Amazingly mindless
Written: Jun 05 '09 (Updated Jun 05 '09)
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: Visually impressive
Cons: Awful writing, adds nothing to the overall story
The Bottom Line: Terminator Salvation is brutal and mindless. The movie doesn't contain violence and explosions. The violence and explosions contain the movie.
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| wrestler's Full Review: Terminator Salvation |
Terminator Salvation is the worst movie I've seen this year. No, I guess I haven't seen all that many. I can't call it boring, and it has the budget, the talent and the expertise to be a superior science-fiction flick, but its lack of ambition left me completely bamboozled. Christian Bale, who plays John Connor in this one, said that he wanted to do with Terminator what he did with Batman. Oh how he has wonderfully succeeded with the caped crusader, and how miserably he has failed with the savior of the human race! Here is a movie that has everything to succeed but a brain in its head.
We are in the year 2018. The now self-aware technological system Skynet has launched a worldwide nuclear attack and has turned the planet into a giant, barren wasteland that is limited, in this movie, to California. I noticed because there is a scene between Sam Worthington and Anton Yelchin in which the former tells the latter: "I'm going north." A line to which Yelchin responds: "You can't go north! San Francisco is completely controlled by Skynet." Pardon my surprise, but it was my first hearing San Fran being referred to as "the north." Or perhaps San Fran was his way of getting north, but I digress.
After about 20 minutes of explosions, gunshots and just-about-pointless bits of dialogue, we finally get what this movie has to be about. Connor is a member of The Resistance, which essentially consists of the planet's remaining humans. There is a list of people the machines want dead. Connor is informed he is second on that list. So who's first? Heck, Connor's been the machines' top target for three movies now, so what's this new hotshot about? His name is Kyle Reese, says one of Connor's Resistance colleagues. As it turns out, Reese is John Connor's father and he's been brought to 2018 through time travel as a teenager (Yelchin), an impressive feat that the movie is rigorous about not explaining. So I guess this means the machines are going after the father to prevent the birth of the son. (In Terminator 5, the machines go back to the 1800s to go after the great-great-great grandfather... just kidding.)
Meanwhile, we meet Marcus Wright (Worthington), who is a convicted murderer who accepts to donate his body for this experiment a mysterious cancer patient (Helena Bonham Carter) says will achieve great things. What that experiment turns out to be could have been a quality shocker had the marketing team not been so hell-bent on giving it away in the trailers. After keeping Kyle alive for a while, he meets a charming member of the Resistance named Blair (Moon Bloodgood), whom he befriends and then some.
We even get an Arnold moment. A CGI Arnold, but I guess age and being the governor of California kind of messed up his ability to appear in the film. His famous "I'll be back" line is uttered by Connor at some point to his girlfriend Kate Brewster, whose part is taken over in this movie by Bryce Dallas Howard after Clare Danes played it in T3. Too bad she's an afterthought here.
At some point, Connor gives a speech in which he tells fellow Resistance members that there's no point for the humans to win the war if they're no different than the machines. The irony of this is striking, given how little humanity the script gives Connor and most of the characters. Moon Bloodgood's Blair probably leads the humanity category in this film, but that's not saying much. Her human moment is when she engages in not-so-subtle flirting with Marcus. One of the movie's big problems is that, most of the time, the characters converse (not the right word) in dialogue that compares unfavorably to that of videogame cut scenes. Occasionally adding to our pain is the abysmally bad Common, whom I can't stand even as a rapper. In this film, he plays Barnes, the Resistance muscle. His delivery is so awful he can't even utter techno babble credibly.
During the aforementioned speech, Connor asks his colleagues to ignore a command to bomb Skynet given by the borderline stupid Resistance commander played by Michael Ironside. This leads me to another of the many that don't work in this movie: if Connor is to lead the Resistance to victory, as we've been hearing for three movies, is there any reason for him not to be the big boss, except as an excuse to have a cliché scene in which he courageously disobeys a direct order?
And while we're on the subject of screenplay contrivances, here's another. The machines might be all-powerful, but they're not exactly behavioral science junkies. Their plan for Marcus seems well-conceived, but to let him keep his human conscience and personality is such an obvious miscalculation that it turns out to be a kind of deus ex machina essential to saving John from certain death and wrapping up the movie.
There is more. The machines make boring movie characters because they have no personalities, they just blow up or beat up anything or anyone on sight. Besides, some of them are so unbelievably enormous and they're so difficult to kill that we realize that it wouldn't take them more than a few months to wipe out all humans, let alone 21 years (from 1997 to 2018).
Terminator Salvation is essentially a video game you get to watch someone else play, and even modern video games are a hell of a lot more coherent than this. About 90% of it is comprised of action scenes with enough explosions to make Hiroshima look like a camp fire. It's not the first film we can say that about. However, it features one-dimensional characters and a screenplay of such staggering vacuity that it would make Steven Seagal action films sound like they were written by Eugene O'Neill. And if that wasn't bad enough, we haven't discussed the movie's cardinal sin. It doesn't add anything to the whole Terminator story. At the start, a lot of people have died and the war rages on. At the end, a lot more people have died and the war rages on. Thus, we come to the sad conclusion that this movie is completely disposable.
Recommended:
No
Movie Mood: Action Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: A few glitches, but mostly complete.
Worst Part of this Film: Script
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Epinions.com ID:
wrestler
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Member: Alexandre Turp
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Reviews written: 163
Trusted by: 17 members
About Me:
Evolution is all that matters.
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