Director: McG
Notable Cast: Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Anton Yelchin, Bryce Dallas Howard, Moon Bloodgood, Helena Bonham Carter, Common
In a recent Entertainment Weekly article about Terminator Salvation, director McG – short for “McGinty,” his middle name – said this movie would be his Aliens. The joke being that James Cameron was ridiculed because he was the director of Piranha 2 and he was making a sequel to Ridley Scott’s science-fiction masterpiece. McG’s joke – besides his name – is that he’s a music-video director turned filmmaker who brought the ‘70s TV show Charlie’s Angels to the big screen. Did it twice, actually, and did it badly. And while McG will smile widely at the thought that this continuation of the Terminator franchise might define him as a director, he must’ve overlooked one tiny detail: Cameron made The Terminator before tackling a sequel to Alien.
What fans of the series have to look forward to is a movie that abandons present time (first time in the franchise’s twenty-five year history). Albeit for a short prologue from 2003, the movie is set 2018, fourteen years after Judgment Day. We’ve seen fragments of John Connor leading the resistance to stop Skynet, an intricate intelligence network that begins to think on its own and starts a nuclear holocaust to end humanity, before, but never this intense. Dark and stained, the screen has a gun-metal veneer from resulting bombing raids and machine-gun exhaust.
With films dealing with alternate realities or time-traveling, events that happened in the past may hold true or they may not be pertinent at all. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines all but said the outcome of T2 didn’t matter. Skynet’s development may have been delayed, but the holocaust was inevitable. And then there are the endless “what if” scenarios, like the one surrounding John Connor’s birth. Would John Connor have been born if Kyle Reese hadn’t slept with the woman he was sent to protect, Sarah Connor? Concievably she would still have had John Conner without Reese as the father, just as long as she survived the enemy Terminator sent to kill her. Which she did. In any case, that’s where time travel can be a convenient asset. Story errors – no problem. Filmmakers can bend the facts when they want.
When Christian Bale was first sent the script of Salvation he had some harsh words for McG. And while John Brancato & Michael Ferris get the final screenplay credit, it got a high-gloss polish job by Jonah Nolan and Paul Haggis. The biggest issues are in the development of characters and the story, but the scope of the film is so large because of the futuristic setting, so ambitious that you sort of overlook the character development. The last act is balls-to-the-wall, non-stop action with one great moment that will have fans of the franchise cheering.
Salvation shares the grittiness of the first Terminator film, albeit with glossier special effects and a bigger budget. Christian Bale plays the much prophesized John Connor, but this is not a story of him as the supreme commander of the resistance. He’s a maverick leader for a local militia, and the voice that provides calmness to the rest of the resistance. Connor has a two-fold purpose. One is to test a radio frequency jammer that’ll stop the machines dead in their tracks. The second is to locate Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), who has been targeted for termination. Reese has his own sub-plot as part of the L.A. branch of the resistance. It is there he teams up with a stranger named Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington). Marcus doesn’t know what year it is or what has happened to Los Angeles. Together they narrowly escape a pair of motorcycle Terminators (in a sequence that recalls George Miller’s Mad Max series) before Reese is captured and sent to Skynet in a scene reminiscent of the cattle cars of human cargo on their way to Nazi concentration camps.
The previous three films had villains (the T-800, the T-1000, and the TX) with the simple task of seek and destroy. Not favoring Salvation is a true villain that has orders to terminate. That doesn’t happen until the last twenty minutes, leaving us in a wait-and-see mode.
Like he did with The Dark Knight, Christian Bale doesn’t upstage the movie. He is intense and still talks like he’s got a mouthful of gravel, but this is as much Sam Worthington’s movie as it is his. A fresh face from Australia, Bale specifically picked Worthington for the role of Marcus. He conveys much more emotion than Bale’s grizzled character. As the story unfolds, you’ll understand why. Completing the male stars is Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese. Already a supporting star in Star Trek – though his Chekov character was more of an imitation – his Reese character has the same steely eyes of Michael Biehn. It’s scary. And his first line of dialogue is a memorable calling card to the original Terminator when he tells Marcus, “Come with me, if you want to live.”
To be real, I was never hip to the idea of more Terminator movies, only because James Cameron closed the book on the subject. The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day told a complete story. Not discounting character development and story quibbles, Terminator Salvation has plenty of action that’ll satiate summer moviegoers. Just don’t expect it to match the levels of James Cameron’s films.
FINAL RATING (ON A SCALE OF 1-5 BUCKETS):
