Terminator Salvation is supposed to serve as an allegory for the human resistance; a tale of heroics and sacrifice, but after two hours in the cinema, you'll most likely feel cheated for sacrificing two hours of your time, whilst having such high expectations for this film.
In director McG's alternative 2018, the world is a grim and unhappy place. Skynet is entrenched in battle with the human resistance and machines have taken control of the world after a nuclear war nuked the fridge on Judgement day.
{Beware: Spoilers:}
Up until now, Terminator fans had always wondered what a future Terminator war film would actually play out. Apart from the occasional glimpses of this grim future in T1 and T2, audiences never really had an clear idea of how it would go down.
Sure, there are Skynets all around the internet if you look hard enough - but its 2009 and we're still here, relatively unscathed, nine years from the date. Heck, Wolfram Alpha has already been considered an early Skynet and yet the world is much more worried about the global recession than an impending global robot battle.
 |
| Christian Bale snakes up on a T800 |
In the film, humans have quickly found ways to deal with all the different robot models, but a certain T800 brings real trouble. Even so, some of these robot models are very menacing, including some mean looking T600 models, human killer (HVs) machines and a couple of giant harvester models that look all too similar to those of the transformers. If only Optimus Prime had these sorts of weapons.
The movie starts off smack bang in the middle of some heavy, heavy battle scenes. This is an all out war film, scattered with intense zombie monster machines and dreary human characters that offer little salvation to their audience - the one theme that this film is desperately trying to pull off.
There are two major problems with the film that hold it back from being cannon to the series: plot and character. John Connor is now played by Christian Bale - who does his best not to yell and snarl his way through the film with those husky Batman vocals, but he still comes off as an uninviting, grim and soulless leader.
 |
A terminator gets it in the head.
|
Where as Eddie Furlong played a clever brat with a heart of gold, Bale is a jaded, unrelenting soldier. As a commander (saviour?) of the human resistance, we never can tell what makes him quite the leader, especially as he dosn't really understand the machines like we as the audience does.
For instance, there's one scene where Connor learns of Skynet's plans to build the T800 using human organs. Connor appears completely terrified with the news, but after seeing the two previous films, you'd think that Connor would know what a T800 cyborg looks like by now. Was he brainwashed in the ensuing years or did the writers thoughtfully neglect this major plot point? Arnie only explained that to him a hundred odd times in T2.
Connor also regularly listens to tapes made for him by his mother, Sarah. However, they sound mostly pedestrian and lacking. This isn't the same Sarah Connor of great vision from T2. Her information here comes across as weak and vapid. By now, this son and daughter team should know just about everything there is to know about Terninators, their creation and certainly the weak spots of the T800, which is the emerging threat of this film. But Connor still appears clueless by these Skynets plans.
The Kyle Reece character is handled best, but its still hard to see this young kid (Anton Yelchin from Star Trek) becoming the dashing and much older Michael Biehn from the first Terminator flick. Aussie Sam Worthington plays a confused cyborg named Marcus, who thinks he's a human - and drops his faux American brogue so often, that we're left to wonder why Skynet keeps building cyborgs with silly accents, Austrian or Austra-American for that matter. Havn't they heard of decent speech recognition software?
To the director's credit, this is a visually spectacular film; the action is pounding and kinetic, explosions rattle the landscape and the CGI is top notch. Some of the robots (overseen by the late Stan Lee) are great fun, although it's a little worrying to see how many times these machines manage to grab John Connor (and his future father Kyle Reece for that matter) without ever killing either man and thereby winning the war for Skynet. They simply throw Connor against the wall a few hundred times. That's the American PG-13 rating for you. It's bloodless, shirt-grabbing fun.
 |
| Connor vs. Marcus - Who is the real cyborg? |
Best scene of the entire film? The Arnie sequence. Using prosthetic molds from the original Terminator, they managed to scan these, and using some very cool de-aging effects on another Austrian bodybuilder, have managed to bring the original 1984 Arnie back to life. For about three whole minutes, the entire audience was left in awe - it was THE kickass moment of the film and it didn't last long enough. It was obvious that the audience misses Arnie. Worthington is no Schwarzenegger, that's for sure.
 |
| The different Skynet models |
With a tighter, more fluid script and logical story, Terminator Salvation could have been a much better and more intelligent film. Except for now, the faintest praise for this installment, is that it's much better than the last silly excuse for a Terminator film (T3) ,whose ienpt female terminator had jumped the shark - and that's not saying much for quality.
A 'killer' script should have been a top priority for this film. Instead, we are left with a bunch of killer robots that don't quite have a clue to the motives of their clunky machine logic - or the programmers (script writers) who built them to act so utterly predictable in the first place.
The future isn't looking so bright in Terminator Salvation. 5/10