Synopsis: There's robots. Stuff blows up.
Bland.
Which is strange.
All the parts were there.
As of this writing, Night at the Museum 2 sits at top box office while Terminator Salvation opens in second place with only 43 Million. Do I wish it opened up on top? Of course. Does it deserve its spot behind another stilted Ben Stiller comedy? Probably.
Directing the first Terminator “without” Arnold (he does make a brief rubbery appearance) McG pulls in fantastic star power only to promptly lose them in the background. Newcomer Sam Worthington plays, perhaps intentionally, the only human character in the whole film. Beyond humans being more flesh colored and the machines looking like nonstick cookware, their dogged hatred and mutual desire for the eradication of the other makes them most indistinguishable.
The chase scenes are good. There are explosions. Some explosions involve giant robots. There are lots of nods to all the previous films: some too obvious while others more subtle bones handed under the table. So why isn’t it good? Well, it isn’t bad actually. As a sci-fi action flick it delivers the goods. But that’s all it is. It’s far too safe. The movie was cut down to a PG-13 rating (all previous were R) but comes across as PG. There’s no squirm scenes: the Cylons making human hybrids in made-for-TV Battlestar Galactica made me more uncomfortable. Arnold rips the skin off his own arm and has bullets pulled from his back with needle nose pliers in T2. Marcus just gets really beat up. I’m not one for blood and guts, but machines standing around looking intimidating is not good story telling. The characters are flat. We know these people can act if given a chance. Instead Bryce Dallas Howard hangs out looking pregnant and 4 time Oscar nominee Jane Alexander delivers a total of two lines before getting snatched by a harvester. Why is Bryce pregnant? Is she ever threatened and John Connor has to save her and his unborn child? Nope. Why is Common even in this movie? I have no idea.
So why do I wish it did better? Like I said, the parts are there. The special effects, the star power, the story potential. Bale signed on for a trilogy. A real writer could push the next film into the realm of fantastic. Unfortunately we may never see the messianic culmination of John Connor if the series is lamed right out of the gate.
I have already had to watch my beloved Star Wars turn into little more than a cash cow for Hasbro while Indiana Jones fights off aliens (aliens!).
Please don’t do the same to my Terminators.
Meet the Critic
- T.D.
- "I was a single monkey trying to type the opening lines of my Hamlet."
4 comments:
First of all, I asked the same question about why Connor's gf/wife was pregnant. The best answer we came up with was that it showed he was a family man.
Bale needs to cut out the batman voice. He supposedly has a different voice for each role he plays but it's extremely hard to distinguish between Batmanish guttural sounds and John Connor guttural sounds.
Chase scenes? What movie were you watching? There was 1 chase scene that was longer than 30 seconds. (where the robots get on Motorcycles, which are for some odd reason able to be operated by a human). The only other chase scene is when the droid comes by and identifies Kyle Reese.
I think making the machines and humans indistinguishable was the intent of the director. You side with Marcus in that situation. Though my gf, not having seen much of the terminator movies, leaned over to me and told me that Marcus was a robot so we shouldn't feel like he was actually sacrificing anything.
I felt strangely unsatisfied with the movie. It didn't have a good ending. Marcus didn't make you cheer for him. It was just... meh. That's the best word to describe this movie.
Well that's two chase scenes right there. Movies generally don't have many more than that.
Like I said, it may have been intentional to make you side with Marcus, but what he essentially did is make them crappy characters. Writing a story full of poorly written characters so your one decent character "stands out" is a really really dumb idea.
As far as Marcus being a robot it was his actual brain and heart in the metal casing, he wasn't just another terminator. That aside, I think Sam Worthington did a great job (much better than Bale).
I really do think Clark explains it best why it isn't a Terminator movie (http://screencrave.com/2009-05-27/why-terminator-salvation-isnt-a-terminator-film/). While she does discusses the shift of the protagonist/antagonist, I would say the movie really had no focus at all. You could say ol' Charlie's Angels himself, McG, was trying to do "something new" but all he achieved was a film that had no real conflict. I think the overabundance of characters demonstrated this.
I would chalk up your dissatisfaction to 1) It being a crappy story and 2) "this isn't the future my mother told me about. Something's changed." The few insights we've had of this war were a lot more brutal. There really was no sense of fear in this movie. Mrs. Connor can apparently perform heart transplants in the middle of the desert while hugely pregnant. Skynet rounds people up and. . . shelters and feeds them as far as we can tell. That doesn't strike me as skin of your teeth, giant-robots-rolling-over-piles-of-human-skulls future we've been told about.
I guess I expect some intrigue in chase scenes. Running away from a visual probe doesn't seem to be thrilling and feels like it's more of a we-need-5-minutes-of-action-before-our-viewers-fall-asleep segment. What were they running from? What was the purpose? The probe didn't even do anything. There was no correlation between any of the robots, they didn't seem to care about anything. It was a plethora of individual robots who couldn't work together.
Also, Marcus was created 15 years before the bulk of the movie. Where did that come in? He's so much more technologically advanced than any of the machines, except that he doesn't seem to ever shoot anything. Am I wrong, but I don't recall him ever having a gun in his hand much less pulling the trigger.
I must say it was rather convenient for John Connor to have all his superiors exploded and drowned so that he could take over. Like you said, he's supposed to be this military genius, but I really didn't see that. He seemed kinda wussy to me. In fact, I think he got as many soldiers killed as prisoners rescued throughout the course of the movie.
bland is right. that's all.
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