25 years.
That’s how long we’ve been hearing about humanity’s war against the machines, a battle James Cameron first initiated in 1984 when he sent Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to terminate an unsuspecting Linda Hamilton. Armageddon was averted—and then triggered—in subsequent sequels before arriving at this movie. But our predestined, apocalyptic future looks a lot like products from Hollywood’s past. Specifically, imagine the love child of Mad Max and The Matrix as delivered by Michael Bay, and you’re beginning to get the picture.
McG is a director with an above-average eye and an original instinct for camera placement. To his credit, he’s not one of those lazy types who think they can generate excitement in an action sequence by shaking the camera or kicking it. But he has a major weakness as a filmmaker, and that weakness is all over Terminator Salvation: His grand, elaborate visual sense is completely detached from his brain.
So what we end up with is a filmmaker who gets it right in all the small ways, meticulously crafting bits of action – showing what it might be like, for example, to be inside a crashing helicopter. But in all the big ways, he’s so lost that the movie becomes comical. He piles action blowout on top of blowout. When in doubt, he increases the scale. Explosions get larger, fireballs bigger. The machines become increasingly resilient, as the soundtrack goes right up to your ears and keeps pounding.
Yet nothing he does can distract us from the fact that he barely has a story to tell. The only question is, was he covering for the absence of story, or did he actually not notice the lack of one?
Unlike the first three films where the events took place in present day, Terminator Salvation is a slight fast forward into the future – 2018. Skynet has already taken over the planet and the surviving humans are either waging war against the machines or they’re merely trying to stay alive. John Connor is leading the resistance and is constantly looking to save other humans and find a way to defeat Skynet. John is now married to Kate and they are expecting – but that’s not important. What is important is that John finds young Kyle Reese before the machines do. In case you’ve forgotten, Kyle’s a pretty important piece of the puzzle as he is the one whom John sends back in time to protect and save Sarah Connor, John’s mother. Oh yeah, and he’s John father.
Kyle is a teenager around this time and we first meet him when he befriends Marcus Wright a loner who can only remember being on death row. The two, along with a very young mute girl named Star , look to find John and join his cause but are chased by the machines almost as quickly as they set out on their journey. Kyle and Star are captured by the machines, but instead of killing them (and thus sealing the fate of all humankind) they are taken back to Skynet’s headquarters along with numerous other humans.
Marcus, feeling responsible for allowing Kyle and Star to be captured, decides to rescue the two from the machines. He meets Blair and she convinces him that John would be able to help. They hike back to meet John and here we realize who Marcus really is. As important as Kyle is in regards to the past, Marcus is the key to the present – but John is torn between his loyalties to the cause and the preservation of his existence. Regardless, this time around it’s John’s turn to save Kyle so that the human race can get one step closer to defeating Skynet.
When Christian Bale allowed himself to play Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins, he was slumming – and to good effect. But with Terminator Salvation, this ostensibly serious actor takes up residence in the action ghetto, and it’s not a good fit. As John Connor, he goes through the film gritting his teeth and talking in a growling whisper, as though he still had the Bat ears on. Bale will get away with it this time, for the simple reason that no one is going to be looking at this as a performance – it’s more like posing as things blow up. But soon this actor will have to decide if he wants to be more like Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage.
The franchise’s pivotal characters are woefully shortchanged. Bryce Dallas Howard is a nonentity as Kate, John’s pregnant wife. New characters tossed into the mix, meanwhile, are inconsequential (Moon Bloodgood’s feisty fighter pilot) or forgettable (Common’s gruff soldier). The most offensive has to be Star, a gag-inducing, cutesy kid warrior played by newcomer Jadagrace, who is either a Fraggle or the tragic result of Will Smith getting wet after midnight.
Still, why complain about botched dramatic scenes in a movie that’s all about the action? So let’s end with a word about the action itself: It isn’t really action. It’s commotion. It can’t be action if nothing happens, and nothing can happen because the commotion doesn’t advance the story. The commotion, the explosions, the fireballs function here only to delay action, to keep the status quo in place, so as to stretch what otherwise would be a 20-minute short into an almost two-hour feature.
Want to know how far the Terminator franchise has fallen? Consider the signature catchphrase “I’ll be back,” which once carried the chilling threat of carnage and death at the hands of a merciless machine. Because McG completely misunderstands the significance, he forces it in as a punch line, a phony wink (alongside a recognizable but pathetically dated Guns n’ Roses song) to an audience that should be insulted by such patronizing nods.
Four has to be enough, right? You wish. Salvation leaves the door open to potential sequels as a closing voiceover hints at Connor taking his attacks on Skynet to a global level. No surprise, really. The Terminator series appears to be as unstoppable as its title character, and only a dip in box-office revenue can deliver a lethal blow. At this rate, should the Judgment Day prophecy fulfill itself and a nuclear blast consumes our civilization, cockroaches and Terminator sequels will fight each other for survival.