Terminator: Salvation

My love affair with Terminator began with the second installment. It hit theaters when I was about 10 or 11 and had not been permitted to see the first one (for obvious reasons, I was 4 when it hit theaters.) Taunted by the coming attractions, magazine covers boasting top of the line special effects and a theater run that outdid everything else that summer, I absolutely had to see it. Luckily, conceding to my pleas, my father took me to see T2 on my birthday that year. And so, Terminator became the summer fling that I always fondly remembered, by constantly forgot about.

Terminator: Salvation comes to us from questionable Hollywood director, Joseph McGinty Nichol (AKA McG.) I have trouble taking anyone seriously whose preferred nomenclature is not only a single name (i.e. Madonna, Cher, Seal,) but an abbreviation at that (see also: DMX.) This is also the person who gave us not one, but two Charlies Angels movies.

That being said, the movie looks good. The effects are top notch. The setting is dim, gritty and dark. Everything needed to create the Terminator experience that follows where the last Terminator experience left off is in the right place. However, the plot doesn't really make much sense.

We've jumped ahead 15 years since we last saw John Connor in Rise of the Machines (then played by the underappreciated Nick Stahl,) who has hence become a Batman-voiced soldier in the human resistance as well as a shadow-messiah to a select few that still believe he will redeem mankind from the clutches of the oppressive cybernetic organisms that bombed us halfway to hell and back in 2003. Problem is, the machines have an ace up their circuits. They're gunning for Connor's future/past father Kyle Reese (now only a teenager, played by Star Trek's Anton Yelchin in what might be the movie's best performance.)

Now, time travel is a tricky plot device and this is where the narrative gets sloppy. Given what we know from the past films, Future John Connor sends back an adult Kyle Reese (from the age difference, I'll say about 15 years after T:Salvation) to protect his mother Sarah in 1984. Reese and Sarah get cozy while hiding out and produce a baby John embryo. Reese dies at the hands of the first Arnold Terminator and Sarah destroys it. Lead in to T2. The only people with the knowledge of John Connor's paradoxical father is John himself (who I believe doesn't know him by name yet,) Sarah and the Good Arnold Terminator(GAT for short.) GAT is melted in the molten steel (as is the T-1000, who probably didn't have this information anyways, but for the sake of loose ends...) Assuming that the original Terminator somehow knew that Kyle and Sarah had shacked up and produced John, the chip that stored said information was also dissolved by Edward Furlong John Connor. Sarah Connor dies of leukemia somewhere between T2 and T3 leaving the John as the sole guardian of his familial secret.

History lesson over. Now, somehow all the machines in this post-apocalyptic world know who birthed John Connor and are gunning to have him erased from history (instead of just killing him like normal human-killing robots.) Added to the mix is unknown fugitive Marcus Wright (played by Sam Worthington who I've seen in absolutely nothing, but will be in James Cameron's crazy-future-scifi-epic Avatar) who, if you've seen any previews for this movie, is all or mostly robot. All this makes for about 2 full hours of chase scenes, shoot-outs, screaming matches and explosions. Everything you need for a summer blockbuster, though, as absurd as the plot to Terminator:Salvation is I can guarantee that it's going to be better than Transformers 2:Revenge of the Fallen.

The thing that worked for me about T4 was that it had echoes of previous installments scattered throughout. Every scene seemed like an updated or more futuristic version of an iconic moment in any one of it's three predecessors (and that's not including the recycled lines like "Come with me if you want to live.") Christian Bale functions as John Connor, but never really sells it. Honestly if he'd pulled more from his character in Reign of Fire it would've been better, though he is rather upstaged by Sam Worthington. As stated before, Anton Yelchin is probably the best actor in the film, easily. If the franchise takes off (despite mostly negative reviews) he'll be the one to make it worth the time. Bryce Dallas Howard is plainly underused, as is Moon Bloodgood, whose scenes border on significance but never really reach it. Common had absolutely no place in this film whatsoever. His lines (mostly delivered in ADR {Additional Dialogue Recording} while he's out of frame) are laughable and cheap.

While Terminator:Salvation didn't turn out to be the reinvigorating installment to the franchise they'd hoped for (in comparison to the staggering success of the Star Trek reboot,) we can only hope that McG and company (with new writers next go-round, let's hope) take a note from the page of George Lucas and make an attempt to fix the mistakes presented in this chapter. If not, we could see another proposed trilogy fall flat on it's face with Matrix-like proportions.