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Terminator Salvation Directed by McG Written by John D. Brancato & Michael Ferris Starring Christian Bale as John Connor Sam Worthington as Marcus Wright Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese Terminator Salvation is a mess of ideas. It tries to be a story about a dystopic future, where humanity is forced to fight a seemingly-omnipotent machine called 'Skynet'; a story of a soldier forced to carry a destiny on his shoulders; and a man who must deal with what he has become. Unfortunately, this film doesn't really deliver in those categories. It follows the plot of the first three Terminator films by actually showing us the future that John Connor (Christian Bale) tried to stop (or will try to stop? I'll assume you know what time I'll be referring to, so I don't have to worry about inadvertently using the wrong tense.) Unfortunately, the events happened. We are somewhat guided through what's happened by Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a man who was put on death row in 2003, but allowed his body to be "donated to science" (does any actual scientist say this?) in exchange for a kiss from the cancer-stricken Dr. Kogan (Helena Bonham Carter). After being put to death in 2003, he wakes up in 2018, in the middle of Los Angeles, where he finds a lone Resistance duo: a teenage Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) and Star (Jadagrace), a small child who tags along with Reese for no other reason than companionship, especially since she doesn't speak. They go through action scene to action scene, tracking down John Connor, encountering another resistance fighter, Blair (Moon Bloodgood). There is a mystery regarding Marcus' character, but the film doesn't develop enough to make it a priority, nor does it really surprise us when it's revealed. It follows a strict progression that I'm pretty sure you'll be able to figure out pretty much as soon as I did. The film offers enough continuity to tie itself to the first three films, especially with the mandatory "Come with me if you want to live" and "I'll be back," and the visual effects work, but they don't propel the story much. I also found myself confused that Skynet has built various machines to its disposal: the famous humanoid Terminators, giant transport ships that carry smaller robots on it, a giant mecha-Terminator, and motorcycle-Terminators that patrol the deserted streets outside of Los Angeles that are littered with cars. I wonder if there are other kinds of vehicular Terminators. It also acts as if it must substitute any humanity in its characters by just throwing action scene after action scene at us. John Connor (Christian Bale) is a man on a mission, and when he completes his mission, he is not much different than when we first saw him. The plot doesn't offer him much: everything he sees in the film he's seen before: merciless terminators, desert camps and industrial horrors. And yet, the Resistance still has fighter jets at its disposal, and a device that, if I understood it correctly, broadcasts at a specific frequency that allows humans to take control of Terminators, even though it just incapacitates them. Terminator Salvation doesn't offer a lot of talking, unless a plot point needs to be expressed to the audience, which doesn't happen often. As I said before, the production design shows us a hellish future where humanity must fight for its survival, but it doesn't give us a big enough scope of the events, save for a few brief shots of what I think are supposed to be other pockets of resistance that John Connor is somehow able to broadcast to via a small radio. Still, there are quite a few problems with this one, such as the feasibility of the Resistance being led by a group of generals in a submarine off the coast of California, and the legendary status John Connor was given in the first three films, as well as mentioned in the opening prologue, which isn't really addressed. In fact, I was expecting him to be the de facto leader of the resistance, but he was only the leader of a small pocket, which included a pregnant Kate Connor (Bryce Dallas Howard), who is given almost nothing to do in the film. Nevertheless, if you want an action movie with only a small semblance of a plot to string action sequences together, this isn't it. There are abundant action sequences, sure, but they're all the same: run from a Terminator and find a way to blow it up and then run from another, and then blow it up, repeating ad nauseum. The acting is fine: Christian Bale as a hardened John Connor worked well, and Sam Worthington's Marcus Wright gave us more than he was given in the script. Perhaps with a better script, this might've been an interesting movie. I was hoping that this film would at least give us a bit of insight into the Terminator future, but no, it didn't. The story did not have to be told. Final rating: 2/5.
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May 23, 2009 20:54
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I have three large issues with this movie: 1. It just looks cheap, kind of like a made for TV project. This starts with the credits and never goes away. The big effects shots are a cut above, but most of the movie seems to be on spartan sets with minimal backgrounds, using close ups of the actors. Even the action sometimes suffers from being too claustrophobic. It boggles my mind that this cost 200 million - Did Bale make like 50 million of that? Where did it all go? Maybe they bought all those A-10s at government prices. Maybe a typhoon struck or... the lights kept getting trashed. 2. Something is just awkward about how the movie is assembled. The clearest examples are the WTF cuts like the one of Bloodgood in the rain and then suddenly SHE'S BEING ASSAULTED. I also lost track of spatial relationships during some of the other scenes. I'll echo the sentiment that the entire film just needed a bit longer in the oven. 3. Skynet is weak as everliving gently caress. You would think that machines and computers == precision killing, but not in this movie. Somehow the machines can sneak up almost silently on people, but then fail to, you know, kill them. A couple of the Terminators do end up being pretty tough, but they seem to have no interest in the quick kill. They just throw people around instead of crushing their heads. Luckily, Connor is one tough motherfucker, so he can endure being thrown into solid metal structures and run through with rebar (thank goodness his spine wasn't injured!). Why does Skynet HQ look like an assembly plant built by humans? Why does Skynet have a tower that projects into the sky with tons of windows to expose the equipment inside to attack? Why do the MOTOTERMINATORS (lol) have pew-pew weapons instead of something that could blow up another vehicle? What in god's name are those stupid aquatic machines that are straight out of Transformers? What kind of f'ed-up Terminator design leaves a heart exposed to future DEATH PUNCHES? Why couldn't people recognize that Cameron had done much of the design work and that it just needed to be realized? **Bonus Issue** Everything in the movie makes a horribly loud sound. I saw this at a podunk theatre, and still my ears were in pain. I swear just opening a can of soda in this movie would sound like a dumptruck impact after it was dropped from a highrise. Dull the senses to leave the impression of an "intense" experience. Every goddamn interface will emit some sound during use (because Terminators need confirmation sounds when manually using their Skynet workstations to tally kills and whatnot) and it all gets tiresome. Anyway, another mediocre sequel comes and goes. It's not offensive (well, maybe the ear-flaying sound), but it is pretty anemic. Terminator films should be huge, like Arnold before he went down with the ship that is California. gently caress the Hollywood blockbuster factory. 2.5/5 the_psychologist fucked around with this message at 04:43 on May 25, 2009 |
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May 24, 2009 01:10
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As a popcorn action movie it's Ok but as a Terminator movie it's a complete failure. Besides having so much wasted acting potential, the movie did come anywhere close to the first two movies. It's also tough to care about any of the characters in the film due to weak script and its inability to create meaningful character development throughout the film instead of following predictable character cliches. Despite all the CGI and effects the first two movies still have more intense and exciting action and chase scenes. Overall a pretty big disappoint for a movie that covers what happens after Judgment Day. Final Score: 1.5/5
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May 24, 2009 14:59
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I wanted The Movie With Robots Killing Humans, and instead got The Movie Where Robots Don't Kill Humans. From the very beginning, there were red flags. Using text on-screen to tell the audience what is going before we got started immediately dropped my expectations, as it rushed from one point to another. For an entity that is Skynet to not have swarms of automatons in any scene it's in was another flag. Why was there not a single HK tank? Why only one single T-600 in the city of LA? Another issue I took was the obviousness of the "signal" that the Resistance comes upon as the end-all-be-all way to end the war. Really. They find a carrier signal after seven years of fighting that controls all the machines, don't field test it save for against one airborne HK, and act surprised they all get triangulated and killed when they activate it en masse. ways the director went about introducing the scenario the Resistance was in. The base they're at is well-fortified and mined, yet as soon as they step foot out there's a shitton of water-based robots. Swimming around and killing anything that comes in the water, they're also used against the Resistance's submarines. Is this what Skynet dropped all it's time and effort into, patrolling and securing the waterways? they run into trouble. The ending, too, was rushed. Sure, we can expect another movie or two. But this was not the movie my mother told me about. 2/5
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May 24, 2009 22:41
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Being a huge fan of the first two movies, I had really low expectations for this one, so luckily I wasn't completely let down. The movie is basically split into two stories, one of them extremely better than the other one. Every time I got really interested in the Marcus side of the story, with the post-apoc landscapes, scavenging for supplies, intense action scenes, it would switch over to the John Connor side which mainly consisted of Christian Bale yelling a bunch, Common looking disinterested (like he does in every movie he's in) and humans dropping like flies, to machines that are really bad shots. Some of the special effects were pretty nice, some of them looked Sci-Fi channel quality. The acting was generally mediocre, though Sam Worthington did a decent job considering his was the only character with any actual emotional depth. The movie generally felt unfinished though, and those little hat-tips to the other movies were so loving stupid. The Kyle Reese "Come with me if you want to live" makes sense, but Christian Bale's "I'll be back" was laughable and had most of the people in the theater jeering in some form or another. I think when Bale was hijacking the motorcycle Terminator the same song was playing that played at the beginning of T2 when he's riding around on the dirtbike. I would also like to point out that at the end I was really hoping Christian Bale would've died by that huge piece of rebar that went straight through his loving chest while not hitting his spine or any organs so the next movie wouldn't be plagued by his lovely acting. 2/5
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May 25, 2009 03:28
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Terrible movie. Would be good as a sci fi channel flick but that's about it. Barring Sam Worthington, the acting was poor. The plot was ok in general but I felt it suffered from trying to focus on two lead characters; the machines were hardly the dreaded killing machines the previous movie incarnations had developed; and Connors mythos was muted by quite a bit over the previous movies as well. Just gave the impression of being thrown together without nearly enough forethought. 2/5
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May 25, 2009 08:15
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I thought it was a very decent movie overall, better than Terminator 3, but not nearly as good as Terminator 2. My biggest criticism of the movie is that it moves so fast and with so much action that we don't have enough time to become attached to the characters (same problem Star Trek had to a lesser extent). The only character with any real development is Marcus, and John Connor is reduced to a supporting character in a series that supposedly revolves around him. This movie takes place earlier in the future than other flashbacks from the series. This is why we don't see droves of T-800's and HK tanks roaming the countryside. Skynet is in a period of major construction and will be rolling out new models, bigger and badder than before. The terminators in this movie do seem weaker than we're used to, but these machines are the first line productions of terminators - slow, mechanical, bulky, not refined, precision killing machines like we will eventually see with the T-800 and T-1000. The future is appropriately dark and post-apocalyptic, complete with nuked cities, deserted roadways littered with abandoned gas stations, warehouses, rusty old cars, and crazy homicidal psycho's looking to rape and pillage whatever they can, humanity be damned. We finally get to see John Connor as a real bad rear end, not the mythical savior from T1, or the whiny bratty kid from T2, or the slacker from T3. The movie doesn't do all the things that T1 or T2 did, but then why should it rehash old ground? Instead it paves a new path, showing us a side of the Terminator universe we haven't really seen before. And for that, I'm satisfied. 4/5 The Shep fucked around with this message at 07:05 on Jun 1, 2009 |
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May 25, 2009 16:14
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This franchise was on life support after Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, and I had high hopes for this film after seeing the bleak post-apocalyptic and Nine Inch Nails scored theatrical trailer. Sadly, I was disappointed. This franchise is now dead. Let's imagine that, a year ago, McG (yes, that's the director's actual name) had approached me to fashion for him a moneymaking sequel to this franchise. If I was to think of ways to gently caress up this franchise before this film was created, I would have suggested the following: - We need to sell as many tickets as possible. This film is the fourth in a series of all R-Rated films, but we should still make it PG-13. This way, kids under 18 will be able to see it. Let's ignore the fact that they would have had to see three R-Rated films beforehand. This will also allow us to get rid of all the horrible things in the previous films like gratuitous violence and intense action sequences. I don't think anyone enjoyed those. - There was too much focus on character development in the previous films. For example, in Terminator there were only 3 characters: Sarah Conner, Kyle Reese, and the Terminator. This allowed for way too much character development and puts too much demand on quality story telling. We need a solution to this. You know what's all the rage today? Large rag-tag groups of people from all different backgrounds. This is what made films like Resident Evil and Doom such a great success. We can have one Black guy, one butt-kicking girl, one devoted wife, hell... we'll think of some others. The point is that with all these people we won't have to focus on character development at all! And thus this film would be written. Hopefully in twenty years Skynet can send a terminator back in time to kill me so this film will never be made (and I will never have to see it). Everything that's wrong with this film is the fault of it being put in the hands of the MTV generation. The director's previous credits include such ADHD-fests as Charlies Angels (and the sequel) and numerous music videos. Because of his idiocy, this film is all over the place. One minute it's chugging along as a great post-apocalyptic action film (the first third is genuinely good). The next minute the film plays like a generic summer action movie, complete with "the rag-tag group of people from many backgrounds" and a music score perfect for the next Will Smith release. With such a large cast of characters, the story is all over the place and never really gets developed. The film could have been redeemed by upping the action to ultra-violent levels, but alas... PG-13. That isn't to say that the action sequences were all bad. There were some enjoyable moments in between the banal conversation, including an awesome cameo at the end. But it came short, partially due to the rating restriction, partially due to the MTV director, and partially due to the complete lack of care I had for the undeveloped characters. 2/5
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May 27, 2009 13:29
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It's movies like this that often make me separate the terms "film" and "movie". The former makes you think about your own personal experience, or touches you in some way, or gives you some brain food to chew on. But then again, sometimes you just want to put the top down and cruise at 100mph down an empty highway. Make no mistake, this was not a good film. It was however, a fantastic movie. I like intelligent discourse and character depth as much as the next guy, but this was an adventure flick in the style of 80s-90s adventure flicks (it had a title crawl and everything). In movies like that, nobody gives a poo poo about how the character has grown. What have we learned at the end of Jurassic Park other than "don't gently caress with dinosaurs"? Did Marty McFly learn a deep lesson about the spacetime continuum and healthy family values? How is Indiana Jones different at the end of Raiders or Temple? He's still a careless snake-fearing wiseass with a whip. The difference is, here we already know what John Connor's all about and don't need much introduction/exposition. The leader of a human resistance discovers a mission he needs to carry out, and he does it with the help of his plucky one-dimensional sidekicks, and perhaps one slightly more fleshed out (or in this case, metaled out) supporting character. Marcus Wright was interesting enough, and Anton Yelchin did a pretty good Michael Biehn impression. It's not really worth complaining about the Terminator franchise going through another genre switch. They've done it before: Horror, action, sort of a weird suspense/comedy hybrid, and now adventure the way adventure used to be. It's fun. It's got some cool new concepts. It's entertaining. That's really all I ask for in a summer blockbuster, especially when I just want to turn off my brain and watch people kick rear end for a couple hours. It's a fun ride, and it's got a bunch of nice little winks to its predecessors, though I'm sure that gets in the way a lot more if your biggest concern is "MY PRECIOUS FRANCHISE!  " As a film, I'd agree with most people that it earns about a 2 on a scale of 5. But this wasn't a film, it was a movie, so I'm going to rate it like one. 3.5/5 rounded up to 4. Bonk fucked around with this message at 08:10 on May 28, 2009 |
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May 27, 2009 23:40
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This franchise was built on suspense, and an actual sense of danger. This movie turned everyone into super heroes, and therefore lost its soul. The John Conner of this future is a raging idiot, "What Are You!", and the Kyle Reese element just seemed out of wak. The movie had no sense of flow/progression/development. They tried to make it smart and trixy, but botched the delivery. In the end, its a string of far fetched action sequences with poor plot elements randomly injected. It had some interesting visuals, but this movie was crap: 2/5
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May 29, 2009 06:41
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Given the slew of negative reviews here and elsewhere, I expected to hate this movie, but I actually thought it was pretty good. It had its flaws, the biggest being that John Connor and Skynet were the least interesting elements of the story. When it focused on Marcus Wright and the young Kyle Reese, both of them interesting characters and very well cast, it was a blast. It was also a serious thrill seeing the good ol' T-800 again. Sure it was no T2, but what is? Maybe I'm being generous, but I'll give it a 4/5.
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May 31, 2009 08:56
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While many notable movie critics are athiest sycophantic virgins (Billy Goodykoontz), Terminator Salvation was an enjoyable action flick. While almost 2 hours long, it flies blindingly by, and as the theatre lights undim leaves a viewer craving more terminator. Plenty of great special FX. This Terminator Quartet is definitely not over. PROS: Terminator Story, New Terminators CONS: While only 2 hours long, ends abruptly 4/5
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Jun 1, 2009 20:49
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This movie was a lot better than T3. It could never be as original and groundbreaking as T2, but the special effects, a mid-story plot twist I didn't see coming, and remarkable self-restraint with shaky-cam earns this flick a 3.5/5. A fun movie, but nothing that will blow your socks off.
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Jun 8, 2009 06:22
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Pretty much everything I expected from a Terminator movie dealing with the future. It fit well with the other Terminator movies. The film has a nice even pace, lots of good action, and a feeling of dread (which it SHOULD have). The character of Marcus was an interesting concept that I thoroughly enjoyed.
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Jun 8, 2009 14:30
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I should have known better than to see a movie directed by a guy who calls him McG (mick-gee). Mr McGinty is the new Michael Bay. Lots of dumb plot devices, the worst one is the fact that while the Terminators are super fast, strong and basically the top predators on the planet, they cant actually kill anything. Hey instead of crushing this guys leg or foot, you know, to wound him and thus have a better chance at terminating the subject, lets bash them around a bit. It also seems to recycle and combine two scenes out of Terminator2 & Aliens. The steel mill scene and the scene where Ripley stumbles upon the Alien lair while looking for Newt. But where Ripley ends up killing a dozen Aliens and a room of eggs, John Conner just has the single terminator to deal with while looking for Kyle Reese. 1/5 Kinison Khan fucked around with this message at 14:03 on Jun 16, 2009 |
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Jun 16, 2009 13:55
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The terminators are supposed to be killing machines. It is expected that, as in the first and second movie, they are quite good at what they do. So what happens when you make a terminator movie where the terminator terminates his target by tossing him around like Goldberg in a cage match? It loses a lot of suspense, that's what. The acting power they threw at this movie was wasted on an incoherent plot, unbelievable characters, and glaring technical inaccuracies that were too big to ignore. This movie was worse than the last one. Maybe my hopes were too high. 2/5.
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Jun 27, 2009 04:38
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buryme fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Nov 11, 2021 |
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Jul 17, 2009 02:52
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