TERMINATOR SALVATION REVIEW
26. May, 2009 
4 Comments
Be forewarned – I didn’t like it.
Why – we’ll get to in a minute but first:
I don’t hate all movies.? I don’t even hate all “modern” science fiction” movies.? But since I hated Charlies Angels, its probably safe to say that I do hate all MCG movies.
I like a good science fiction film.? I’ll even give props to SF films that aren’t 100% good; in fact, considering some of the flicks I do like, my standards are pretty low.? But not so low as to include this abomination.
I know its partly me: I’m stuck in an earlier era, one in which we were taught (both theoretically and by way of example on the big screen) that a good movie had – acting, plot, continuity,? intelligible dialogue and, in the case of science fiction film – science that makes sense, technology that makes sense and reactions/plot points that reacted sensibly to both (come to think of it:? why don’t light sabers ever run out of power in the middle of a duel…?)
Obviously it is my opinion that T:S had little to none of the aforementioned.
Low points: Christian Bale should have been wearing a mask and a cape;?? I wonder if anyone ever told him that he was acting in T4, not B3.
But perhaps I should back off a bit and hit things more globally before criticizing particular points.
One of the conceits that I always enjoyed about the previous T movies was the4 conceit that since we were playing with time travel, there was no reason to write a different plot for later incarnations.? All you really have to do is take the various scenes from the first film (arrival, car chase, stumbling-injured-chase, seizure of police vehicles (“get out”),? female lead comes into her own and such, mix them up, shove the new faces and new effects into them and viola – T2, T3.
By presenting the sequels in this fashion, it was possible to maintain the fiction throughout all three that they are all realities that were squeezed off into their own time-loop, doomed to repeat essentially the same sequence over and over, because out world avoided Judgement Day the moment that Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor conceived John.
(Somehow the whole time-travel paradox concept – understated as it was in the first film – has gotten lost, perhaps the filmmakers consider it too complex a concept for general audiences to understand but here it is in a nutshell:? Reese travels to the past and conceives John Connor – the very person who would send him into the past to be conceived.? John Connor, leader of the human resistance, only exists because there has been a Judgement Day – rendering the entire Terminator universe one parallel to our own, and one that only shares histories up to that conception point.)
Unlike Star Trek, in which the confusion between time travel and parallel universes muddles the entire plot, the set-up from the original Terminator film begins the franchise with the ability to play with alternate realities in any manner desired, since we’re already in an alternate reality and have already introduced time travel and paradoxes, the plot is free to go wherever it wishes to.
So, instead of playing with the timelines, the BIG TWIST in T4 is:? “hey – how about instead of people and machines travelling from the future to the past, we have a man/machine travel from the past into the future…?”
I’m beginning to think that we need Congress to enact a Science Fiction Film Law: anyone planning on producing a science fiction film must first submit their plot to a panel of science fiction writers, artists, futurists and editors (and a select group of successful SF film producers/directors, living or dead with success NOT measured by box office receipts) before the project can be financed.
I’m growing as bored of writing this review as I was while watching the film. I swear to god I almost fell asleep a couple of times.? The so-called action sequences left me dizzy, with no real sense of who was fighting whom or what the outcome of the battle was; the camera shook too much, the perspective was way too close to the action and the cuts were MTV-quick style.? I was honestly surprised that we didn’t get flashed to a shot of a midget riding a tricycle, or 99 red balloons floating up to the sky.
I felt no sympathy for any of the characters; the future-retro look of Skynets machinery left me yawning and pissed off: the bikes and hydrobots were way too sophisticated when compared to the almost-steampunk-like giant terminators – but I totally lost it when, in a scene not too long after the young Kyle Reese explains that its best to move around during the day because Skynet uses infrared, everyone is sitting around camp fires in the middle of the night.
Adding insult to injury – the executed felon turned terminator rips out his own control chip in order to defy his programming.
Nice to see Arnold in the cameo – he looked 25 years younger.? They could have done the same for Shatner and Nimoy in Star Trek.
So far, the 2009 SF film season has been a major downer, box office receipts notwithstanding.? If this is what we get from big budget, hyped up franchises, I say its time to go back to low-budget, no prior history, stories that rely on story, SF films.
Terminator Salvation is a very good movie. It is obvious that Terminator can be stand-alone movie, without Schwarzenegger. The action scenes are awesome.
CF – suggestions like “think a little deeper” come across as an insult – particularly because you present your OPINION of what the movie was about and the manner in which it was crafted as a declarative statement. Were you on the script writing team? The proposal team? The development team? If so, I would have expected you to say so.
Art is art (even when it’s a painting made out of elephant dung) and beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but there is also something to be said for mass appeal – or the lack thereof. In the case of this particular movie – the elephant dung stood out more than the art – at least so far as the vast majority of reviewers and other commentators (I think it’s running 66% rotten on rotten tomatoes right now) – not that I believe that a gathering a bunch of idiots together somehow elevates the mob’s intelligence, but at least in the case of Terminator Salvation, MCG FAILED to get his hidden message (the one you suppose is there) across to the majority.
And in the case of ‘art’ that has, as its bottomline, income and mass appeal, by that measure, the movie is drek.
You may have seen some great social commentary – what I saw was lack of creativity. I saw actors not acting so that they would not distract from the pretty explosions. Finally, your contention about survivors of the war having lost their humanity flies in the face of the experiences (real) of actual survivors who ultimately consider themselves to have been given a gift (life) and guilt, and who more often than not become the most involved and ‘human’ members of a community, because they are bound and determined that what happened to them will never happen to anyone else.
“I felt no sympathy for any of the characters”
I think people like you are really missing the deeper message in this movie. The underlying story is all about how the one character with real love and heart was the machine, Marcus Wright.
The characters, including John Connor were designed to be dull and lifeless throughout the movie. Let me emphasize: THIS WAS BY DESIGN, not a mistake by the director. 15 straight years of war had made all the human beings lose their humanity. Marcus Wright did not grow up in a post-apocalpytic world and even he, a criminal in his time, was more human and had more “heart” than anyone living in the current world.
John Connor had not yet become the great hero portrayed in visions of earlier movies because he had yet to learn to discern what real humanity is. He finally learned this at the end of the movie, and gained Marcus’s “heart”, both physically and metaphorically. This is the final enabler that will prepare him as the true leader of the resistance, unlike Ironside’s character who gave up his humanity and, in the end, his life and position in the resistance.
The drab, gray landscape, the quarrel between the gas station tribe about giving food, the ignorance of Kate Brewster’s pregnancy and the lifeless characters (other than Marcus) were all BY DESIGN to contrast how mankind lacked the humanity to succeed.
When I walked out of the theater, I thought the way you do, “oh what an uninspiring, mess of a movie”. Now, I’ve begun to understand the hidden message here. In my revised opinion, I now believe this movie is the best of the entire Terminator series because it has a deeper message than the previous films. To me it is not a popcorn thriller like T1-T3, but an intense examination of the heart of a human being.
So please, think a little deeper at the hidden message of this film. McG has taken “Terminator” a step further than Cameron ever could.
These Hollywood series do get more repetitious and incoherent with each new installment, don’t they? I think it’s because they assume the audience has the mentality of a ten year old. Like that P. G. Wodehouse story where a Broadway producer puts an actual ten year old in charge of the show…