With the decade coming to a close, I've been doing a lot of thinking about how cinema has grown and changed over the previous ten years, and all the amazing new talents that have emerged in that time. To think, prior to this decade people like Christopher Nolan, Darren Aronofsky, and Paul Greengrass had yet to really enter the fray. Meanwhile people like Peter Jackson, Alfonso Cuaron, and Guillermo del Toro finally emerged from the shadows to create major visions. We've had a lot of amazing new talent this decade, but the good must always go with the bad. If the previously mentioned were among the most important new talents of the decade, then who were the worst? Well, I think you can already see where I am going with this since this is my Terminator Salvation review. Director McG started his film making career at the start of the decade with Charlie's Angels, a bad film with little redeeming it aside from Bill Murray. It was followed by the somehow worse sequel (sans Murray), and more recently he made a film I did not see, We Are Marshall. Now maybe that film is a winner, but between his first two films and this new Terminator movie, he has demonstrated that his talent is exceedingly limited, and what's more, he probably drove the final nail into the coffin for this venerable franchise.I'm a pretty big fan of the Terminator movies, and I enjoy all three for different reasons. The first one is a fun B-movie treated with the utmost respect by its director. T2 is the epitome of how to make a sequel, something James Cameron seems to excel at better than any of his peers. Even the third one, often unfairly maligned, has some good moments. I particularly respected its decision to not allow the franchise to become repetitive by ending it with the often mentioned Judgement Day. It has been six years since the last film (actually the shortest gap between sequels, amazingly) and the franchise has finally moved forward into the future war that has long been discussed. It seems like a pretty hard concept to mess up, but somehow McG and company do an admirable job of getting everything wrong.
We know that Skynet has become self aware and killed most of humanity. We know that John Connor has been told since childhood that he would be the key to humanity's salvation when he grew up. We know that Kyle Reese must be sent back in time to save Connor's mom from the wrath of a terminator. Beyond that, this future has been largely unwritten. The filmmakers could have done practically anything here, free from the confines of the previous films which were about characters fulfilling destiny. So it's pretty insulting that this film fails to move the story forward at all. Even remotely. This movie could have been skipped entirely, we could have moved right along to film 5, and the whole plot here could have been explained in passing by a character in just a sentence or two. Except, the events here are so inconsequential here that no one would feel the need to speak that sentence to sum up these events. Basically Connor finds out that Skynet wants to kill Kyle Reese before he goes back in time to save Sarah Connor. Connor rescues Reese and blows up a Skynet base. No forward movement of plot, no character development - that's it.
What made all the other movies so great was that they were about something. Underneath the great action set pieces was actually humor and thought. Could a person change their fate if they knew the future? What was the difference between man and machine? Could a machine be taught to be more human? Questions like those were at the heart of the original trilogy. We think maybe this film will try to explore something similar when we are introduced to Marcus (Sam Wothington), a man who donates his body to science while he is on death row. Fifteen years later we learn he is part machine, part human. Surely interesting things will come of this, right? Nope. Marcus thinks he's human, finds out he's a machine, and soundly rejects his machine side. What was especially odd about this was Connor's reaction to Marcus. Connor twice met sentient machines prior to Judgement Day, and both times he tried to show those machines how to be more human - he didn't want to believe they were totally devoid of any humanity. Here, when he meets Marcus, he immediately wants to kill him without any second thought. Yet unlike those previous machines, Marcus wants to be human, already has semblances of human emotions. One of the most human of emotions is compassion, yet Connor has been robbed of his for some reason in this film, perhaps only because it serves the story.
The acting is across the board bad, with maybe the exception of Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese. Christian Bale is always gruff as Connor, radiating a deadness inside himself that makes you not care if he lives or dies. What happened to that rebellious kid from T2 that we all loved? Sam Worthington is being proclaimed as the next big star. His next film will be Avatar, James Cameron's long awaited new film. It seems likely that McG saw that Cameron had faith in this new talent, so he grabbed him as well. I'm hoping that it is McG's fault that Worthington is so wooden, because if not, he really has about as much of a future as Hayden Christensen did post Star Wars. And I have a gripe about the women in this film. James Cameron has always been particularly great at developing strong, dynamic women in his films. McG seems to laugh at the notion that women can be strong characters. By my count there were four women in this film. One is a mute child who is an obvious nod to Newt from Aliens. She does nothing and is completely useless. Jane Alexander plays the leader of an outpost hidden in the desert. She is snatched by robots almost instantly. Bryce Dallas Howard is Connor's wife. The only words to come from her mouth are exposition. Finally, Moon Bloodgood is supposed to be our badass heroine here. She isn't. We first meet her stuck in a tree, and she needs help getting down from Marcus. Later she is attacked by a group of marauders, and again needs help defending herself. Then she leads a robot right into camp, unknowingly playing the Judas to Connor's Jesus. Why can't McG make these women strong, interesting, or realistic?
If nothing else, this film has great sound and special effects. I appreciated that they tried to incorporate practical effects whenever possible. And while the cinematography is flat and the art direction is bland, there were one or two action scenes that McG handled well. The problem was they held no weight behind them because the characters were so poorly conceived. If I don't care whether anyone lives or dies, I'm not going to be invested in scenes of peril (not to mention the bigger problem of not caring if humanity wins this war). They also found an interesting way to incorporate Arnold Schwarzenegger in the picture, and it seems likely that special effects have gotten to the point where he could appear in any Terminator film from here to the end of time and no one would really question it.
If you like loud dumb action films, this might be passable to you. If you want an actual Terminator film out of it, it's really bad, so temper you expectations and you will not be as disappointed as I was. I'd say that objectively, Wolverine was a worse movie, but this was a bigger disappointment because I expected more from it. Riddled with plot holes (how does Skynet know about its many attempts to kill John and Sarah Connor if they aren't going to attempt them for ten more years?), filled with wooden acting, and conceived as a place holder more than an advancement of a story, there's just so little here to enjoy. If there ever is another film in the series, I can only hope Cameron or someone of his ilk comes along and finishes this story in the right way.
