Movie Review: “Teminator Salvation”

Reviewed by Gary Pollard (first aired on RTHK Radio 4’s “Morning Call”)

I had high hopes for “Terminator Salvation” but unfortunately I had not done my research properly. I had been surprised by how many bad reviews it was getting. The preview had shown some promise, particularly a sequence of a person who thought he was human being shown convincingly he was an android.

Then the movie started, and I saw it was credited as a “McG Film”. My heart sank.

McG, for those who don’t know, is the director of the “Charley’s Angels” movies. What on Earth about those films would make anyone think he was the right choice to direct a science fiction film?

“Terminator Salvation” is scripted by John Brancato and Michael Ferris. They wrote the weakest of its three forerunners “Terminator 3 – Rise of the Machines”. In fact, that 2003 movie was so weak that I had forgotten it was even made. As Freud suggested, we easily forget things we don’t want to remember.

I will say this for “Terminator Salvation”. It’s better than Terminator 3, although I can’t guarantee I’ll remember it any longer.

Well, for those who haven’t seen them, in the original “Terminator” (made in 1984) a muscular and murderous android, the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzennegger), traveled back through time from a machine dominated future.  In that future, the artificially intelligent super-defence system Skynet had become self-aware and decided man was a threat to its existence, so mankind needed to be destroyed.  The Terminator had been sent to present-day Los Angeles  to kill Sarah Connor (played by Linda Hamilton), who was otherwise destined to become the mother of John Connor, a hero of the resistance against the machines.

However, that film had the logical paradox that if the Terminator had killed her, John Connor would never have existed, so the robots wouldn’t have sent anyone back to kill her, so he would have existed and everyone would have been caught in a recurring loop.

Anyhow, by 1991 and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” another Schwarzennegger look-alike android was sent back by the human resistance, this time as a good guy. His job was to protect the young John Connor (Edward Furlong), from another killer machine, this one played by Robert Patrick.

By “Terminator 3″, John himself was played by Nick Stahl, but the less said about that one the better. In “Terminator Salvation” he has become Christian Bale, who  – as in Batman – has decided that being an action hero calls for speaking in a low raspy voice.

Since Terminator 3, Skynet, having become “self-aware” has unleashed a nuclear holocaust, known as “Judgment Day”,. Now it wants to wipe out the rest of humanity. Armies of Skynet Terminators are patrolling the bombed-out remains of the country trying to do just that.

But before we get to that “Terminator Salvation” opens with a prologue set on California’s death row in the present day. Helena Bonham Carter is playing a terminally ill scientist who is persuading condemned prisoner Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) to leave his body to science. He agrees.

Before the titles are over, we are zapped forward to 2018, where the machines have already taken over, and John Connor is already an icon and a leader of the resistance. He’s taking part in an attempt to infiltrate one of the bases of Skynet, the computer entity that controls all the machines. Things go pretty wrong, and it turns out that Connor survives the operation. As he escapes, another figure crawls out of the ground. It’s Marcus Wright.

Interestingly Wright doesn’t seem to need to sleep, nor to eat, nor to drink water. If you have seen the movie preview you will already know why.

He feels impelled to look for someone, or some place, but on the way he runs into an assortment of resistance fighters, including Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), who is going to go back in time to become John Connor’s father. Reese is accompanied by a grungy kid who can’t talk. We saw a rip off the Mad Max feral child character just recently in “Outlander”. Here’s another one.

Meanwhile Connor and the resistance think they have found a radio frequency that can switch the machines off, and give mankind more of a fighting chance. They try a few experiments to see if this will work as Wright makes his way through the landscape

Wright also meets one of Connor’s lieutenants, Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood). She’s a bit of an action heroine. The movie needs one because Connor’s wife (played by Bryce Dallas Howard), is pregnant and can’t be expected to do any heavy duty action.

Inevitably, of course, Connor and Wright meet, and Connor is convinced that Wright is a tool of the machines even if he doesn’t know it. For us, really, the only dramatic centre in the movie is Wright’s internal struggle. Most of the rest is just explosions, chases, and other action scenes.

McG and his cinematographer Shane Hurbut give the movie a bleached out, slightly cold look. The action is to a considerable degree computer generated. There are times when “Terminator Salvation” is more of a computer game than a movie. In some shots, there is nothing on the screen that is not computer rendered.

There are interesting ideas in the script, but they are almost always skimmed over. While the identity crises of Marcus Wright might seem to be pretty profound, it’s not as if he’s going to be left much time for reflection. There are just too many things to blow up, things to crash, and things to escape.

I’m not a huge fan of James Cameron, creator of the first two Terminator movies, but one thing he realized was that we need interesting human characters if we are going to care whether humanity survives or not. John Connor’s mother, as played by Linda Hamilton, had an actual personality and vulnerability. In Terminator Salvation we’re somewhere in the realm of the super hero movie where humans and androids can take an unbelievable amount of punishment and still come back for more. These characters are about as mortal as cartoon characters.

Without the really human underpinning, Terminator Salvation doesn’t really engage you as it should. It’s ending, which should give you a sense of sacrifice, just feels convenient.

And then, in case you aren’t bored enough by this one, the machines still haven’t found a way to travel through time yet, and set the whole Terminator ball rolling. Yes folks, A sequel is almost inevitable.