The Terminator was about time-traveling robots from the future sent to kill an unborn child named John Connor before he could grow up to be a man and defeat them in a future war between humans and machines. Through the decades, two subsequent movies and the recently canceled TV show, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, have taken up the story, with various people trying to save the young John from the killer robots.
Now, 25 years after the release of the movie that started it all, Terminator Salvation finally tells us exactly what John Connor does in this war that makes him worth protecting through all those attempts on his life. And the only sentiment I can offer up in response is, “Meh.”
The film is set in 2018, after the mechanized defense system called Skynet started thinking for itself and eradicated most of the human race. Only a few pockets of resistance are left to battle the killer robots that Skynet has built. Among the remaining humans is John Connor (Christian Bale), a respected commander in the field who gets hold of an audio signal that might defeat Skynet and its machines. The other main character is Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a convicted killer whom we see being executed in a prologue set in 2003, only to be mysteriously resuscitated 15 years later. Marcus becomes protector and mentor to Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin from Star Trek), the teenage resistance fighter who as an adult will be sent back in time to protect the unborn Connor. Marcus’ presence and the circumstances behind his re-emergence cause some existential conflicts for Connor’s people that I can’t discuss without giving away too much. I will say that the TV show Battlestar Galactica addressed similar issues in way more complex terms.
The new director in charge of the series is McG, the nom de cinema of Joseph McGinty Nichol, who’s best known for helming the Charlie’s Angels movies. Whereas McG drowned those films in candy colors and pervasive silliness, here he goes to the opposite extreme. Humor is nowhere to be found, and the visuals are all cloaked in various shades of gray and brown. It’s as if he imagines the postapocalyptic Terminator world as something akin to that of Children of Men.
Not a bad idea, especially in light of McG’s skills with a camera – early on he executes a single take that tracks from the exterior of Connor’s helicopter being tossed around by an explosion to the inside of the chopper as it crashes to the ground and then back outside as Connor extricates himself from the wreck and has to fight off the disembodied upper half of a robot. It’ll delight any film-school formalist, and the other action sequences are done with scarcely less panache.
The Alfonso Cuarón comparisons can stop there, though. McG’s fatal flaw is that he’s never had any idea of how to handle human emotions. (For proof, check out his one non-action film, the somnolent 2006 football drama We Are Marshall.) There’s no spark of affection, eccentricity, or warmth in Marcus’ relationship with Kyle, or John’s with his pregnant wife (Bryce Dallas Howard), or Marcus’ with a resistance pilot (Moon Bloodgood) whom he saves. The less said the better about the character of the mute little girl (Jadagrace) who’s always ready to hand a weapon or other useful object to a grown-up who needs one. The film sorely lacks the fierce maternal presence of Sarah Connor, who only shows up here via prerecorded tape messages and a still photo. The acting is uniformly studied and joyless, and though Worthington – whose previous work has mostly been on Australian TV – takes an admirable crack at his conflicted role, he can’t bring it to life.
Worst of all, fear and awe are totally absent from this movie. McG never evokes any sense of the humans being buffeted by murderous and incomprehensible forces, like Cuarón did in Children of Men. Nor does he make the robots themselves fearsome like Spielberg did in War of the Worlds. For all the CGI work that goes into rendering the giant, heavily armed killing machines, we’ve seen it all before in Transformers, and we’ll see it all again in the Transformers sequel next month. McG is considerably more talented than Michael Bay, but at least Bay is trying to entertain us. McG’s sense of fun, oppressive though it can be, has gone out the window here, and what should be a dark and terrifying film comes out grim and soulless. This is new ground for the Terminator series, and it’s not good at all.
