Review: Terminator: Salvation
*
Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Anton Yelchin, Bryce Dallas Howard, Helena Bonham Carter, Jane Alexander, Michael Ironside, Common, Moon Bloodgood. Screenplay by John Brancato, Michael Ferris, Jonathan Nolan and Anthony E. Zuiker. Directed by McG. MGM Distribution Company, Warner Bros. Pictures Distribution. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and language. 115 minutes.
A major disappointment and total waste of talent and time, Terminator: Salvation, director McG’s misguided franchise reboot about the collision of past, present, humans and machines in a burnt-out future, fails at everything that James Cameron’s iconic two films delivered, even managing to make Jonathan Mostow’s reviled B-movie actioner Terminator: Rise of the Machines, seem almost fun in retrospect. Jettisoning the characters and heart from the series, Terminator: Salvation is all noise, machines and explosions.
For nearly two hours, we watch the empty saga of John Connor (Christian Bale) unfold. Resistance leader of the near future, rebelling against a machine-controlled world courtesy of Skynet, the creator of the terminating robots which suddenly got smart and annihilated humans, his mission is to save the young, captured rebel Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin).
Anyone familiar with the series understands that Reese must travel back to the 1980s to protect one Sarah Connor (played to perfection by Linda Hamilton in both The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day), who will eventually give birth to John Connor and who has been targeted for termination, thereby extinguishing the possibility Connor could be born to fulfill his future prophecy. Complicating the situation, Reese will also become Connor’s father, a paradox we are aware of while Connor is not.
Thrown into this wasteland is Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a once executed murderer from the past who turns out to be (spoilers) a machine himself and who ends up protecting Reese and a spunky young waif (the kind who drifts around in barren movie sets like this), before catching the attentions of a vapid rebel pilot (Moon Bloodgood).
Soon Skynet has rounded up all humans into a sort of POW facility, and they are marked for certain death, a fate from which Connor must pluck Reese, but not before a confrontation with the prototype terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1984 original, digitally cloned here (badly) in order to mount a climax borrowed wholesale from those two vastly superior pictures.
Also on hand are one of those central casting, ragtag band of survivors led by the great Jane Alexander and rapper Common—you read that right—who are also members of the Resistance and who get picked up by a giant machine, only to be hurled to the ground and herded to Skynet’s prison.
In many ways, the approach here—bigger, louder, faster—is a too-common miscalculation that plagues many Hollywood action sequels, including this Summer’s Wolverine, another mindless effects show disposing of what made its predecessors effective—new ideas.
McG and company can’t be bothered with compelling characters or reinvention—they’re too busy with explosions, too preoccupied with fussy, bleached-out cinematography and too obsessed with gadgetry to notice that they have betrayed the central idea in the series, and made the machines much more important than the people. And that’s a pretty major miscalculation in a movie pretending to be about the triumph of humanity over hardware.
It doesn’t help that a talented cast featuring Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Ironside, Howard, Yelchin and Alexander (who apparently really wants to work, after appearing in the equally embarrassing The Unborn earlier this year) were hired and then given a soulless script with nothing to do.
Other cast members don’t fare as well, including the wooden Moon Bloodgood, hired for her looks, and Worthington, who barely registers in a role that might have contained an intriguin
