So while my parents were here the other week for Christmas, there arose an opportunity for a bit of DVD shopping in the downtown HMV while they were next door, buying memory cards for cameras. On release that week were most of the summer's major attractions, of which I bought a few that I hadn't seen and I thought I might like. I guess over the course of the next 10 minutes, you might come to find out that I didn't like my first purchase; Terminator Salvation, the fourth in the Terminator series. It's fair to say that the fourth instalment of a number of Hollywood 'franchises' have had something of a mixed record. Alien: Resurrection was a nice idea poorly executed; Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was just poor; Rocky IV is an entertaining if cheesy way to spend two hours; Star Wars I - The Phantom Menace: by a galactic distance the worst of that particular series; Batman and Robin? The less said, the better I think.
I'd been looking forward to the summer release of TS (despite the very bad punctuation in the title, have Hollywood execs not heard of colons?) but never actually got to see it at the cinema. I am always well-disposed to a bit of good science fiction. It had been well publicised during the spring following the release of the audio of the epic on set rant of Christian Bale at the films director of photography, for walking in his eyeline during a take. Bale is an actor whose performances I enjoy watching. He was excellent in American Psycho and the recent Batman Begins, though utterly upstaged by the late Heath Ledger in the follow up The Dark Knight. The first two Terminator films are terrific sci-fi films by a director approaching the peak of his powers, and the third was an enjoyable - if a little too comedic - bit of cinematic pulp. So far then, so good, as far as omens go. On the debit side was the thought that the director, 'McG', was chiefly known for the two recent Charlie's Angels films; hardly a substantial or weighty oeuvre. In IMDB fashion, **HERE BE SPOILERS**
So to set the scene. The year is 2018. A rag tag band of human resistance fight a guerilla war against the machines of Skynet, a former military AI program that became self-aware at the end of T3 in 2003. The machines perceived humans as a threat, thus destroying most of them in nuclear armageddon as the US Army rather foolishly left the program in charge of the nuclear arsenal. John Connor has survived attempts on his life before he was even born in T1, as a teenager in T2, and in his early twenties in T3 by the aforementioned Terminators from the future. He is now a middle-ranking member of the resistance in his thirties who listens a lot to audio tapes from his mother, who died in 1997. Connor is a shouty, sullen, world-weary sort who is entrusted with a mission to construct and field-test a device which disables all Skynet machines, while humans can then strike back.
Simultaneously, in the pre-credits sequence, we are introduced to Marcus Wright, a death row prisoner, who signs over his body to medical science to a typically eerie Helena Bonham-Carter, before being executed. Hands up who can't see where this is going before the opening credits have even started? Wright is seemingly put in cold storage for 20 years, before escaping during Connor's raid on a Skynet facility. He inadvertently bumps into a teenage Kyle Reese (the father of Connor in T1) and a mute girl who are seemingly the whole Los Angeles resistance before Reese and the girl are captured by a giant, human catching robot. Wright tries to rescue them but falls from a bridge over a ravine into a river, along with the pilot of a former USAF A-10 Thunderbolt which has come to assist them. This bit provokes a few questions. How is an A-10 Thunderbolt still flying after 20 years? Are Skynet so incompetent they haven't destroyed all military facilities in nuclear armageddon? Even the aliens in Independence Day had the forethought to destroy NORAD pretty sharpish. How is there a) any fuel left to fly them and b) anyone capable of flying one (but then I suppose if drunkard crop duster Randy Quaid and Mister President can competently fly F18s in Independence Day I'll let that slide) and c) any parts and/or technical staff?
So Wright and the (of course both attractive and female) pilot head off for the Nevada desert hideaway. They seem to have a bit of a death wish. We have already heard that the Skynet Hunter-Killer craft work better at night seeing as they have infra red. So they light a fire, which is not very clever seeing as that's how Connor effectively manages to attract one to test the weapon. Maybe they were going to cover themselves in mud, Predator style, if that happened. Oh, they're in a desert. No water. They'd be screwed then. I digress. Eventually, we reach the base, surrounded by a magnetic mine field. Still can't see where this is going? BOOM goes the dynamite! Wright loses a prosthetic limb and the very clumsily signposted secret is exposed. Wright is a cyborg, with human heart and brain, but is largely machine. Connor wants him 'terminated' - witty - until Wright reveals he knows Kyle Reese has been captured by Skynet and that they must stop the imminent attack else Reese be killed.
[I'm curious what happens in this scenario. If Reese dies, then Connor never exists. Does he simply disappear like the photos of Marty McFly's family in Back to the Future? He then can't have fathered Connor Jr being carried by his pregnant wife. Does the baby disappear as well? As Sarah Connor remarks on the tape, "a person could go crazy thinking about all this"]
Connor's wife Kate (who is played by an actress younger than the woman who played her in T3, despite this being 18 years later, and is apparently allowed to operate on humans despite being a vet in T3. But on the plus side, in real life, her godfather is the Fonz) doesn't believe Wright and recommends he be terminated. He escapes, before being reapprehended by Connor. They do a deal; Wright will go back to Skynet and let Connor in, they can then rescue Reese and then destroy the facility. Except this is where it goes wrong. Wright is told by a computer impersonating Helena Bonham-Carter that he is actually an infiltration robot tasked with bringing Connor to Skynet and that the signal that the rebels have used to supposedly disable the robots is actually leading the robots straight to them. Cue the inevitable cyborgs-have-feelings-too moment and off he goes to the rescue.
Connor has, in the meantime, found Reese, but been waylaid by a digitally recreated 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger. Fights ensue, before a melting-then-freezing moment we've seen somewhere before, before Wright is apparently killed by a punch to his human heart (after Arnie scans him and finds "vulnerability"). Connor jump starts him with electrical cables, before being skewered by a now skinless Arnie through the torso by a metal pole, like once happened in an episode of 999. Wright comes round and beheads Arnie rather easily for a supposedly invincible killing machine. They escape, destroy the evil HQ (a shamelessly mechanised Minas Morgul from the Lord of the Rings) and then vet woman gets to perform a succesful heart transplant in a field, replacing Connor's heart with the cyborg Wright's one. Death-row-convict-redeemed box ticked? Check. I guess we all live happily ever after, or at least until the next film (for there are supposed to be two more).
This is a supremely lazy film. It feels like one set piece after another, followed by some clunky expositional dialogue/portentous ranting (delete as appropriate as to whether Bale is on camera or not). There is no humour in it at all. Bale has a face like the metaphorical bulldog chewing the metaphorical wasp the whole time. I watched to try and see which scene it was he might have had that on-set tantrum, and came to the conclusion it could have been each and every time he was on screen. I know we are in the post-apocalyptic age, but smile, John, please! The film isn't consistent within the canon of the other films e.g. see Kate Brewster/Connor's age, or the fact Helena Bonham-Carter worked for Cyberdyne Systems which was destroyed (in 1991!!) in the middle of T2. There is too much borrowing from other sci-fi films at the expense of a coherent story. I saw bits borrowed from Mad Max, Waterworld, The Matrix, Transformers, Minority Report, AI, T1, T2, War of the Worlds and of course, Aliens, which in a not-at-all concealed nod to James Cameron also has a mute girl that has survived mutliple horrors through her own ingenuity. Where does homage end and theft begin? Crowbarring lines such as "I'll be back" and "come with me if you want to live" and the AC-DC song into it is just trying too hard to please at the expense of actually having a coherent storyline that can't be summarised in the pithy fashion seen above. I've not actually missed much out, so you can see how much the material has been stretched to the available space. Terminator Salvation? It certainly needs it after this sorry showing.
4/10 for visual effects, and not being quite as bad as Batman and Robin was.
I'd been looking forward to the summer release of TS (despite the very bad punctuation in the title, have Hollywood execs not heard of colons?) but never actually got to see it at the cinema. I am always well-disposed to a bit of good science fiction. It had been well publicised during the spring following the release of the audio of the epic on set rant of Christian Bale at the films director of photography, for walking in his eyeline during a take. Bale is an actor whose performances I enjoy watching. He was excellent in American Psycho and the recent Batman Begins, though utterly upstaged by the late Heath Ledger in the follow up The Dark Knight. The first two Terminator films are terrific sci-fi films by a director approaching the peak of his powers, and the third was an enjoyable - if a little too comedic - bit of cinematic pulp. So far then, so good, as far as omens go. On the debit side was the thought that the director, 'McG', was chiefly known for the two recent Charlie's Angels films; hardly a substantial or weighty oeuvre. In IMDB fashion, **HERE BE SPOILERS**
So to set the scene. The year is 2018. A rag tag band of human resistance fight a guerilla war against the machines of Skynet, a former military AI program that became self-aware at the end of T3 in 2003. The machines perceived humans as a threat, thus destroying most of them in nuclear armageddon as the US Army rather foolishly left the program in charge of the nuclear arsenal. John Connor has survived attempts on his life before he was even born in T1, as a teenager in T2, and in his early twenties in T3 by the aforementioned Terminators from the future. He is now a middle-ranking member of the resistance in his thirties who listens a lot to audio tapes from his mother, who died in 1997. Connor is a shouty, sullen, world-weary sort who is entrusted with a mission to construct and field-test a device which disables all Skynet machines, while humans can then strike back.
Simultaneously, in the pre-credits sequence, we are introduced to Marcus Wright, a death row prisoner, who signs over his body to medical science to a typically eerie Helena Bonham-Carter, before being executed. Hands up who can't see where this is going before the opening credits have even started? Wright is seemingly put in cold storage for 20 years, before escaping during Connor's raid on a Skynet facility. He inadvertently bumps into a teenage Kyle Reese (the father of Connor in T1) and a mute girl who are seemingly the whole Los Angeles resistance before Reese and the girl are captured by a giant, human catching robot. Wright tries to rescue them but falls from a bridge over a ravine into a river, along with the pilot of a former USAF A-10 Thunderbolt which has come to assist them. This bit provokes a few questions. How is an A-10 Thunderbolt still flying after 20 years? Are Skynet so incompetent they haven't destroyed all military facilities in nuclear armageddon? Even the aliens in Independence Day had the forethought to destroy NORAD pretty sharpish. How is there a) any fuel left to fly them and b) anyone capable of flying one (but then I suppose if drunkard crop duster Randy Quaid and Mister President can competently fly F18s in Independence Day I'll let that slide) and c) any parts and/or technical staff?
So Wright and the (of course both attractive and female) pilot head off for the Nevada desert hideaway. They seem to have a bit of a death wish. We have already heard that the Skynet Hunter-Killer craft work better at night seeing as they have infra red. So they light a fire, which is not very clever seeing as that's how Connor effectively manages to attract one to test the weapon. Maybe they were going to cover themselves in mud, Predator style, if that happened. Oh, they're in a desert. No water. They'd be screwed then. I digress. Eventually, we reach the base, surrounded by a magnetic mine field. Still can't see where this is going? BOOM goes the dynamite! Wright loses a prosthetic limb and the very clumsily signposted secret is exposed. Wright is a cyborg, with human heart and brain, but is largely machine. Connor wants him 'terminated' - witty - until Wright reveals he knows Kyle Reese has been captured by Skynet and that they must stop the imminent attack else Reese be killed.
[I'm curious what happens in this scenario. If Reese dies, then Connor never exists. Does he simply disappear like the photos of Marty McFly's family in Back to the Future? He then can't have fathered Connor Jr being carried by his pregnant wife. Does the baby disappear as well? As Sarah Connor remarks on the tape, "a person could go crazy thinking about all this"]
Connor's wife Kate (who is played by an actress younger than the woman who played her in T3, despite this being 18 years later, and is apparently allowed to operate on humans despite being a vet in T3. But on the plus side, in real life, her godfather is the Fonz) doesn't believe Wright and recommends he be terminated. He escapes, before being reapprehended by Connor. They do a deal; Wright will go back to Skynet and let Connor in, they can then rescue Reese and then destroy the facility. Except this is where it goes wrong. Wright is told by a computer impersonating Helena Bonham-Carter that he is actually an infiltration robot tasked with bringing Connor to Skynet and that the signal that the rebels have used to supposedly disable the robots is actually leading the robots straight to them. Cue the inevitable cyborgs-have-feelings-too moment and off he goes to the rescue.
Connor has, in the meantime, found Reese, but been waylaid by a digitally recreated 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger. Fights ensue, before a melting-then-freezing moment we've seen somewhere before, before Wright is apparently killed by a punch to his human heart (after Arnie scans him and finds "vulnerability"). Connor jump starts him with electrical cables, before being skewered by a now skinless Arnie through the torso by a metal pole, like once happened in an episode of 999. Wright comes round and beheads Arnie rather easily for a supposedly invincible killing machine. They escape, destroy the evil HQ (a shamelessly mechanised Minas Morgul from the Lord of the Rings) and then vet woman gets to perform a succesful heart transplant in a field, replacing Connor's heart with the cyborg Wright's one. Death-row-convict-redeemed box ticked? Check. I guess we all live happily ever after, or at least until the next film (for there are supposed to be two more).
This is a supremely lazy film. It feels like one set piece after another, followed by some clunky expositional dialogue/portentous ranting (delete as appropriate as to whether Bale is on camera or not). There is no humour in it at all. Bale has a face like the metaphorical bulldog chewing the metaphorical wasp the whole time. I watched to try and see which scene it was he might have had that on-set tantrum, and came to the conclusion it could have been each and every time he was on screen. I know we are in the post-apocalyptic age, but smile, John, please! The film isn't consistent within the canon of the other films e.g. see Kate Brewster/Connor's age, or the fact Helena Bonham-Carter worked for Cyberdyne Systems which was destroyed (in 1991!!) in the middle of T2. There is too much borrowing from other sci-fi films at the expense of a coherent story. I saw bits borrowed from Mad Max, Waterworld, The Matrix, Transformers, Minority Report, AI, T1, T2, War of the Worlds and of course, Aliens, which in a not-at-all concealed nod to James Cameron also has a mute girl that has survived mutliple horrors through her own ingenuity. Where does homage end and theft begin? Crowbarring lines such as "I'll be back" and "come with me if you want to live" and the AC-DC song into it is just trying too hard to please at the expense of actually having a coherent storyline that can't be summarised in the pithy fashion seen above. I've not actually missed much out, so you can see how much the material has been stretched to the available space. Terminator Salvation? It certainly needs it after this sorry showing.
4/10 for visual effects, and not being quite as bad as Batman and Robin was.
