No Fate But What We Water Down

Conditions: Meh.


Film Review: Terminator Salvation.

You know, I hated the third movie with a passion. T3, (and therefore T4,) veered away from what the core concept, the heart, of Terminator was all about: That mankind could change. That we not only could create marvelous things, but that we could ultimately be smart enough to stop ourselves from creating things so marvelous that they would destroy us. That our self-destructive human nature and eternal cycle of construction and destruction could ultimately be broken. But T3 ruined that concept, mostly because profit lay in the direction of death and destruction, as it so often does. Not only due to how attractive war is as a spectacle for the masses, but also because war is so much easier to do, in film and in life.

So here we are finally, in the future war we’ve spent so long wondering about, and trying to prevent. The inevitable proved to be inevitable after all. And, unsurprisingly, T4 is basically exactly what everyone imagined a Terminator future war movie would be: desperate and grubby, albeit with one, (really, really stupid, when you think about it) wrinkle in the form of Marcus Wright, a Terminator who's been programmed to not know he’s a Terminator. However we all know, because we saw the trailer, which makes the first third of the film, where Marcus “wakes up” and wanders around the blasted landscape of California not knowing what’s going on, something of a pain. But eventually everyone figures it out, and (really oddly, and out of nowhere) he teams up with John Conner in order to rescue a bunch of prisoners from a Skynet facility before blowing it to smithereens. Which apparently was all part of Skynet's plan. This stands as the first of possibly three films set in the future, and so John Conner is not yet the leader of the resistance, and so spends a lot of time running around and shooting things. However, everyone knows who he is, and so there's a disconnect between everyone speaking about him in hushed tones, and the leaders of the resistance giving him orders.

This film, if nothing else, is pretty damn fraught. But it's a particular kind of modern PG-13 fraughtness. To appeal to the kids. And so while the action sequences are relentless, intense, and very well done (Terminator has a fine history of heavy metal action, and it’s a tradition that is upheld by the latest installment), the ultimate lack of impact of the various scenes of chaos and destruction really harm any possible emotional shock the film can have. The almighty dollar wins over artistic force again. McG of the Charlie's Angels films helms this one, and the action sequences have style to them as a result. And I’ll give him credit for not shaking the camera all that much. But in terms of story and character, it’s slim pickings. The characters just are not really given a chance. Conner and Marcus spend more time shouting than talking. There’s one tiny spot of human interaction, other than that it’s about proceeding to the next battle. The story is essentially about Marcus, and the Resistance Leaders falling for a giant Skynet trap. Almost as an afterthought does John meet his father, fight a T-800 and get stabbed in the heart.

There’s a lot of shout-outs, cliches and callbacks to the earlier films. Some of them, surprisingly, work quite well. Others, however, grate badly. And there’s no reason for them really. A film should be able to stand on it’s own script rather than constantly having to echo various catchphrases yet again. In fact, the little moments of deliberate recall that are sprinkled throughout keep reminding you of it’s better predecessors. The C.G is very well done, the machines are brilliantly brought to life by the wizards at ILM (extra praise is deserved for the Arnold-model terminator that shows up at the end, but points are deducted for pitching the fight in the middle of a T-800 assembly line, and yet never really using the idea beyond a weak shout-out to the steel mill fight from T2.) But while they look fantastic, their relentless purposeness that always characterized the Terminators has somehow been diluted. In fact, at the end we are treated to an extended fight between John Conner and a Terminator. Which makes not one bit of sense when you’re dealing with a machine that can crush your larynx with two fingers, or simply punch right through your ribcage. Instead, the Terminator decides to throw John at various walls until Marcus can come to the rescue after he's had a chat with Skynet, embodied by Helen Bonham Carter.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Putting a face to Skynet is possibly the worse thing this film does, a cowardly decision in my view. It weakens the whole entire damn point. It may satisfy some film goers, possibly of a younger generation, but I find it frustrating to see the machines, all the machines, reduced to this. Yet again we see classic movie monsters being downgraded to give the humans a better chance.

So, we have a Terminator film filled with menacing yet muddling machinery, endless death and destruction, huge spectacle, a series of polished old catchphrases, virtually no emotion, and a weak storyline. Was it worth it? I mean, we’ve spat on the hope and heart of James Cameron’s original movies, and for what, exactly? Essentially, we get the *exact* *same* ending as T2, but now dulled and hopeless. Possibly due to A) Marcus simply not having enough time to be as solid a character as T2 Arnie was, B) There's no "Sarah" equivalent: no actual emotional human element to the film, and C) We’ve essentially seen this before, but done much better, and civilization didn’t have to be destroyed for us to see it the first time. A sacrifice to stop a war from starting is worth more than a sacrifice to stop it being lost. One Skull out of Five.



Extra: What Went Wrong

Chud.com have a pretty interesting article up that delves into the history of the fourth Terminator film, what it was meant to be originally, and why it was changed

The biggest change came when McG flew to the UK to talk to Christian Bale about starring in the fourth Terminator movie. The director wanted the Batman star to play Marcus Wright, the cyborg protagonist of the script. But Bale focused on another part: John Connor. The only problem is that John Connor had about three minutes of screen time in the entire film; most of Connor's moments were played offscreen. In the original script John Connor was the secretive leader of the Resistance. He lived on the HQ sub, and almost no one saw his face, so as to keep him hidden from the robots. Connor made radio addresses and existed as a legend for the fighting men and women of the Resistance, but in the original script Connor didn't show up onscreen until the last minutes of the movie.
[...]

For a little while people involved in the film were assuming that Bale was going to let go of the Connor idea and move over to the Marcus role, but he had something else up his sleeve: massive rewrites to beef up the John Connor role.

Watching Terminator Salvation as it exists in theaters it's easy to see that this was a bad idea. The script that ended up getting shot never quite finds anything for John Connor to do. If you were to remove Connor from the film, relegating him once again to radio voice over, almost none of the film's plot would be changed.

- chud.com/

There's a lot more, including a big twist ending that was removed, and a plot point straight out of The Matrix. Not that the film would be five stars if they had stuck to the original idea, but maybe the original idea lent more time for the characters to actually act, instead of what we ended up with.



- Peace out.