May 28, 2009: Terminator Salvation
I find myself wondering how much time I should bother spending to tell you all how bad this movie is.
Where do I even start? The Terminator (1984) was an instant sci-fi classic. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) was more than just a worthy sequel, it was a top-notch action-adventure film which was almost universally loved. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) disappointed many and was certainly flawed, but I still found it to be a worthwhile addition to the franchise. This brings us to 2009 and Terminator Salvation, with an admittedly well-intentioned entry which ultimately insults the franchise as the film moves from shoddy to terrible, with a story which is not only inconsistent with the other films, but also doesn’t make sense within its own parameters.
The story here has John Connor, the son of the Terminator’s original target and himself the target of more advanced Terminators in the second and third films, now finally working with the resistance to fight Skynet. We’ve never before seen this future setting except in brief scenes in the earlier films. The resistance has discovered a new type of experimental terminator, as well as a weakness to exploit and possibly bring down Skynet. The muddled nature of the story is clear early on, as Christian Bale ostensibly plays the lead as John Connor, yet is clearly a supporting player who is upstaged by a couple of other resistance characters, both in their performances and the dramatic usefulness of their characters. Unbelievably stupid, wooden dialogue throughout doesn’t help, and Bale really is hamstrung by the fact that he’s required to be in the film but it isn’t really about him. Additionally, Bryce Dallas Howard is completely wasted as Connor’s pregnant wife.
Then we launch into a whole mess of inconsistencies, concerning the plot, sci-fi conventions, the Terminator storyline, and the passing off of impossibilities as plausible. Skynet’s capabilities vary depending on the level of tension needed for a given scene – it sends out killer robots to a fire in the woods, but doesn’t notice an entire airfield full of resistance fighters? The previous movies all hinted at epic battles between men and machines in the future, but it’s hard to conceptualize how they would actually play out. Wouldn’t the humans just get their asses totally kicked and it would be over? Maybe that’s why there really aren’t any large-scale battles depicted here. This is only 15 years after the new Judgment Day (which I suppose was delayed from 1997 to sometime in the 2000s), but the technological advances don’t seem consistent with that passage of time. Gasoline doesn’t have a long shelf-life, so the cars people are driving around in would be mostly dead unless they somehow managed to steal gasoline from Skynet, which might not even use gasoline if everything runs on fuel cells. Similarly, the submarines in which the resistance leaders hide out would be in pretty rough shape and would probably no longer have power. And seriously, a heart transplant in a field hospital? All of these points ripped me out of the story and threw me into sheer bafflement so frequently that I really never got into the movie.
As I said, I think Terminator Salvation is well-intentioned. It does expect full knowledge of the story up to this point, otherwise the viewer would be lost. However, I’m not against this approach, particularly with such a well-known franchise, since I really don’t want to see half the movie spent explaining what happened before. Shortly after he film’s release, I read an article about it whose mere concept really nicely summarizes up the problem – it was a list of 20 things that sucked about the new Terminator movie and 10 things that were good. The careful touches and well-placed references to earlier events really were outnumbered two to one by boneheaded plot devices and glaring inconsistencies. I would probably chalk up the failure of Terminator Salvation to two things. First, we have the PG-13ification of an up-to-now solidly R-rated movie franchise. I don’t think this is the major contributor, since there’s still about as much violence as you’d expect, and there never really was much sex or coarse language in these films. The impact certainly wasn’t as jarring as the butchering of the fourth Die Hard film. The second thing is the director. McG, as he’s known, is most closely associated with the Charlie’s Angels revival films which have been floating around over the past decade or so, and he brings that exact same slick, overstylized, hyperactive style to a film which should be gritty, and unrelenting in a completely different way. Sorry, McG, but you killed the Terminator franchise for me, and this one is not going on my shelf.
Ruins one of the great stories.
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