Movie Review: Examining 'Terminator Salvation'
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Pros: Interesting premise, cast performs decently and the special effects are great
Cons: No single dominant villain, too dependent on action sequences
After the success of director Jonathan Mostow’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (T3), a film which depicted the “birth” of the murderous computer network known as Skynet and the nuclear attack it launches against humanity on July 24, 2004 – Judgment Day – many fans of the science-fiction genre figured that the series would continue with more sequels, perhaps focusing on the battle between the survivors of the nuclear holocaust and Skynet’s armies of Terminators and Hunter-Killers.
There were, of course, various issues that needed to be addressed, the biggest one being the non-availability of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who stars in the previous three films as the original Terminator and two reprogrammed T-800 Model 101 copies and is the big audience draw for the franchise. Schwarzenegger had left Hollywood after T3 to make a successful bid to replace Democratic Governor Gray Davis in a recall election and would remain unavailable for any sequel planned or filmed during his stint as the Governator until 2011.
Even though the short-lived Fox TV series The Sarah Connor Chronicles: Terminator proved that stories based on James Cameron’s dystopian SF mythology could find an audience as long as they focused on John Connor in different stages of his life, Schwarzenegger’s absence as a major player –as well as Cameron’s reluctance to be directly involved with any more Terminator projects – were possible roadblocks to future sequels to T3.
Eventually, though, a company named Halcyon acquired the rights from Terminator producers Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna, and a screenplay by T3 scribes John Brancato and Michael Ferris (with additional – and uncredited – material by Jonathan Nolan and Anthony Zuiker) was eventually made as Terminator Salvation.
Directed by Joseph McGinty Nichol, better known as McG (Charlie’s Angels), Terminator Salvation is an atypical entry in the big-screen franchise in more ways than one.
The most obvious, of course, is that this is the first Terminator feature film which is not tied to the Schwarzenegger name; here, the main villain is essentially Skynet itself, which in turn uses a wide array of early-model rubber-skinned Terminators or their endoskeletal forms, Hunter-Killers, hydro-bots and the new moto-Terminators. (We do, however, see the genesis of the T-800 Model 101 Terminator, so fans do get a fleeting visual tip of the hat to the first three films’ antagonist/protagonist.)
The other atypical feature of Terminator Salvation is that unlike in the two Cameron-directed Terminators or Mostow’s T3, McG and the screenwriters have set the film in the year 2018, 11 years before the final battle for Los Angeles shown in the prelude to 1984’s The Terminator.
In a reversal of Cameron’s structural setup for the first film, Terminator Salvation begins as a flashback to 2003, a year before the events of T3.
In a state penitentiary – more than likely a California prison, given the fact that all the Terminators take place, at least in part, in the Golden State – we meet convicted murderer Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) in his Death Row cell a few hours before his scheduled execution.
Marcus has a visitor, Dr. Serena Kogan (Helena Bonham Carter), a scientist who is employed by Cyberdyne Systems who offers the soon-to-be-dead con a Faustian deal: Marcus can sell his body to Cyberdyne – ostensibly for scientific research – and in turn, Dr. Kogan’s work will give Marcus a “second chance at life.”
Wright has apparently accepted his guilt regarding the incident in which two police officers and his own brother died, so even though he signs the papers that Kogan proffers, all he wants is to be executed and be destroyed:
Serena Kogan: You're doing something very noble, Marcus.
Marcus Wright: No, I'm guilty. Just cut me up until there's nothing left.
After Marcus’ execution and the main title sequence, Terminator Salvation plants its narrative feet in the gritty post-apocalyptic near-future of 2018. Most of humanity has perished in the nuclear fires of Judgment Day, but a handful of survivors has formed a Resistance and is fighting against Skynet.
In this intermediate period between the rise of the machines and the prophesied victory by the Resistance 11 years hence, John Connor (Christian Bale) is a rising (but not yet leading) officer in the Los Angeles area insurgents’ cell. Operating under orders of General Ashdown (Michael Ironside), Connor’s unit is tasked with a raid on a Skynet facility and discovers, among other things, the schematics for a new Terminator model that incorporates living tissue harvested from human prisoners.
Things go badly for the Resistance strike force, and Skynet blows up its own facility with a small nuclear weapon. Connor is the sole survivor, and even though he’s not quite yet the Resistance’s Chosen One, he manages to get the airborne rescue team that has retrieved him to take him to the nuclear sub where Gen. Ashdown and the senior command have their headquarters.
Ashdown doesn’t care much for Connor or his supposed future role as the Savior of Humanity, but he tells the younger man that the Resistance possesses a secret weapon that, if it works as hoped, can shut down Skynet’s entire system in one fell swoop. This weapon, however, has not been field-tested; Connor, whose unit has specialists in tech and signals warfare, volunteers to try it out.
Meanwhile, Marcus Wright – who is now unknowingly a Cyberdyne cyborg – wakes up somewhere in Los Angeles, where he is saved from an attacking T-600 Terminator by a teenager named Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) and his young, mute companion Star (Jadagrace Berry). Kyle is only beginning his career as a Resistance fighter and idolizes John Connor, unaware that their destinies are intimately interwoven in more ways than one.
My Take: Though the Terminator timeline has been rendered a bit murky by the existence of T3, fans of the franchise know, more or less, that Kyle and Marcus will have to cross paths with Connor, and that at some point the L.A. cell leader will become the Resistance’s top honcho.
Of course, the Brancato-Ferris-Nolan-Zuiker team has answers for these questions, even though they – like Cameron and Wisher before them – don’t get around to answering some of the lingering questions raised in the series.
For instance, although all four films have established that Skynet is a sophisticated computer network that became self-aware and perceived humanity as its enemy, we are never told the reasons why. Even in a special effects-heavy movie set in a fantasy or science fiction universe, understanding the characters’ motivations is important.
Here, we see little glimpses into Cyberdyne’s single-minded drive to perfect artificial intelligence and robotics, and we know the consequences of that company’s hubris, but – other than building the proverbial better mousetrap, why did people like Serena Kogan develop Skynet in the first place?
McG’s Terminator Salvation is one of those “franchise movies” that tries hard to stand on its own cinematic feet and somehow remain true to the films which precede it, but it doesn’t quite achieve these two goals.
To his credit, McG wanted Terminator Salvation to depict a more realistic-looking near-future in which both sides use weapons more or less more in step with existing technology from the late 20th and early 21st Century.
Instead of wielding laser-emitting cannon and whatnot (as seen in the first three films), Terminator Salvation’s combatants use rapid-firing automatic weapons and missiles for the most part; the human Resistance employs military hardware which survived Judgment Day, including ancient Huey helicopters and 1980s-vintage A-10 Thunderbolt II close air support jets. Skynet, of course, deploys robotic assailants of various types, but no one uses lasers yet.
This allows McG a certain creative leeway in choosing to use practical (or, as they say in the movie industry, in camera) effects that, when combined with more modern CGI techniques, give Terminator Salvation a gritty realism that is absent from the other three films’ “future war” sequences. This approach imbues the movie with a gloomy and menacing environment that doesn’t look too unbelievable.
Also worth mentioning is the admirable fashion in which Terminator Salvation acknowledges the Schwarzenegger movies in some way.
Not only did the special effects team led by Industrial Light & Magic’s Ben Snow find a way to get Arnold (or a digital version of him) on screen for a brief scene, but Anton Yelchin worked really hard to give Kyle Reese some of the high intensity exhibited by his “future” incarnation as played by Michael Biehn.
The writers also find ways in which Terninator catch-phrases such as “Come with me if you want to live” and “I’ll be back” can be recycled without sounding jammed in for the hell of it or, worse, coming across as hackneyed.
On the other hand, Terminator Salvation is hobbled by the fact that where in the previous three movies the protagonists faced off against a particular Terminator unit, here the enemy is Skynet itself and its arsenal of killer robots. Fights which were once very menacing because they involved characters we had followed from the beginning of the picture to the climax now seem to be by-the-numbers action sequences which, after a while, blur together in a post-apocalyptic mix of I Am Legend and Michael Bay’s deplorably loud and explosion-heavy Transformers trilogy.
Personally, I would have liked it better if the movie had expanded Helena Bonham Carter’s role and made Serena Kogan the dominant villain, even if only as the avatar for Skynet. Bonham Carter is capable of portraying her both as a vulnerable if perhaps somewhat goal-obsessed human being in the 2003 prologue and, later, as one of Skynet’s visual representations in the film’s third act, but her combined on-screen time is limited to five minutes.
The cast’s major actors, including Christian Bale, Bryce Dallas Howard, the late Anton Yelchin and Sam Worthington, turn in decent if not spectacular performances in Terminator Salvation. I would have liked to see Nick Stahl and Claire Danes reprise their roles as John Connor and his now-wife Kate from T3, but Bale and Howard are acceptable as their decade-older counterparts.
Yelchin, who had also stepped into the role of Original Series actor Walter Koenig’s Pavel Chekov in Star Trek, is far more interesting as young Kyle Reese. When I am watching Yelchin in Terminator Salvation, I see not only some physical similarities between the young Russian-born actor and Michael Biehn, but also some of his mannerisms and emotional constitution.
As Marcus, Sam Worthington is watchable, particularly in mid-film when he rescues a Resistance A-10 pilot named Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood), who is both a strong feminine character in the Sarah Connor-Kate Brewster mold and a possible love match for Marcus. In their scenes together, Worthington makes us believe that he is more man than machine more effectively than in the verbal sparring matches he has with Bale’s Connor.
However, Terminator Salvation lacks a great deal of the humor and suspense which both Cameron and Mostow brought to the first three films. Yes, the nuclear bombs have fallen and humanity can barely get its collective feet back up, but there are very few relieve-the-tension-with-dark-humor moments to be had here.
There are some instances of gallows humor, of course, most notably in the first exchange between Marcus Wright (who is about to be executed) and Serena Kogan:
[first lines]
Dr. Serena Kogan: Marcus. How are you?
Marcus Wright: Ask me in an hour.
Also, whereas Cameron – and to a lesser degree, Mostow – tried to give some of the Terminator time-traveling characters some initial ambiguity, Marcus Wright’s story arc is pretty predictable once you see the prologue. The fact that he is physically imposing does give viewers an illusion that he could be the film’s “bad Terminator,” but if you pay close attention to what he says to Serena after he signs off on donating his body to Cyberdyne, you’ll see what path Marcus will follow.
On the whole, Terminator Salvation is not an unwatchable mess without any redeeming qualities, but it isn’t as good as James Cameron’s original Terminator or Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It’s faithful to Cameron’s mythology and has nice special effects, but it’s also somewhat uneven and unengaging.
There were, of course, various issues that needed to be addressed, the biggest one being the non-availability of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who stars in the previous three films as the original Terminator and two reprogrammed T-800 Model 101 copies and is the big audience draw for the franchise. Schwarzenegger had left Hollywood after T3 to make a successful bid to replace Democratic Governor Gray Davis in a recall election and would remain unavailable for any sequel planned or filmed during his stint as the Governator until 2011.
Even though the short-lived Fox TV series The Sarah Connor Chronicles: Terminator proved that stories based on James Cameron’s dystopian SF mythology could find an audience as long as they focused on John Connor in different stages of his life, Schwarzenegger’s absence as a major player –as well as Cameron’s reluctance to be directly involved with any more Terminator projects – were possible roadblocks to future sequels to T3.
Eventually, though, a company named Halcyon acquired the rights from Terminator producers Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna, and a screenplay by T3 scribes John Brancato and Michael Ferris (with additional – and uncredited – material by Jonathan Nolan and Anthony Zuiker) was eventually made as Terminator Salvation.
Directed by Joseph McGinty Nichol, better known as McG (Charlie’s Angels), Terminator Salvation is an atypical entry in the big-screen franchise in more ways than one.
The most obvious, of course, is that this is the first Terminator feature film which is not tied to the Schwarzenegger name; here, the main villain is essentially Skynet itself, which in turn uses a wide array of early-model rubber-skinned Terminators or their endoskeletal forms, Hunter-Killers, hydro-bots and the new moto-Terminators. (We do, however, see the genesis of the T-800 Model 101 Terminator, so fans do get a fleeting visual tip of the hat to the first three films’ antagonist/protagonist.)
The other atypical feature of Terminator Salvation is that unlike in the two Cameron-directed Terminators or Mostow’s T3, McG and the screenwriters have set the film in the year 2018, 11 years before the final battle for Los Angeles shown in the prelude to 1984’s The Terminator.
In a reversal of Cameron’s structural setup for the first film, Terminator Salvation begins as a flashback to 2003, a year before the events of T3.
In a state penitentiary – more than likely a California prison, given the fact that all the Terminators take place, at least in part, in the Golden State – we meet convicted murderer Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) in his Death Row cell a few hours before his scheduled execution.
Marcus has a visitor, Dr. Serena Kogan (Helena Bonham Carter), a scientist who is employed by Cyberdyne Systems who offers the soon-to-be-dead con a Faustian deal: Marcus can sell his body to Cyberdyne – ostensibly for scientific research – and in turn, Dr. Kogan’s work will give Marcus a “second chance at life.”
Wright has apparently accepted his guilt regarding the incident in which two police officers and his own brother died, so even though he signs the papers that Kogan proffers, all he wants is to be executed and be destroyed:
Serena Kogan: You're doing something very noble, Marcus.
Marcus Wright: No, I'm guilty. Just cut me up until there's nothing left.
After Marcus’ execution and the main title sequence, Terminator Salvation plants its narrative feet in the gritty post-apocalyptic near-future of 2018. Most of humanity has perished in the nuclear fires of Judgment Day, but a handful of survivors has formed a Resistance and is fighting against Skynet.
In this intermediate period between the rise of the machines and the prophesied victory by the Resistance 11 years hence, John Connor (Christian Bale) is a rising (but not yet leading) officer in the Los Angeles area insurgents’ cell. Operating under orders of General Ashdown (Michael Ironside), Connor’s unit is tasked with a raid on a Skynet facility and discovers, among other things, the schematics for a new Terminator model that incorporates living tissue harvested from human prisoners.
Things go badly for the Resistance strike force, and Skynet blows up its own facility with a small nuclear weapon. Connor is the sole survivor, and even though he’s not quite yet the Resistance’s Chosen One, he manages to get the airborne rescue team that has retrieved him to take him to the nuclear sub where Gen. Ashdown and the senior command have their headquarters.
Ashdown doesn’t care much for Connor or his supposed future role as the Savior of Humanity, but he tells the younger man that the Resistance possesses a secret weapon that, if it works as hoped, can shut down Skynet’s entire system in one fell swoop. This weapon, however, has not been field-tested; Connor, whose unit has specialists in tech and signals warfare, volunteers to try it out.
Meanwhile, Marcus Wright – who is now unknowingly a Cyberdyne cyborg – wakes up somewhere in Los Angeles, where he is saved from an attacking T-600 Terminator by a teenager named Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) and his young, mute companion Star (Jadagrace Berry). Kyle is only beginning his career as a Resistance fighter and idolizes John Connor, unaware that their destinies are intimately interwoven in more ways than one.
My Take: Though the Terminator timeline has been rendered a bit murky by the existence of T3, fans of the franchise know, more or less, that Kyle and Marcus will have to cross paths with Connor, and that at some point the L.A. cell leader will become the Resistance’s top honcho.
Of course, the Brancato-Ferris-Nolan-Zuiker team has answers for these questions, even though they – like Cameron and Wisher before them – don’t get around to answering some of the lingering questions raised in the series.
For instance, although all four films have established that Skynet is a sophisticated computer network that became self-aware and perceived humanity as its enemy, we are never told the reasons why. Even in a special effects-heavy movie set in a fantasy or science fiction universe, understanding the characters’ motivations is important.
Here, we see little glimpses into Cyberdyne’s single-minded drive to perfect artificial intelligence and robotics, and we know the consequences of that company’s hubris, but – other than building the proverbial better mousetrap, why did people like Serena Kogan develop Skynet in the first place?
McG’s Terminator Salvation is one of those “franchise movies” that tries hard to stand on its own cinematic feet and somehow remain true to the films which precede it, but it doesn’t quite achieve these two goals.
To his credit, McG wanted Terminator Salvation to depict a more realistic-looking near-future in which both sides use weapons more or less more in step with existing technology from the late 20th and early 21st Century.
Instead of wielding laser-emitting cannon and whatnot (as seen in the first three films), Terminator Salvation’s combatants use rapid-firing automatic weapons and missiles for the most part; the human Resistance employs military hardware which survived Judgment Day, including ancient Huey helicopters and 1980s-vintage A-10 Thunderbolt II close air support jets. Skynet, of course, deploys robotic assailants of various types, but no one uses lasers yet.
This allows McG a certain creative leeway in choosing to use practical (or, as they say in the movie industry, in camera) effects that, when combined with more modern CGI techniques, give Terminator Salvation a gritty realism that is absent from the other three films’ “future war” sequences. This approach imbues the movie with a gloomy and menacing environment that doesn’t look too unbelievable.
Also worth mentioning is the admirable fashion in which Terminator Salvation acknowledges the Schwarzenegger movies in some way.
Not only did the special effects team led by Industrial Light & Magic’s Ben Snow find a way to get Arnold (or a digital version of him) on screen for a brief scene, but Anton Yelchin worked really hard to give Kyle Reese some of the high intensity exhibited by his “future” incarnation as played by Michael Biehn.
The writers also find ways in which Terninator catch-phrases such as “Come with me if you want to live” and “I’ll be back” can be recycled without sounding jammed in for the hell of it or, worse, coming across as hackneyed.
On the other hand, Terminator Salvation is hobbled by the fact that where in the previous three movies the protagonists faced off against a particular Terminator unit, here the enemy is Skynet itself and its arsenal of killer robots. Fights which were once very menacing because they involved characters we had followed from the beginning of the picture to the climax now seem to be by-the-numbers action sequences which, after a while, blur together in a post-apocalyptic mix of I Am Legend and Michael Bay’s deplorably loud and explosion-heavy Transformers trilogy.
Personally, I would have liked it better if the movie had expanded Helena Bonham Carter’s role and made Serena Kogan the dominant villain, even if only as the avatar for Skynet. Bonham Carter is capable of portraying her both as a vulnerable if perhaps somewhat goal-obsessed human being in the 2003 prologue and, later, as one of Skynet’s visual representations in the film’s third act, but her combined on-screen time is limited to five minutes.
The cast’s major actors, including Christian Bale, Bryce Dallas Howard, the late Anton Yelchin and Sam Worthington, turn in decent if not spectacular performances in Terminator Salvation. I would have liked to see Nick Stahl and Claire Danes reprise their roles as John Connor and his now-wife Kate from T3, but Bale and Howard are acceptable as their decade-older counterparts.
Yelchin, who had also stepped into the role of Original Series actor Walter Koenig’s Pavel Chekov in Star Trek, is far more interesting as young Kyle Reese. When I am watching Yelchin in Terminator Salvation, I see not only some physical similarities between the young Russian-born actor and Michael Biehn, but also some of his mannerisms and emotional constitution.
As Marcus, Sam Worthington is watchable, particularly in mid-film when he rescues a Resistance A-10 pilot named Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood), who is both a strong feminine character in the Sarah Connor-Kate Brewster mold and a possible love match for Marcus. In their scenes together, Worthington makes us believe that he is more man than machine more effectively than in the verbal sparring matches he has with Bale’s Connor.
However, Terminator Salvation lacks a great deal of the humor and suspense which both Cameron and Mostow brought to the first three films. Yes, the nuclear bombs have fallen and humanity can barely get its collective feet back up, but there are very few relieve-the-tension-with-dark-humor moments to be had here.
There are some instances of gallows humor, of course, most notably in the first exchange between Marcus Wright (who is about to be executed) and Serena Kogan:
[first lines]
Dr. Serena Kogan: Marcus. How are you?
Marcus Wright: Ask me in an hour.
Also, whereas Cameron – and to a lesser degree, Mostow – tried to give some of the Terminator time-traveling characters some initial ambiguity, Marcus Wright’s story arc is pretty predictable once you see the prologue. The fact that he is physically imposing does give viewers an illusion that he could be the film’s “bad Terminator,” but if you pay close attention to what he says to Serena after he signs off on donating his body to Cyberdyne, you’ll see what path Marcus will follow.
On the whole, Terminator Salvation is not an unwatchable mess without any redeeming qualities, but it isn’t as good as James Cameron’s original Terminator or Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It’s faithful to Cameron’s mythology and has nice special effects, but it’s also somewhat uneven and unengaging.
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