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? Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘Terminator Salvation’