Terminator Salvation

Twenty five years since Arnold Schwarzenegger donned the biker leather and bad attitude that made him jump off the screen and into our psyche with the original Terminator (1984) comes the fourth film in the franchise, Terminator Salvation.

The third Terminator movie, Rise of the Machines (2003), was met with a lukewarm reaction at best. With the remarkably talented Christian Bale starring as John Connor, and what looked to be a more serious war-movie style approach to the film, it seemed Salvation had the potential to be great. Sadly, it doesn’t live up to that potential.

What looks like an exciting and interesting trailer doesn’t stand up in a 2 hour long film. Christian Bale has a natural intensity and humanity as John Connor, even if he does rely on his deep growling “Batman voice” a little too much, and he is a convincing leader in his role as one of the key members of the Resistance. Strangely though, it is Sam Worthington as Marcus Wright who gets more screen time and character development than the franchise’s supposed hero. Worthington plays a death row prisoner who donates his body to medical science. He wakes up in the year 2018, unaware that he has been turned into the machines’ newest weapon against the resistance; a Terminator that thinks and feels that it is human, using human tissue to fool both the Terminator and Resistance members into this belief. Worthington captures the emotions of the character perfectly, communicating a deep sense of duality. Wright is a good man, struggling with the evils of his past. He does good deeds but doesn’t believe he has the potential to be good. It’s a conflict that helps keep an average film from becoming downright disappointing.

The action scenes are impressive, but overused. Most of the first hour of the film sees the characters going from gunfight, to explosion, to car chase, and then back again. When the movie does develop into plot, the plot is somewhat predictable. The “major twist” at the end is given away right at the very start when Wright signs over his body to medical science. There’s also the fact that most of the UK trailers showed the very moment in which Wright discovers he is a machine. Everything looks impressive, but you can’t help thinking that considerably more effort has gone into the special effects and production design than the actual script, which hammers home the “What makes us humans different from machines?” question so hard that it hurts. I think the coolest part of the film was when I figured out why the guy who played Kyle Reese (oh yeah – Connor’s search for his father is also a big plot point in this film. That’s Reese) looked so familiar (because he was playing just a few screens away in Star Trek too, for those who are wondering). Oh, and the Arnold cameo is good for a small laugh, even if only for nostalgia’s sake.

All in all Terminator Salvation is a resoundingly average film. It’s not horrible, and it could have been a lot worse, but they shot themselves in the foot. They made it look like they were making a serious Terminator movie, and they did, only it was so serious that it lacked heart and wasn’t all that entertaining. They overdid it on the explosions and machine guns, AND car chases, and neglected to give the audience what a good film needs most – a gripping plot.

Add Comment

You must log in to submit a comment.