Terminator Salvation

2009 superfluous sequel and money grab

Rating: 9/20

Plot: Ahh, who cares anymore? John Connor's now in the future, and he's turned into Batman or something. Arnold Schwarzenneger can't be bothered because he's turned into a politician. As long as there are explosions.

Moon Bloodgood, Common, and Jadagrace are all in this. And it's directed by McG, the guy who directed Offspring's "Pretty Fly for a White Guy" video and two Charlie Angels movies. So you've got a cast made up of the children of Frank Zappa and rappers, and a guy who decided his professional name was going to be McG. The whole thing made me skeptical way before the movie even started.

I'll start with the good. Danny Elfman scored this. It's a departure from what he usually does. It's a dark score, and although he does dark very well, it's a different, more modern darkness. The score is definitely better than the last movie. The sound in general is very good. Techno noise emanated from my television in a way that threw me right into the middle of the action. And the world building here is pretty good. It's all very artificial, but a lot of the scenery just looks so cool. Yeah, it's sort of modern-day video game cool, but I could still appreciate the artistic side of things. I thought they went a little too far with the Holocaust allusions, trying to create sci-fi concentration camp parallels with the prisoner transport and the arrival at their "camps," but now that I think about it, I was probably just reading into things a little too much.

I don't know whose idea it was to make a Terminator movie that didn't involve time travel and one that had very little involvement from Schwarzenegger. That's a little like having an Indiana Jones movie but only putting the title character in it for about ten minutes, isn't it? Sure, there's an "I'll be back" shoved into this because there just has to be, but I needed more Schwarzenegger. And it seems weird to type that.

All these non-Schwarzeneggers failed to grab me at all. Christian Bale, despite being as indestructible as a cartoon character, is genuinely awful in this. It's really a terrible performance, and I'm not sure how he can mess up something that should have been so easy. All he had to do is run around and scream all his lines, and while he does run around and scream all his lines, he somehow still manages to fuck it up. Kyle Reese is played by Anton Yelchin, and we get more bad acting from him. The script does neither of them any favors, of course. It was written with a copy of 1001 Action Cliches You Need to Know or something close by. "Come with me if you want to live." Seriously? "You point a gun at someone, you better be ready to pull the triggers." Yuck. Kyle Reese, the writers felt, needed to announce everything that is going on to the audience. "Aerostat!" he screams at one point, like it has meaning. The Arnold substitute is Sam Worthington, but his Marcus character never really makes any sense to me. And if you can't buy his human/machine hybrid character, this whole movie just isn't going to work. He bored me although during one ten minute chunk of film where he screams "Nooooooo!" about forty times, I did start to feel for him a little bit. The human characters bored me. The half-assed attempt at a romance subplot to capture the attention of women dragged to theaters to see this didn't work. It was all just pretty ugly, and I kind of felt angry at myself for watching it.

I will see the upcoming Terminator movie, just to figure out how they're going to explain Arnold's age. However, this is apparently a franchise that should have stopped before it became a franchise.