Terminator Salvation (2009): Can the Fourth Time Around Be The Best?
Written: May 24 '09 (Updated May 24 '09)
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: More human than the earlier ones.
Cons: Not dark enough and not loud enough.
The Bottom Line: I liked it because it is perhaps the most humanized of the films in the series.
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| Ed.Williamson's Full Review: Terminator Salvation |
We saw the fourth installment of the Terminator series the other night at the Bijou, and it may well be the best of all. I say that knowing that many of the critics and much of that mass audience don't share my contrarian view.
For one thing, Arnold, as good as he is in these things, tends to overbalance the cast, and without him (well sort of- they still manage to slip a clone of him in) this one has a much better cast balance to it. It is like three plots going at once with Christian Bale (John Connor) holding up one plot thread, Anton Yelchin (Kyle Reese) holding up the middle, and Sam Worthington (Marcus Wright) holding up the third thread, and darn near stealing the show as he does it. Moon Bloodgood (what kind of screen name is that???) also shows fine work here.
John Connor is the spiritual, if not the political, leader of the Resistance against the robot world of Skynet. He is seeking Kyle Reese after Kyle gets detained by the metal guys. Enter an android Marcus Wright into the picture, who is possibly a good robot but maybe a bad robot, and you've got the kind of off-balance chemistry that makes such a story interesting, as opposed to the stark Good-Humans-versus-Bad-Robots monotony in the earlier renditions. About the only really interesting plot thread in those was when Arnie played a good robot protecting Sarah Connor from the shape-shifting T-1000 robot (Robert Patrick), which was like Marcus Wright's playing-against-type androidal guy here in Salvation.
The thing that makes Sam Worthington's acting job a cut above Christian Bales' is that Sam comes off as perfectly laconic about it all. While Bales' Connor is almost as stone-faced as he was in his Batman film, The Dark Knight, Sam seems very cool and almost diffident about ending up in a universe he did not choose to fight a war whose combatants are all (except for Bloodgood's Blair) hardly worth caring about. He reminded me of the early Clint Eastwood.
What really sets T4 apart from T 1, 2, and 3 though, is the soft-pedaling of special effects (although, for the FX addicts, there is a fix-a-plenty here) in order to emphasize the human interaction. It was good to see John Connor with a pregnant girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard), as well as to see the interaction between Worthington and Bloodgood, and to see Yelchin's Kyle Reese caring for the mute girl Star, played by Jadagrace (where do they get these screen names? Jada Jada Jada...)
Anyway, that's the way I see it. If you can tear yourself emotionally away from the tradition and culture of T1,2, &3, and take a bit of a nonconformist approach to the series, you may like it as I did. Somehow, it is a little less, well, robotic than the earlier ones.
Five Stars/ *****
Recommended:
Yes
Movie Mood: Date Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: A few glitches, but mostly complete.
Worst Part of this Film: Nothing
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Ed.Williamson
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Member: Ed Williamson
Location: Way Out West, USA
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Fight 'em till Hell freezes over, then fight 'em on the ice!
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