Terminator Salvation (12A)
- Starring: Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Anton Yelchin, Bryce Dallas Howard, Common, Moon Bloodgood, Helena Bonham Carter
- Director: McG
- Duration: 114 mins
- Year: 2009
In post-apocalyptic 2018, John Connor leads the dwindling human race against Skynet and its relentless army of Terminators. The future is uncertain until John meets enigmatic stranger Marcus Wright, who was once on Death Row but seems to have little memory of the past. John is immediately suspicious of Marcus and is unable to ascertain whether this man with a fractured memory has been sent from the future as part of a dastardly Skynet plot to undermine the human resistance. As the threat from the Terminators takes to land, sea and air, John and Marcus form an uneasy alliance, which is tested to breaking point when the two men infiltrate the very heart of the Skynet operation.
Reviews
Alison Rowat's Review
Half the fun, perhaps the only fun, to be had in Terminator Salvation is guessing at what point Christian Bale went loco with a lighting engineer who strolled into his line of sight during a take. Bale says it was “the most intense scene” in the picture.
That hardly narrows the field. T4, to give the movie its dress down Friday name, is a suffocatingly dark affair full of clashing metal and brooding menace that’s more war movie than thriller. Saving Private Iron, if you will.
Directed by the succinctly named McG, this is a very different beast than T3, and is a universe apart in tone from James Cameron’s first two films in the franchise.
McG, the director who made his name with the light and fluffy Charlie’s Angels films, has taken the opposite tack here, occasionally for the better, but more often not. Like its leading man, Terminator Salvation wants to be taken very seriously indeed. So shame on you for expecting some larks at the movies.
Bale plays John Connor, leader of the resistance in a post apocalyptic world where machines have taken over. These aren’t just any old temperamental photocopiers or dodgy faxes, but bullet-spitting, inferno-unleashing, global-dominating robots. The first three pictures were concerned with seeing Connor safely born and keeping him alive long enough so that he could one day fulfil his destiny to rage against the machines. McG’s picture shows him knee-deep in that task.
Except it’s not quite that straightforward, as the opening sequence, set in 2003, shows. Death Row prisoner Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) is preparing to meet his maker when a doctor (Helena Bonham Carter) persuades him to donate his body to science.
Marcus does so and goes to his grave with the aid of a lethal injection, only to wake again in 2018, a touch confused and understandably so.
Adrift in the wasteland that was once America, he teams up with local lad Kyle Rees (Anton Yelchin, the Russkie in Star Trek). The cognoscenti will remember Kyle as the character from the first Terminator who saved Linda Hamilton from big Arnie, and knocked her up in the process with the child who would be John Connor.
Just as Marcus starts to grow fond of the kid, Kyle is snatched by the evil Skynet, the controlling computer mind behind the machines. If Kyle doesn’t survive, John Connor, even though he already exists in the shape of Christian Bale, can’t be born.
I would have spent more time trying to make sense of all this but my fillings were about to jump out. Terminator Salvation is incredibly loud – dentistry-imperilling, eardrum-shattering, chest- thumpingly loud. Crash, bang, wallop, go the Terminators as planes scream overhead, vehicles blow up, and bellowing humans scurry like ants for safety.
The action sequences arrive so thick and fast there’s hardly any time for characters to catch a breath, let alone round out their characters. What’s the point, you begin to wonder, in having a multifaceted, ultra-intense actor such as Christian Bale in the lead if he’s given no space to develop Connor’s persona. Sam Worthington, star of James Cameron’s upcoming Avatar, makes more of an impression, even managing to pinch scenes from the Bale man on several occasions.
When Bale does manage to get some words in edgeways, he speaks in a Dark Knight growl of dark things. “The devil’s hands have been busy.” There are other echoes of films gone by in a scene where a giant, Transformers-style metal Mickey lays waste to a petrol station in which survivors are hiding. Relentless in its pursuit, the tin beast disgorges Dark Knight style motorbikes to snaffle its prey.
Screenplay writers John D Brancato and Michael Ferris were co-writers on T3, the picture where the franchise, to many fans’ dismay, took a turn towards the lighter side. Like McG, they seem to be overcompensating here for the tonal sins of the past. The dialogue in T4 is infested with portents of doom and riddled with biblical phrases (even the title has an Old Testament flavour). The set design for post-Judgment Day Earth is pitched at war zone bleak. Rubble-strewn, awash in greys and browns and choked in smoke, this world calls to mind Iwo Jima 1945, or Afghanistan 2009.
The phrase “lighten up, guys” bounces constantly to mind.
Even Bale’s supposedly comic nod to the franchise’s past (won’t give it away, but it comes in the shape of an answer to the question, “What shall I tell your men when they find out you’ve gone?”) gets only a semi-flourish, as if he daren’t let his seriousness slip for a moment.
Serious is fine, unrelenting action gives the moviegoer a lot of bangs for their buck, but the Terminator films of old provided both and, crucially, had a heart and humour as well. Both those commodities are lacking in McG’s picture. For all the sound storm, it’s tinnier for it.