Al does Terminator Salvation

”This is John Connor. If you are listening to this, you are the resistance.“

The Scoop: PG-13 2009, directed by McG and starring Christian Bale and Sam Worthington

Tagline: The End Begins

Summary Capsule: John Connor fights the Future War while a death row inmate from 2003 tries to figure out how he wound up in 2018.

Al’s Rating: Me and you, McG?  We’re done, professionally.

Al’s Review: Have any of you ever read fanfic?  I’ll bet a lot of you have.  For anyone who doesn’t know, fanfics (fan fiction) are stories written by the fans of a particular series for no other reason than they love the characters and think it would be cool if they fought/teamed up/had sex with Buffy/Data/the cast of Dragonball Z.  It’s like when you were five and you mixed your X-men action figures with your G.I. Joes.

A lot of fanfic is atrocious, as you’d expect, but some of it is surprisingly good.  The major problem with most of it, though, is that, no matter how earth-shattering the events of the story seem to be, you know nothing will ever truly change because the writers cannot violate the established canon of the franchise.  In other words, no serious Star Wars fanfic is going to kill off Han Solo unless they plan on bringing him back by the last chapter.  The author simply doesn’t have the authority to do something like that.

Terminator Salvation struck me as fanfic almost immediately.  All of the important characters are there, like John Connor, Kate Brewster and Kyle Reese.  The badass machines we glimpsed in T1, T2, and T3 get extended action sequences where we see them in all their computer-generated glory.  We even get a mysterious, laconic protagonist who conveniently needs the whole situation exposited to him for our benefit.

But, like any fanfic, what happens in Terminator Salvation simply doesn’t matter.  Will John’s bold plan to wipe out the machines and end the war work?  Not a chance.  Will Kyle Reese be killed by the machines who have targeted him for termination?  Get real.  It’s just the director playing with action figures that have to go back in the box when he’s done.

The dialogue is a step down from Judgment Day and Rise of the Machines, taking itself so seriously that I was afraid the characters might break if they were ever allowed to crack a smile.  The plot sabotages itself by taking a promising idea and saddling it with a narrative structure that eliminates any ambiguity or suspense (not to mention a trailer that spoils the whole thing).  Even the action, for all it’s wham-bam CGI glory, is boring beyond description, featuring the same giant robot monsters, daring escapes, and massive property damage that summer action movies have been required to showcase for about fifteen years.

To try and express myself a little better, I sat down and did some math in the course of writing this review.  The original Terminator features a flashback/forward of The Future War that lasts exactly three minutes, forty seconds.  Kyle Reese and a fellow soldier avoid a hunter-killer gunship, we get the nickel tour of humanity’s squalid living conditions, and the scene fades out as a terminator infiltrates the barracks and opens fire.

Working with a much larger budget, our vision of The Future War in Terminator 2 is naturally much more epic:  There are giant explosions, a sky full of H-K gunships, and a half-dozen skeletal terminators walking over a field of human skulls.  It’s ineffably cool.  It’s also only two minutes and twenty-eight seconds.  In fact, if I stretch the definition and include the ‘burning playground’ opening credits and Sarah’s nuclear bomb nightmare, the total Future War screen time for Terminator 2 (Special Edition) clocks in at six minutes, two seconds.

Two movies, adding up to nearly four-and-a-half hours of film, show us The Future War for a total of nine minutes and forty-two seconds.  In under ten minutes, James Cameron gave us a vision of Judgment Day that was both fascinating and terrifying.  Nine minutes and forty-two seconds that have been burned into the minds of every Terminator fan for twenty years.

Terminator Salvation, on the other hand, spends it’s entire 115 minutes exploring The Future War.  We’re taken across blasted-out battlefields, through ruined cities, and into terminator construction centers—literally from the highest skies to the deepest seas of Earth, circa 2018.  Yet, in nearly two hours, the film failed to produce a single image with the power of the playgrounds burning or of scattered bones being crushed underfoot.  Nothing even close.

Terminator Salvation is a pretender sequel that has none of the drama, none of the action, and none of the style that befits a true Terminator movie.  It’s mediocre fan fiction that somehow made it up on the big screen.  But, who knows, maybe in the next one we’ll get to see John Connor team up with Conan the Barbarian!  That’s what all the kids are writing about on the internet, right?

Toothpaste is a luxury on the battlefield, making this conversation even more uncomfortable than it looks.

Didja Notice?

• Michael Ironside in the underwater sub?  I like that.
• So… there’s a machine that looks and acts exactly like a motorcycle?  Uh, okay.
• No Derek Reese?
• Guns and Roses survived Judgment Day?
• Marcus’s Great Escape-style bike jump?
• The eel bots?  “Now John Connor did not get eaten by the eels at this time…”
• The machines’ plan for Marcus is pretty hopelessly convoluted, no?
• The machines don’t kill Kyle Reese even though they have him captured and identified and he’s number one on their kill list?  Lame.
• The T-800 just seems to throw John Connor around a lot instead of, oh, I don’t know, terminating him?
• How John gets his facial scar?
• John recovers surprisingly well from a stab wound in the heart?

Is It Worth Staying Through The End Credits?

No.

Intermission!

The rumored original ending of the film had John Connor killed off and his skin grafted onto Marcus’s cybernetic body “to keep his image alive.”  It was reportedly changed after the ending leaked onto the internet.  Some sources, however, dispute that an alternate ending ever existed.

Groovy Quotes

Kyle Reese: Come with me if you want to live.

Marcus Wright: What day is it? What year?
Kyle Reese: 2018.
Marcus Wright: What happened here?
Kyle Reese: Judgment Day happened.

John Connor: This is John Connor. If you are listening to this, you are the resistance.

Kate Connor: What should I tell your men when they find out you’re gone?
John Connor: I’ll be back.

Marcus Wright: If you’re going to point a gun, you’d better be ready to pull the trigger.

Kyle Reese: You want to know the difference between us and machines? We bury our dead.  But no one is coming to bury you.

Marcus Wright:  The idea is to stay alive.  I’m driving.

John Connor: You and me, we’ve been at war since before either of us even existed. You tried killing my mother, Sarah Connor. You killed my father, Kyle Reese. You will not kill me!

If You Liked This Movie, Try These:

• Terminator 2: Judgment Day
• The Road Warrior
• Resident Evil: Extinction