Terminator Salvation Review

"With a plot twist you'll never see coming...
Unless you watched the trailers...
Or saw the first five minutes...
Or have any thinking capacity whatsoever..."

Before judging this movie, you have to establish what exactly you're viewing it as: a Terminator sequel or a sci-fi action film. If it's the former, you might just like this new direction. If it's the latter, then this movie will remain very, very confusing to the uninitiated.

The year is 2018 and humanity is all but scraps after Skynet launched its war against the human race. Since then, John Connor (Christian Bale) has become a soldier in the Resistance with a crew of freedom fighters dedicated to finding a way to destroy the machines once and for all. He's also trying to find his father Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) who is meant to travel back in time and father John in the year 1984.

It's a Terminator thing...

But John discovers that Skynet is preparing to hunt down Kyle with the intention of killing him, and in turn, rewriting history to Skynet's advantage for a John Connor-free future.

Another Terminator thing...

But hope may be in store with one of Kyle's traveling buddies, a former death row patient named Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) who has somehow survived execution and woken up in the middle of the War with the Machines. Not only is Marcus possibly able to save Kyle, but he might be the key to stopping Skynet once and for all.

I've completely lost you, haven't I?

For Terminator fans, this is an installment full of juicy fan service and worthy cast members to take up their roles. But when the movie has to step back away from the franchise, it just falls apart. Anybody trying to come into this for the first time are highly unlikely to pick up most of what's happening in this screenplay.

This movie also does little to tell its story in the method of any of the Terminator movies before it. John Connor is demoted to secondary protagonist, the T-100 character (archived footage of Arnold Schwarzenegger) is in the movie for all of ten minutes and with a plot that is heavily founded on traveling to the past to change the future, we don't see any time travelling.

What strengths this movie has, its all done with subtlety. Director McG helps to give a new desert war-zone atmosphere to a series that was originally all just darkness, so the action that's delivered (however light) is done in a realistic setting. But one must remember this is not a franchise about who's the grittiest soldier in the barracks.

If you can salvage Terminator Salvation for a decent sequel, you might just get your money's worth...even in a rental. With a sequel fully set in the future we've been looking forward to seeing, it doesn't wrap up much in terms of story or character development and the action everybody loved from the previous films is just not at the same epic level. A good attempt, but needed a sharper script and a lot less plotholes.

 

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

 

 

So anybody who saw the end of Terminator 2: Judgement Day was probably thinking to themselves, "How in the name of Kyle Reese' ghost does Arnold come back from that to be in the third movie?" The answer: some things were better left unmade.
John Connor (Nick Stahl) is now his own man after supposedly preventing Skynet and a war with machines from destroying most of humanity. But Connor, like his mother before him, has spent the last several years in paranoia of that future. As you can guess by the movie poster, this rightly so.
Again Skynet has sent an upgraded Terminator assassin, the T-X (Kristanna Loken) to destroy the Resistance of Mankind before it can ever be created and ensure the survival of the computer system that will eventually take over the world. But a new T-101 Terminator (again played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) has arrived on the scene to defend both Connor and another pre-destined war hero Kate Brewster (Claire Danes). These three are the only ones capable of preventing the rise of machines before they fight back against the humans who designed them.
For a franchise with the moral message of "There is no fate but what we make" this movie rewrites drowns the series and its characters into destinies that not only steer them away from the development of previous movies but solely exists for the sake of fan service. It tries to bring the Terminator world into the modern digitally-centred age but seldom comes up with anything creative with what it offers.
Schwarzenegger's performance is thankfully just as good as his last turn at the Terminator character, but the script really tries to make this robot into something he's not. New cast additions Danes and Stahl aren't bad, but they aren't given much development. Whereas the previous movie at least had a strong supporting cast, the movie makes little attempt to hide the fact this whole cast is built around Schwarzenegger. This also doesn't help with our new baddie, the T-X who has little cool factor to her name. She may have superior CGI, but she's definitely no T-1000.
For a movie that's set on the verge of a nuclear apocalypse, they don't give the audience much to invest in. One solid chase scene will keep your adrenaline at its peak but its fairly early and by the end of the movie you're left with a bittersweet impression at best.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day

Picking up where I left the Terminator marathon (yes, months ago) we revisit the iconic action/sci-fi series that launched the career of the Austrian sensation himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, by checking out Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
Over a decade has past in movie time since Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) avoided assassination from the cybernetic T-1000, a Terminator sent from the future programmed to kill her, and in doing so, prevent her from giving birth to the saviour of mankind; John Connor. Since then, John (Edward Furlong in his film debut) has grown up in separation from his mother, who has been locked away after being deemed insane for his beliefs about the coming robopocalyse. Turns out John and the rest are in for one huge "I told you so lesson" when not just one, but two Terminators show up to throw their lives back into panic mode. ; one with the mission to protect John and the other ordered to kill him.
Reading this synopsis you might be assuming that this is just rehashing the same plot thread as the predecessor, but this is where James Cameron widens the scale of the story and much more is invested. It's the equivalent of what the movie Aliens (another Cameron sequel) did for Ridley Scott's Alien in terms of developing a larger movie. Here, bigger things are at stake, more lives are put in jeopardy and the tension is nothing short of edge-of-your-seat variety.
Character development especially goes into interesting turns for this film. Somehow they're able to give the T-1000 a character arc, even though he's specifically written to be anything but human underneath. Arnold's not just playing a literal killing machine anymore.
Sarah Connor has also seasoned over the years (quite bitterly in this case) and replaced her frightened scream queen persona from the last movie with the stone-cold pro-active soldier attitude her late beau Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) had in the previous film.
And John, since of course the events of the story essentially revolve around him (though Arnold enthusiasts would say otherwise) finally has a character since the last time we saw him, he was nothing more than a baby bump. He's a snarky, fun-loving hacker that Furlong simply nails in his performance for such a young age. To this day, I still don't know why his career hasn't taken off in a better direction.
This is a movie that best represents the themes of man vs machine and the overall message of "fighting against the future and the future fighting back." Though the marketing already kind of spoils the twist before it happens, I won't be the one to say who the villain truly is in this picture. Just know that not everything is what it seems in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
Once again, the production quality of the movie is phenomenal under the vision of Cameron, with tightly-knit editing and strong cinematography that is something worth the Hollywood history books. Terminator 2: Judgement Day remains the most viewed installment of the franchise and personally my favourite chapter in the series. I highly recommend the Extreme Edition DVD for home viewing, as it contains a lot of new footage and documentation of Cameron's direction over the movie.
So it can only go downhill from here...