McG: Terminator Salvation (2009)

[Chris Knipp]

McG: Terminator Salvation (2009)

It's dark and gloomy without Arnold

Review by Chris Knipp

It's 25 years now since the original Terminator, starring Arnold Schwartzenegger and written and directed by James Cameron. But our memories aren't too dim to recall how much silly loud fun that movie was, in comparison. Arnold and James also teamed up for the slightly less successful but still breathtakingly exciting Terminator 2. Cameron left Arnold to his own devices (or rather another director) for the still less successful, but nonetheless highly profitable and arguably quite entertaining Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which heralds the situation chronicled in this still louder and more high tech and more fatalistic Terminator blockbuster, which has had just about all the fun squeezed out of it. What a pity Arnold was too busy struggling with California's hopeless state budget to lend his endearingly wooden charm and outsize body to this movie. The first thing that's wrong with this version is that the machines have no personalities, not even an Austrian weightlifter's.

We have to begin with a sci-fi plot device I can never quite understand: the one in which the hero must go back into the past to change things so the future--that is, the present--can turn out the way it is already. Or at least that's how it seems to me. I just find it hard enough living in the present. If anybody can go back and tinker with history, like Dick Cheney, at just about any time, what's the use? But this is the essence of the Terminator franchise: delving back into the past to change things so your side, be it humanity or the evil cyber world, will have an edge.

Throughout the series, humankind has been enslaved by machines. (Now that part I get.) A man named John Connor leads a revolt of the human slaves. Somehow that doesn't change. But there's always that struggle from one film to the next over going back in time to prevent Connor from being born, or kill him off as a kid, or make sure he is born. This could go on forever. But then franchises are designed that way.

What's equally mystifying in this darkly cool-looking, stylistically seductive, but relatively more pointless Terminator film, the fourth in the franchise, is that this appears to be at least partly a prequel (maybe any time-travel story is?), but it's also thoroughly post-apocalyptic. The world, which just to keep things convenient let us call Los Angeles, is now a post-nuclear holocaust wasteland of broken metal and minefields. John Connor is Christian Bale. But--and this is another thing I can't quite follow--his dad, Kyle Reese, is among the prisoners, in the youthful form of Anton Yelchin, no longer spouting a Russian accent as in the new Star Trek. And of course Anton has to be protected because the machines are out to kill him. Why don't they just kill Christian Bale? Well, they'd like to, but they just can't, because, well, he's Batman, you know, and he's a real s.o.b. as well.

The ghost in the machine, so to speak (the machine of this rather mechanical sequel) is Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a prisoner on death row in the film prelude who signs his body over to Helena Bonham Carter for "research." Somehow he pops up fifteen years later, very confused about what he is. A pity the muscular Worthington is rather bland, because he plays a pivotal role either as nemesis or salvation, it's not certain which.

A cyborg gives his heart that Christian Bale may live, which seems rather appropriate given the apparently dysfunctional Bale's rude manners both onscreen and off. Bale is relentlessly one-note as the leader in battle against the man-killer machines, and the anticlimactic ending is that the war remains yet to be won. All that's been accomplished is a lot of explosions (set off nicely by the dark, monochromatic visuals) and a lot of ornately bent-up metal, somewhere in what is referred to as Los Angeles.

Let's hear it for the explosions (as well as the fires, the detonators, the electro-shocks, the crashes, the monstrous death's-head creatures, and the computer-readout thingies, for this is their film, and they light it up both literally and figuratively against the prevailingly dark and ashen landscape). Nothing else much matters, other than a brief and shining moment when what looks like a naked Arnold does battle with Christian Bale. In the other Terminator movies, especially the first two, there was a lot more human interest. Even the machines were (almost) human, and that made all the difference. All the noise and violence are very well done, but they're not as pretty as Star Trek's. Space makes an even nicer background for a big explosion than a nuclear wasteland.

[Johann]

Thanks for the review.
Terminator 4 has been getting negative reviews- I've read three different reviews and they all gave it 2 stars or less. One even gave it a half star.
They say that McG doesn't have a strong enough narrative, and I don't know because I haven't seen it. But that's one thing I read about it. A thing I read that interests me were the raves about the renderings of the machines. In particular, one reviewer said the Harvesters were the most wicked things since that ultimate battle scene in Matrix Revolutions, that it's War of the Worlds type stuff.
Looking forward to Bale and Ahnold dustin' it up..

[Chris Knipp]

There are a lot of good technical and mechanical things and the visual style is edgy and stylish but of course it's a movie not a video game and the lack of compelling character development or narrative content make it feel extremely disappointing. It does not stand up to its predecessors at all, particularly not to the first two.