in San Francisco.

Connor tries to get clearance for this Skynet HQ assault, but command won’t hear it. Connor screams, “If we stay the course, we are dead! We are all dead!” The Bush years are over, and this political commentary is tired. Obama is President now; Connor should have said “Yes we can!”

The third act is a jumbled mess. Luckily, Moto-Terminators have a USB interface (please) and can easily be ridden by a human. It’s nice that Connor is still using a handheld computer to hack stuff, but the Skynet Tech seems pretty antiquated. Skynet doesn’t think it’s weird that the Moto-Terminator is using its red eyeball to interface with the network, doing a wheelie while looking up directions in a laboratory. Marcus and Connor fight Terminators in Skynet central, a well realized environment, but unevenly explained. Arnold’s appearance is an amazing demonstration of special effects prowess, but the fight is short lived and choppy. The robots have a strange bendy appearance from their computer rendering, lacking the iron angularity and solidity of earlier installments. Terminators range from easily destroyed to nigh invincible, and weapons similarly morph from dishing out catastrophic damage to being near useless. Most notable is John Connor, who has been around these things before mind you, using a pistol on several occasions against a T-800. Skynet complains that despite sending back its most advanced machines it cannot kill Connor, and the reason is clear, Skynet is an idiot.

By the time the tacked on ending winds around, the mind is thoroughly worn out. Christian Bale is asleep at the wheel, just yelling his way through his part. He apparently never watched Edward Furlongs take on the character, or even Nick Stahl’s sad sack turn at the part. Bale is content to play himself, yelling and rasping through the lines. Sam Worthington has presence and acting chops, but is given terrible material to work with. Only Worthington reaches the levels of easy masculinity and confidence Arnold used to bring to the table. Worthington is an action star. I only wish we got a better look at his Terminator Chassis, which is only hinted at, but looks darkly foreboding. Terminator Salvation is a cacophony of jerky transitions, shifting aesthetics, and choppy plot. PG-13 just doesn’t cut it, MCG ruins a franchise he loves, and James Cameron was imminently wise to not give his endorsement to this abomination.