Review: 'Terminator Salvation'

A Terminator mega-robot is fun to watch only if he (it?) is making his (its?) marauding way toward its target; generally, that’s the good guy in the movie who, by superhuman strength and unprecedented cleverness, will dispatch said Terminator in the last reel. Every Terminator movie has been defined by this simple conflict: man versus super-machine.

Not this time. And that is why, despite spectacular visual effects, a brooding and hyper-popular Christian Bale in the lead role, and marketing that pretty much stamped the title across my kids’ foreheads, Terminator Salvation is not nearly the success that the other three movies were.

John Connor and his mom (and his friends and pretty much everybody else with whom they ever come in contact) become instant targets for future-born Terminator robots. The setup is pretty straightforward. The time is present day.

I’m talking about the other pictures, not this one.

This picture is the dog that caught the car: finally we are carried into the future where the post-nuclear dystopian world is filled with killer robots on a constant hunt. This is what we have been (well, I have been) curious to see since the very first of these pictures. Turns out, though, that a bunch of anonymous killer robots aren’t much more interesting than a bunch of trees in the wind or a bunch of cars in traffic. You gotta have a personal story to make the movie take off–you gotta have a conflict so clear it bats you in the head, for instance, the marketing campaign for a big summer movie about killer robots from the future.

In this picture, John Connor is… umm… I think he’s trying to save a guy long enough for that guy to go back in history to impregnate Connor’s mother-to-be so she can give birth to him (Connor) so he (Connor again) can grow up to–save the life of his father so he can go back in time to impregnate Connor’s mother to give birth to him? Maybe? Wasn’t this supposed to be about a killer robot? Ah, well. I wish it was just John Connor and his mother-du-jour on the run from a Terminator, in a series of hair’s-breadth escapes that make mayhem and carnage of and around the lower-billed actors, each of who should enjoy a nifty/gross death scene that they can put on their reel.

This picture needed a bad guy, or a bad robot (which might make it a job for J.J. Abrams, haha) to chase the good guy around–and this good guy didn’t come off as particularly likable, by the way, or even particularly good.

Oh–and the final cheat is that after spending two hours hearing that this is the decisive battle against the evil Skynet, we learn in an end-of-movie voiceover that–surprise!–this is actually just one more battle in the apparently eternal march against Skynet. Can they never be defeated? Only by relatively bad box office, I guess. Maybe this time.

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