Terminator Salvation

The Terminator franchise has always been about a pending war between humans and machines. The machines try to stop the war by sending soldiers into the past to eliminate key figures before they can interfere with the war. The humans try to stop the war by gleaning information from the future and stopping events before they can occur. Obviously neither side has been victorious in these endeavors, since we’ve gotten three previous movies and now, with Terminator Salvation, we step beyond Judgment Day into the fray itself.

After a brief prologue that, along with the marketing for Terminator Salvation, robs the movie of one of its big surprises, we see what the war between humans and machines looks like up close. John Connor (Christian Bale) has become a nearly mythical figure among some of the soldiers, and is the leader we have always been told he would become - except, of course, he isn’t the one in charge. In fact, John is constantly outranked by people who don’t have faith in his decisions and other than a close cell of the resistance that includes Moon Bloodgood and Common, we really don’t get a large sense of the hero John is supposed to become, with the exception of one moment in the story that almost feels arbitrarily thrown in.

The resistance manages to get their hand on a weapon that will take down the machines and command plans a siege on their opposition’s central hub. Unfortunately, there are human prisoners in that central hub; prisoners that include a young Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin). Thanks to the recordings of his mother, John is aware that, in the future-past, Kyle will become his father, so he’s not so keen on having those prisoners lost as casualties of war. In fact, the order to attack the hub and ignore the human prisoners becomes something of an ideological battle between John and his commanding officer (Michael Ironsides). It’s a weak battle at best though. Command says “do it,” while John points out that it makes them more mechanical than the machines they are fighting. It still doesn’t really indicate any leadership on John’s part, other than his ability to form clichéd arguments.

Through all of this is woven the story of Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), who is introduced in the prologue as a death row inmate who signs his body over to Cyberdine systems for science and then mysteriously appears almost fifteen years later without having aged a day, unaware of the conflict going on in the world he inhabits. Even without the movie’s marketing revealing something more, it’s obvious that there is more to Marcus that meets the eye.

Terminator Salvation’s big problem is that it lacks focus. The movie moves into a new realm of storytelling in this universe created by James Cameron, but it doesn’t come across as certain about what story it wants to tell. Christian Bale doesn’t get enough screen time to give John Connor any emotional weight. He continues on the character’s conflicted status from previous movies, but doesn’t get to shine as the virtual messiah the character is supposed to be. Instead the movie spends a lot of time following Marcus Wright, building up to a surprise that’s all but been revealed already (and is incredibly predictable anyway) and then putting the character into an existential internal battle. Of course, since we can figure out what that battle will be early on, it’s hard to care about the character’s plight at any point.

As a summer blockbuster, Terminator Salvation is visually striking, but I wouldn’t expect any less. McG can do big explosions and action pieces well, and this movie is no exception to that. What is done here is done well, but McG’s vision for his movie is limited. How else do you explain a giant fight sequence that occurs on a Terminator assembly line in a Cyberdine factory, with only one bad robot appearing to fight the protagonists? If you put your characters in the wasp nest, only having one wasp show up to fight is anticlimactic. Besides, all of the explosions and action sequences can look as realistic as possible, but if there’s no emotional weight attaching us to the characters, it’s all for nothing, which is certainly the case here.

McG has managed to create a sequel that is very faithful to the previous Terminator movies, but his post-Judgment Day setting lacks the interesting storylines and emotional weight of the films that came before it. The result is a very shallow story about humans attempting to survive in a war against the machines, but without any compassion for the humans, or even any feeling of desperation about the situation they are in. These just aren’t characters to care about, and the story as a whole lacks a wide scope. Terminator Salvation tries to be something different from the other movies in the franchise, but winds up just being empty images flickering on the screen; impressive images, sometimes, but empty images nonetheless.