Terminator Salvation
The Terminator has always been one of my very favorite films. I saw it in Times Square, the evening of a day which ended with me being in an extremely bad mood, and it cheered me up immensely. T2 was terrific, too, and although Rise of the Machines turned the whole thing into a sort of pointless Twilight Zone episode, I was still looking forward to Terminator Salvation.
I shouldn't have bothered. Big disappointment. While it's jam-packed with a lot of decently-produced action sequences—at least McG has finally learned how to hold a camera still—it's difficult to see what the point of the rest of the movie is. The plot is pretty incoherent—Christain Bale as John Connor and Sam Worthington as a sort of proto-Terminator head off to infiltrate Skynet to rescue the teenaged Kyle Reese in order to ensure that he isn't killed, resulting in a temporal paradox which will erase Connors' existence. Got that?
Now, why Connor worries so much about this is beyond me. Since all of his teen-aged attempts to keep Skynet from existing at all clearly failed, and since "Judgment Day" took place in spite on his non-stop efforts, presumably since birth, to counter it, I'd have thought it was a safe bet for him to sit back and wait for some deus ex machina to pull Reese out of the robot stalag like a rabbit out of a hat. Evidently, Connor feels differently about it. Risk-averse, I guess. (I suppose if I'd spent my adolescence being chased around by killer robots from the future, I might be risk-averse, too...)
The fact is, it's hard to care about any of this. Bale's ostensible acting talents seem to have been left at home, but that's pretty much the case with everyone here—they've all got about one expression apiece. Bale looks dour, Worthington looks tortured, the young Reese looks sullen and Jadagrace, as a seven-year-old mute resistance fighter, looks blankly on. Now that he's worked out how to use a tripod, maybe McG can study up on acting before his next film, which, with any luck, will be a long ways off.
Again, the special effects budget was certainly put to good use. We have giant robots of all sorts (including some cool motorcycle-like things, one of which Bale "repurposes" as his own personal chopper), mushroom clouds and explosions galore, and a lot of interesting noise on the soundtrack. What we don't have is an actual movie.
As I said, "tedious" is not a word I'd have thought I'd be using to describe a Terminator film. Watching Terminator Salvation is a lot like watching somebody else playing a videogame: there's apparently a lot going on, but it's actually not very interesting.
Terminator Salvation
Christian Bale, Sam Worthington
Directed by "McG" (Joseph McGinty)
Running time: 115 min.