Terminator Salvation

You know that feeling you get when you anticipate something so badly and for so long and then that day finally comes and it’s a gigantic let down? Well, that’s the feeling I have right now. How long have I been anticipating this movie? Long before it was called Terminator Salvation. I saw T2 when I was about 5 year’s old, T1 around that same time. I credit these movies with influencing my life as much as anything else. I said the other day that I was raised by Sarah Connor, Kyle Reese, and Arnold’s T-800. I wanted nothing more than to be John Connor when I was younger, with his Public Enemy t-shirt and POS dirt bike. There is no duo of movies I would rather watch thanT’s 1 & 2. Now that you have an idea of how much I love this franchise, we can begin.

Let’s just address the elephant in the room and let me say that this is not a “bad” movie. It’s not Next Day Air (more like Crap Crap Air) or X-Men Origins(more like Crap-Men Origins). Those are bad movies. You can tell that it’s poorly put together, or people aren’t trying their hardest. That’s not the case with T4. Everyone’s trying. The problem is their best just isn’t good enough. The result is a movie that had limitless potential but instead is nothing more than a major disappointment. To me, that’s sometimes worse than making a bad movie. Whatever I say from here on out, just know that I did not hate this movie. I just see what could have been and the anger flows out

T4’s failure can be traced to two sources: a truly awful screenplay and McG. For those of you who are more casual movie goers and are wondering what a McG is, he’s the director of this and other cinematic masterpieces such as We Are Marshall and the Charlie’s Angels movies. I didn’t feel good when he signed on to direct T4, he said all the right things and I’ll admit that the guy has a good eye for action. He begged us for a chance, telling fans this would be his Aliens. I should have known the guy was a tool for even comparing himself to James Cameron, but I, like most other fans, took a leap of faith with McG. What a poor decision that was.

At least I could see that McG was trying. He wanted to make this movie good. The problem is that he just lacks the talent to shoot anything outside of an action sequence. The actions scenes are shot well, but they seem small. I mean, come on, this is post-Judgement Day. This should have been epic. I’m going to resist the urge to fanboy-out right here, since most people won’t know what I’m talking about if I mention T-600’s or H-K’s, but I will say that McG decided to replace certain staples of the Terminator universe in exchange for new things that look cool. Now, I would have had no problem with adding this new things, but at the expense of things we’d seen since the T1? I don’t think so.

The performances are mediocre across the board, even Christian Bale. Anyone who knows me at all knows how much it kills me to say anything even remotely bad about Bale, but he was very underwhelming. Now, I know that Bale is great, and I think he’s one of the most versatile actors in Hollywood. It’s just tough to be great when you’re being directed by McG. Sam Worthington, who gets the majority of screen time, is solid, and he’s going to be a star, but I just don’t like the way his character is written. There’s no reason that a character we’ve never heard of before should be the main character over John Connor. This is another example of choosing something cool over staples of the franchise. My least favorite performance was Anton Yelchin. Yelchin plays young Kyle Reese, who was played by one of my all time favorite actors, Michael Biehn, in T1. Yelchin is a good actor, but he’s not Kyle Reese. At no point did I ever think that his Reese could grow up into Biehn’s Reese. All of these weak performances are McG’s fault, because I know these guys can act. If Christopher Nolan was in the director’s chair, I guarantee I wouldn’t be making these complaints.

The rest of the problems all come from the script. When Bale read the original screenplay, he turned it down because it was too bad. The screenplay was then re-written by pretty much everyone in Hollywood until Bale agreed to do it. What was the screenplay that he turned down? Did someone just throw up on the page and hand it to him? T4’s screenplay is one of the worst I’ve ever seen. The story is just very bad, which blows my mind. It’s Judgement Day. Show us the war. Don’t show me Sam Worthington walking for five minutes. Give me John Connor, not Marcus Wright. The pacing is absolutely atrocious as well. They try to make it a dual movie between Connor and Wright, but it’s a horrible balance. Three minutes with Wright than thirty seconds with Connor. The dialogue is painfully bad. There is a scene between Marcus Wright and Moon Bloodgood’s Blair around a campfire that was soap opera quality acting. The theme of the movie is that the difference between humans and machines is heart. That’s funny because this movie has no heart. Not one character in the movie has any emotional punch. It’s tough for the actors to do that when they have both a bad script and a hack director.

Now, I could make a list a mile long of how this isn’t even a Terminator movie and how things from this movie just make no sense, both in comparison to the original films and just in general. I’d have to go into spoilers to talk about these things and I doubt that anyone would either know what I’m talking about or care, so I’m going to end here. Moral of the story is go see Terminator Salvation as long as you’ve already seen Star Trek (if not, go see that immediately) and the idea of a dumb, dumb, dumb movie with big action set pieces seems like a good time to you. Me? I will never see another McG movie as long as I live. He broke my heart and I’ll never forget it.