![]() ![]() Imagine if a murderous cyborg from the future came back to keep James Cameron’s original “The Terminator” from being made. Terminator Salvation, in spite of its relatively decent special effects and cinematography, is basically a two-hour action sequence, ending with the promise that they won the battle, but not the war - the fight goes on.Watch Video: Arnold Schwarzenegger never expected for this line to become iconic McG and his script writers are enamored with what they clearly think are Big Ideas, but they are clichéd ideas hammered down to the point of absolute dullness. (And why, by the way, does the biomechanical Terminator prototype look like Sam Worthington instead of Schwarzenegger?) This is done in the midst of the Skynet machines taking humans hostage (why they're doing this instead of killing them is never explained), and John Connor eventually coming face to face with a nude, CGI, circa-1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is conveniently and ridiculously concealed from indecent exposure by carefully placed mist and smoke in every shot. Plenty of the same time-travel notions are brought into the mix, what with John Connor's self-appointed mission to keep a teenage Kyle Reese alive, so he can eventually go back in time to 1984 and become John Connor's father. The only complaint here is when his voice is heard with his back turned, likely a post-production over-dub, and out of nowhere his native Australian accent is heard crystal clear - certainly a poor reflection on the film's lazy sound editors. ![]() He commands attention, and makes the movie watchable when it would otherwise be falling apart. It's kind of ironic that he's the one machine who actually qualifies as a character, and he delivers by far the most human performance. If there's any genuinely bright spot in Terminator Salvation, which is otherwise tediously grim and humorless, it's Sam Worthington, as the would-be biomechanical Terminator prototype. ![]() Christian Bale, as the revered John Connor ("prophesied" leader of the Resistance), spends all his screen time growling like Batman, staring blankly into space, or riding along in some elaborate action sequence. So what is director McG to do? Apparently he thinks the way to go is to make this fourth movie one extended action sequence, where everything that happens is either intended as a zing-wow! special effect, or a lead-up to such an effect - significantly at the expense of substance, dimension, or character development. These same ideas, long grown stale, simply don't have the same emotional weight anymore. We now live in a highly mechanized and computerized world that the first Terminator films would have us fear, and we just don't live our lives fearing our computers. Really, what's the point? Terminator Salvation has an intriguingly broad concept of finally bringing the franchise into the future from which all the previous Terminators came, but the impact of that future just isn't the same. This movie not only recycles ideas and concepts from countless other movies, but from previous films in its own franchise. It recycles famous lines ("Come with me if you want to live" "I'll be back") in ways that add nothing to the film, and even features a climactic sequence of a robotic/fleshless Terminator stomping up grated steps after John Connor in exactly the same way Sarah Connor was chased at the end of the original Terminator. ![]() It was just more of the same stuff, and Terminator Salvation raises that derivativeness exponentially. And the idea of machines who think they're human, discover they're machines, and wind up being allies to humans - it's all been done already, recently, and far better in the sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica.Ģ003's Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines had already revealed the Terminator franchise to be a tired and dated concept - it offered nothing new whatsoever, unless you want to count its calculated release to raise Arnold Schwarzenegger's profile as he was about to run for governor of California. It was almost disappointing that no allusions to Predator turned up.īut it gets even better! Instead, we discover a Terminator with flesh and blood who thinks he's human - a plot point that's hardly a spoiler given not only how blatantly it's telegraphed to the audience from the beginning of the film, but how it was openly revealed right in Terminator Salvation's own trailer. Then we're taken through a military offensive sequence with soldiers wading through water in a huge mechanical tunnel, when you half expect it to turn into Aliens vs. Then Terminator Salvation starts, and after an actual prologue set in 2003, when it might as well be a modern remake of Demolition Man, it moves to the post-apocalyptic setting of 2018, when it might as well be Mad Max vs. Before Terminator Salvation began, a trailer for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was shown, and it might as well have been a prologue - only with more pointless destruction and witless humor. ![]()
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