First, let’s get one thing out of the way: Christian Bale is awesome. The dude knows how to act, and he’s been on my top 5 list ever since American Psycho. Perhaps that’s one of the greatest disappointments in Terminator Salvation: the leading character of the entire franchise gets 20 minutes of airtime. Maybe that’s what he was so pissed off about during the filming.
The future is serious business.
Terminator Salvation is the 4th movie in the franchise, and although the trailers would lead you to believe it’s a story centered around John Connor, the main character of this story is decidedly Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington); a convicted murderer who is (kind of) executed by lethal injection in 2003 and wakes up 2018 at the height of man’s war with the machines. Though he isn’t aware of it for a time, SkyNet has turned him into a cyborg. His mission, if he even has one, is a mystery to him; he is just trying to figure out what’s going on. In time he befriends Kyle Reese (who is sent back in time by Connor in the first film, “get’s it on” with Sarah Connor, and in true paradoxical form end’s up being Connor’s own father) and a child named Star.
Long story short Reese, Star, and countless other humans are abducted by SkyNet and taken to it’s HQ for- presumably- experimentation towards grafting human organs and tissue ontop of and inside Terminators like Marcus Wright. Wright get’s pissed, decides to rescue them, and encounters the absurdly hot Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood) along the way. She turns out to be directly under the command of John Connor, and things progress pretty much exactly as you’d think from there on out.
Christian Bale got a whole 20 minutes of screen time!
No surprises in this film, really. About a third of the way through the film you’ve already figured out how it’s going to end, and there aren’t any twists to change that. You see Bale every other scene or so, acting depressed and yelling a lot. You see a lot more of Wright… hell, you see a lot more of Williams for that matter… and the ending is even more infuriating because of it. This film was a huge disappointment overall. The action was decent, the acting was great, but without a script worth the paper it was xeroxed on it all goes to shit. On the bright side, at least it wasn’t as bad as Rise of the Machines.
Oh, and spoiler alert? You know who totally makes a (heavily CG) appearance.
[rating:2/5]
Tags: arnold schwarzenegger, christian bale, john connor, kyle reese, sam worthington, terminator
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I felt like he didnt even try to act in this movie. He was stuck on Batman voice it was like he didnt even want to be in this movie. The Marcus character didnt even make sense in the series of the movies. Lets see what they do in T5 which I’m pretty sure they will do soon.
I agree on both fronts, but I’m not sure you can look at this film as just another Terminator. It really felt like they were trying to start fresh (by moving the perspective to the future, which hasn’t happened before really) and introducing a “grayer” area in the man vs machine story with Marcus. I think they had all the right players, but went with a garbage script. Really sad.
I’m sure there will be a T5, bad reviews or not. The money is still green.