Terminator Salvation

Reviewed by J. Lunden on May 28, 2009

James Cameron’s The Terminator may have been conceived as a sci-fi monster movie, but his tale of self-aware machines bent on exterminating the human race evolved with each new installment. It became a living, breathing mythology, replete with a genuine human story at its core—that of the embattled Sarah Connor and her son, John, who is destined to be a wary messiah for a hopeless future.

It’s that human element which makes the Terminator films so palpable—especially in Terminator 2 (the undisputed best of the series). Swartzenegger’s T-800 learns as it protects John from state-of-the-art special effects (savor the irony). The machine learns not just about 1990s human colloquialisms, but about sacrifice of the un-programmed variety. Even in the mostly unnecessary, but unfairly disregarded, Terminator 3, the most powerful scene is that of a helpless John Connor listening as countless warheads scorch the earth. His struggle to stop Judgment Day had been a failure. He will not escape his future. All of these aspects elevated the franchise to more than just a gears and guts distraction, and left an entire future for wide-eyed filmmakers to explore.

So, with all that juicy, sometimes heavy-handed melodrama just waiting to be plumbed for a hard-hitting sequel, how did we end up with this mechanical, soulless and downright idiotic expedient? This was supposed to be the film where we finally got to see the future that Sarah Connor spoke of. Her worst fears materialized. Unfortunately, Director McG and crew have presented something else: a first class lesson in style over substance. Sure, there are lots of scary robots running around causing a ruckus in McG’s landscape, but—and perhaps this is just me—that’s not why I care about the Terminator mythology.

McG adequately directed the Charlie’s Angels films, but he and cinematographer Shane Hurlbut have presented a particularly uninspired vision of Cameron’s post-apocalyptic world. Terminator Salvation’s composition is just plain unattractive. The film often drowns in hazy, digital murkiness, including some truly horrid green screen work. The special effects range between “okay” to guys in laughably bad Terminator suits, popping-and-locking their way around. This is a far cry from the revolutionary FX of Terminator 2. Even the battle-scarred skin of the Terminators looked phoned-in. Stan Winston, you are missed.

The dunderheaded script focuses almost all of its energy on silly plot devices, soapy subplots, and nonstop—and mostly pointless—action sequences. That tongue-in-cheek self-awareness that made Cameron’s entries so spirited is replaced here with unintentional laughs inspired by unwelcome camp. And all of this is communicated through some of the most monosyllabic dialogue I’ve heard in any recent action film. The script also oddly maroons John Connor as a secondary character, instead focusing on Marcus Wright, a new kind of Terminator, who is neither interesting nor necessary to the story. In fact, the character seems to exist only to distract from the film’s lack of story.

So, what of John Connor, then? The narrow focus placed on him gleans very little. In Terminator 2, Edward Furlong played John as boy who, even in the face of an impossible situation, was still a child. A child who wanted nothing more than for his mother to love him; to hold him; to say that everything was going to be okay. Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) could never offer her son those most basic of comforts. John was in an endless state of preparation, because she knew implicitly that nothing was going to be okay. That the whole goddamned world was coming to end and only her son could save what would be left of humanity. The weight of that goes unfelt in Terminator Salvation.

The John Connor of Terminator Salvation is merely an outline of how he was described by Kyle Reese in the first film: a solider with a messianic following. All right. But what does that mean to John? In the film, John’s wife (Bryce Dallas Howard) is pregnant. That seems illogical to me. After what John has seen, after being hunted his whole life, would he really bring a child into his world?

You’d assume that Christian Bale, one of our finest actors, would be just the man to examine these points. But he’s given nothing to work with. Bale is relegated to pointing guns, brooding, and screaming into walkie-talkies. In T2 and T3, John was a creature of psychology, haunted and driven by his mother’s prophecies. In Salvation, John listens to the tapes his mother left for him, hoping to find clues to his future, but he seems unaware of the underlying depths of her posthumous messages. The character is no longer human—he’s a cog in his own legend, going through the motions out of obligation to a bad script.

I like watching folks get terminated as much as the next guy, but I used to care about John Connor’s plight. I used to fear for his survival. Walking out of Terminator Salvation, after two hours of tiresome action, I felt apathetic—almost antithetical—towards the character. If what the Connors say is true and the future is what we make it . . . I suggest no more Terminator movies.