I don't think I can come up with very much to say about Terminator Salvation. It just wasn't very good. There are plenty of other reviews on the internet, and I don't think I have anything unique to add. I know some fans really enjoyed this one, and good for them. It's probably not quite as bad as Terminator 3, or at least it's bad in different ways. Honestly, I just had no idea what was going on most of the time.
Who was the main character? Why should I care? Where was the story going? These are all questions I cannot answer for much of the movie. This movie bears the mark of having gone through multiple writers. There are several competing plotlines, and only one of them is really compelling: The attempt of John Connor to rescue Kyle Reese from Skynet.
Rather than go over what went wrong, I'll just talk about what I liked. Christian Bale was actually good as John Connor, and with a more coherent script might have brought a lot to the part. He had the kind of beaten down, survivalist feel about him that is perfect for someone who's gone through Judgment Day. He got into Batman growling a little too much, and I never saw any of that spark that made him supposedly a hero/messiah figure for humanity, but that's the fault of the script, not Bale.
Anton Yelchin is the star of 2009. He was hilarious as Chekov in Star Trek and is great here as Kyle Reese. He had Michael Biehn's mannerisms down perfectly, and his character stole every scene he was in. There's something innately sympathetic about his appearance, and any emotion at all in the film came from him. I would have loved for him to be the main character, but again, the script just wasn't good enough.
Arnold's cameo in the film's admittedly exciting third act was a gigantic crowd pleaser, and the effects work was phenomenal. (In fact, the effects in the whole movie were some of the best I'd seen in a long, long time. Nothing looked fake or manufactured in a studio or a computer. On the other hand, it also looked less burned out and bleak then I would except post apocalyptic LA to look, but that's the least of the movie's problems.) Anyway, I got a big grin on my face when Arnold showed up, and it almost made the film's faults worth it. A fantastic little moment.
Except it didn't. The "main character," Marcus Wright is boring, and while I won't give away the twist about his character--you'll have to watch the trailer for that--let's just say it fails to be the brilliant high minded sci-fi conundrum it was clearly supposed to be. Way too much time is spent on this character, and it simply doesn't work. There's no strong villian, Skynet's motives are bizarre and illogical, and plenty of characters do nothing.
But again, those things I liked, I really did like. Good visual effects are taken for granted these days, but what Stan Winston did here for his final movie is nothing short of amazing. The terminators never looked so good.
So that's a positive look at was a very dissapointing and jumbled movie. I could just as easily tear into all the problems, but it's not worth it. There were good elements in this movie, and with a little more finesse and care they might have really worked. McG is just not the guy to handle this material. It's not his fault, he's just not qualified.
I'm in the camp that thinks James Cameron's Terminator movies are pretty close to brilliant. Terminator 2 is easily one of my top ten movies, in part, I'm sure, because I remember the pop culture phenomenon it was in the summer of 1991. As an adult I love the movie far more than I ever did as a kid. Every scene is like a trip to film school. I could watch that movie over and over and over again and learn something new about film making every time. In the Terminator Salvation hype I've actually been watching my T2 DVD quite a bit, and am always finding new ways to appreciate that movie.
The Terminator story really ended there. Everything that has come after is really just fan fiction. It has flashes of quality, but really it's just somebody else trying to put their own spin on something that will always belong to someone else.
It's a shame Salvation wasn't great, but really, what did we expect?
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