James Cameron’s 1984 film The Terminator is one of the great
action flicks — resourceful, tense, even witty. It’s a grungy,
reasonably low-tech movie with a charismatic trio of leads, a
well-paced structure, and a chewy sci-fi premise lending gravitas.
Cameron’s 1991 follow-up, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, was
similarly effective but had a totally different character
— a big, bright, sleek, propulsive high-tech action
juggernaut that set the bar — for good or ill
— for Hollywood blockbusters to follow.
The fourth film in the series, Terminator Salvation, is
directed by someone who insists on calling himself “McG” and has
contributed such cheap, forgettable hits as Charlie’s Angels and
We Are Marshall to film history. Needless to say, McG is no
Cameron.
Terminator Salvation gets points for at least pushing the
story forward (or is that backward?) after the third film (2003’s
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, directed by Jonathan Mostow)
was essentially a desperate rehashing of Cameron’s Terminator
2.
Set largely in the year 2018, a few years before the future events
that set up the “present-day” story of the original film, Terminator
Salvation stars Christian Bale as John Connor, the character
conceived in the first film and played by Edward Furlong and Nick Stahl
in the second and third. The film takes place well after the “Judgment
Day” in which increasingly intelligent military machines (“Skynet”)
rained a nuclear fire on the planet to protect themselves against the
humans who created them.
Small pockets of humanity remain, hunted daily by their machine
overlords, and Connor is, at this point, a flashy subordinate in the
resistance movement, considered either a savior or a false prophet for
his radio broadcasts about the nature of the human vs. machines
conflict. The story here ties back to the original as Connor tries to
save his father, a teen Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), who was played by
Michael Biehn as a grown man in the first film. Skynet is tracking down
Reese to keep Connor, in the future, from sending Reese into the past,
where he will father Connor. If this is confusing to you, it’s because
you haven’t seen the earlier films, in which case there’s absolutely no
reason to waste your time with a dutiful but entirely nonessential
sequel. Nevertheless, the first film’s other two stars have a presence
here: Linda Hamilton (as Connor’s mother) in still photo and voice
form; Arnold Schwarzenegger in a well-placed CGI cameo.
Bale is well cast (he’s like a hybrid of his and Matthew
McConaughey’s characters in the similarly post-apocalyptic but far more
enjoyable Reign of Fire), but he brings no lightness to this
grim story.
Terminator Salvation is visually numbing — blurry,
chaotic action sequences playing out against a monochromatic,
computer-generated or computer-enhanced backdrop of grays, browns, and
blacks. A subplot cribbed from Blade Runner is an attempt to
inject some poetry into the mix, but ultimately Terminator
Salvation is as mechanical in delivery as it is in content.
Ah-nold’s comically flat line-readings are very much missed.
Terminator Salvation
Opens Thursday, May 21st
Multiple locations
