Ah, where did it all go wrong? Terminator Salvation has the potential to be a lean, mean killing machine, but unfortunately in this vision of the future, McG is in charge. Despite some fantastic design work and arresting visuals, the whole thing grinds to a halt under the weight of exposition and a refusal to engage with it’s most interesting characters.
The story itself is straightforward-ish. John Connor is hunting for Kyle Reese, so he can send him back in time to become his own dad (Hey, I said ‘Ish’ didn’t I?). Meanwhile, executed killer Marcus Wright comes back from the dead (maybe…) post judgement day, to find out he’s super human, or maybe not human at all-they team up, fight the machines and try to save Reese- with me so far?
There’s a lot of heavy (metal) metaphor going on here, with Sam Worthington pumped full of liquid metal making a particular impact. It seems at some point in a production process almost as convoluted as the Terminator series various timelines, somebody decided to give us a parable about mankind’s reliance on, and interaction with, technology. Unfortunately for the viewer, this probably doesn’t test too well, so McG replaces it with a bunch of judder-cam and explosions,while losing anything that made us actually care.
Bale looks borderline comatose throughout, doing a little bit of his gruff Bat-vox to make us think he’s earning his pay as he broadcasts robot killing news to the survivors of humanity, even if some of it is a bit stupid (Early Terminators can be killed with a knife, for example), while the rest of his script seems to be limited to shouting his own name at various machines. Meanwhile, Worthington struggles to convey empathy for Marcus, our other central figure. This isn’t to say his acting is bad here, it’s just that we never spend enough time with the character to give a shit. He’s a half human Terminator that thinks he is/actually is human, and thinks he deserves to die. It’s a fascinating conceit, but one that just isn’t developed.
Unfortunately this leads to a choppy, disconnected feel throughout, the explosions look great, and the killer metal eels and death-cycles are amazingly cool, but they never feel as dangerous as they should-mainly because you couldn’t care less if everyone gets killed or not. As an action film it has some fantastic sequences, particularly the opening sequence, and a spectacular helicopter crash, all of which look far more realistic than, say, Transformers, but carry all the dramatic heft of the car crashes in The A-Team. There’s no sense of urgency or peril.
It is possible I’m misreading all this, and the fact that we connect far more with the machines than the humans is some kind of postmodern statement by McG (I kind of doubt it though), and if the blogosphere is to be believed, his original ending was dark, deep and fantastic. Unfortunately it was also common knowledge, so it’s been changed to one of those bloody awful, studio-approved upbeat endings that we all know and fear, and even the original would struggle to cover the plot holes (why exactly does SkyNet have touchscreen controls?) or budget gaps. With a re-edit and a whole bunch of inserted dialogue, this could be great, as it is? Well, there’s a reason it’s been out-box officed by ‘Night at the Museum II’. Not worth saving.
