Terminator Salvation
Year:
2009
Directed by:
McG
Rated:
PG-13
Country:
United States
Runtime:
2 hrs. 10 min.
Production Company:
The Halcyon Company
Written by:
John Brancato
Michael Ferris
Starring:
Christian Bale
Sam Worthington
Moon Bloodgood
Anton Yelchin
Similar Films:
Killer robots and great action redeem an awful script.
Lately I've been writing a lot of Godzilla reviews. The Terminator films, for me, hold much of the same, primal, appeal: they show us evil creations of the imagination causing mass destruction. Every once in a while you'll come across a moment of good storytelling in these franchises, but what these films do best is feed our baser desires to watch cool things destroy things. In that, Terminator Salvation excels. In other areas ... not so much.
We follow two main characters, the franchise's mythological John Connor (Christian Bale) and the newcomer Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a man who in 2003 was executed for the murder of his brother and a cop but who gives his body to science and is revived in the time of this film, 2018. Connor, who most will know, is the leader of the human resistance against the machines, which, viewing humankind as a threat to their existence, have all but wiped out the race. The world is a perpetual battleground in which the robots and humans try to destroy each other in order to survive. In this film, the resistance has found what they believe is the key to defeating the machines, but Connor has a task even more important: finding and protecting a civilian named Kyle Reese. Why is this more important than defeating the machines? This gets knotty, so pay attention. Reese, in the future, goes back in time to the 1980s to protect Sarah Connor from a Terminator (this all takes place in the first film) and ultimately fathers her child, John Connor, who becomes the leader of the resistance against the machines in the future, which is why the terminator was sent to kill Sarah Connor in the first place. (This already doesn't really make sense, I know.) The logic (for lack of a better term) goes that if the machines now destroy Reese, as they are trying to do, he will never father John Connor, who will then never exist to lead the resistance (I guess he'll vanish like people in Back to the Future photographs or something), and the humans, lacking such a great leader, will fall. While all this is going on, Wright is somehow revived, learns what is going on in the world, and seeks out Connor to join the resistance.
Strong special effects, particularly robot-related ones, have always been the hallmark of the Terminator franchise. Coming after a fairly mediocre third entry of the series, Terminator Salvation is not technically revolutionary like the first two installments were, but it far surpasses them on an absolute basis. Never before in a Terminator movie have we seen so many robots (in non-flesh-wrapped form, no less), and never have we seen such cool robots. Along with the generic terminators we all know of, this film also has motorcycle robots, serpentine robots, and, best of all, giant robots that look like bastard children of the Transformers franchise. The designs of these things are just plain awesome, everything looking purely evil and behaving with startling ferocity. The filmmakers then take these designs and use them to their fullest extent with action sequences so involved, fast-paced, and big as to best be described as operatic.
The imagery as a whole is often just as good as the elements that constitute it. There are many shots in this film that I would buy a print of, such as the giant robot towering over innocents or the scene of humans being rounded into captivity like cattle, with armed terminators watching over them. Director McG does not actually take a visually artistic approach to the material, but several moments such as these appear as if they were inevitable. Amidst the mayhem of huge action sequences, these occasional glimpses of the post-apocalyptic sublime bring a dark beauty to the film.
Complimenting the visuals are the sound effects, an aspect of cinema not usually worth mentioning in critical evaluations, but they stand out so strongly here that I have to mention them. They don't just provide noises that need to be there; they actually make the film more intense. In fact, some of the sounds are even frightening. The best by far is the sound that the giant terminator makes: a low, monstrous, vibrating noise, which somehow feels so naturally evil that it gives me chills. Adding to the effectiveness of this film's sound effects is the sheer volume of it. This movie is loud. While volume is obviously relative to the viewing situation, this movie's sound effects are loud relative to the organic sounds of the film, such as speech. The manufactured sound effects will blow you away, and the bass hits are tremendous. At first, I considered the loudness of the movie simply to be a cheap way for it to force itself upon the viewer. Then I realized that that is actually true, but it still works well. It allows you better to feel the action as it unfolds. It may be a cheap way of drawing you into the film, but it does have the effect of drawing you into the film.
