2009 | U.S. | 115 minutes
Director: McG
Writers: John D. Brancato, Michael Ferris
Cast: Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Moon Bloodgood, Helena Bonham Carter
Distributor: Warner Brothers Pictures
Cdn video distributor: Warner Home Video
The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day are widely known as action classics. They also told simple stories. Hero vs unstoppable killing machine. Just one. If the machine got close enough, it was game over. Hero dead, and humanity doomed.
That’s it. Very simple. Very direct. Lots of fun.
Terminator Salvation — set sometime after the nuclear holocaust that closed out Terminator 3 — strives to top this by throwing in dozens of terminators. Some fly, a few look like sporty motorcycles, others like snakes, and one resembles a 10-storey high Transformer. There’s even the return of the Arnold Schwarzenegger T-800 model. Yet none of them seem very capable as terminators. They all behave like spy villain henchmen. Countless times they get their metallic claws on their prime targets — John Connor and Kyle Reese — and what do they do? Throw them across rooms, mostly.
And what happens when the true scheme is finally revealed at story’s end? It’s told in typical spy movie fashion with the chief villain — the Skynet mainframe computer — explaining its devious plan to the one person most capable of foiling it.
Remember Scott Evil from the Austin Powers films? He was always chastising his dad, Dr. Evil, about such senseless toying. He was all for blowing away Austin Powers without hesitation.
Yet the antagonist is not supposed to reflect the dim-witted thought processes of Dr. Evil. They’re Terminators. Menacing machines, programmed to kill. The embodiment of the Scott Evil philosophy of don’t-dilly-dally. It’s what made the earlier stories so terrifying. It’s why they’re called “terminators” in the first place. As the Kyle Reese character succinctly explained in the first movie, “It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”
The film is also bogged down by its stubborn focus on the Connor family life cycle, once again reminding us of the paradoxes of time travel and its threat of retroactive-abortion. It’s further complicated by the introduction of a new character named Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington). He’s even given a love interest in the form of a tough, scrappy lass named Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood). Ultimately, though, his character is just a pawn in Skynet’s Dr Evil-like scheme to kill the present and future John Connor.
Most may not comprehend the silliness of this plotting since the whole thing is set in a dull-grey, desolate world that never offers a moment of levity or comic relief. Even the revival of the “I’ll be back” phrase is drained of its comical irony.
It’s all so bleak and serious.
Here’s a suggestion for the writers of future Terminator sequels: stop trying to add wrinkles to the Connor family storyline. Ideally, dump it altogether. Go back to basics. Keep it simple. Have a group of survivors in some safe haven. Eventually have them surrounded by an army of terminators, all bent on killing anything in sight. The challenge: how do they get out of this pickle?
Don’t have Skynet lure its nemesis to its secret underground lair (seriously, that’s what happens in this film)
In case you care, yes, there is action. Deadly showdowns, guns blazing, buildings exploding, plus lots of foot chases, car chases and aerial sequences.
But if the experience of watching all this elaborate production design, state-of-the-art f/x and action fails to thrill as much as the previous films — you’d think it would — it’ll probably happen when you realize that the terminators are not really terminators anymore. More like Fembots.
John Connor and Kyle Reese will surely live to see another sequel in the face of such incompetent adversaries.
- Theatrical release date: May 21, 2009
- Video release date: December 1, 2009
- Production Budget: $200 million
- Worldwide Box Office: $371,352,910
FUN ALTERNATIVE: Terminator Salvation director McG confessed he used the story of The Road as inspiration for his film. He would have been better off studying The Road Warrior.
For one thing The Road Warrior dispenses with it backstory shortly after the opening credits, and then soars into action.
Also set in a post-apocalyptic world, Mel Gibson reprises his Mad Max character and, at first, he’s just as ruthless as his opponents. Any attempts at decency are merely acts to fulfill his selfish interests (fuel for his car, primarily). When the last of his worldly possessions — and his dog — are finally wiped out, he finally resigns to commit a selfless act. Even then he’s mostly compelled because he has no other choice. He simply has nothing left to live for (the screenwriters Terry Hayes, George Miller and Brian Hannant used the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa, classic Hollywood westerns, as well as the writings of Joseph Campbell — he wrote a book on mythology entitled “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” – as inspiration). The John Connor character could have used such complexity, instead of the all-noble hero he apparently strives to be.
Best of all, there’s no computer-generated imagery here. Everything you see is real-time action. Every full-throttle image, dangerous stunt, and crushing crash. Occasionally the camera is under-cranked to add a sense of speed, but the overall realness is breathtaking.
Curiously, the final chase sequence was modeled after the climax in Buster Keaton‘s The General. Indeed this is a film that borrows from the best, and remains one of the greatest action films of all-time.