“The King Speaks” is the first of a few new articles I’m adding to the blog. Basically, “The King Speaks” gives me the opportunity to comment on movie news or other information that doesn’t fit in any one review but I feel passionately about. Unlike my reviews, which are spoiler free, these new articles will not be.
You might be confused by the title of this article, especially if you just read my feelings on Terminator Salvation below. Before you call me a hypocrite and decide to never read my site ever again, gather round and let me tell you a story. This, my friends, is the story of how Christian Bale saved theTerminator franchise.
Our story starts in London, where our hero is on his way to The Dark Knight premier when someone hands him a script. He opens it, takes one look at the title, and tosses it away. After all, who’d want to be in a movie calledTerminator Salvation?
Well, Bale might have thought he was done with Salvation, but our other main character has other ideas. I won’t go as far as to call him the villain. He’s far too stupid to be the villain. The villains of the story are those two hacks who wrote the screenplay: John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris. No, McG is our jester. He’s just a little boy pretending to be a real director and he’s in over his head, but enough bashing of McG. His film speaks for itself. So, when McG gets the news that Bale has no interest, he won’t take no for an answer. He flies to London with a pitch all planned out and when he gets there, Bale looks him dead in the eye and again says “No” and again McG is devastated. He gets down on his knees and literally begs. He begs Bale to put some faith in him. He begs him to take a leap of faith. To all of this, Bale responds that the script is just crap, but McG is a blubbering Betsy at this point, so Bale agrees to do it under two conditions: Jonah Nolan gets to rewrite the script and Bale gets to choose who plays Marcus Wright (Bale’s choice of Sam Worthington was one of the positives that Salvation offers).
Now, I can hear what you’re all saying. “I just read you’re review of Salvationand you thought the biggest problem of the movie was the script. If Bale forced re-writes, isn’t he responsible for that garbage excuse for a Terminatormovie? How can he possibly have saved the franchise, especially when you said he wasn’t even that good in the movie?” To tell you how Bale did, I first have to tell you what the script was before Jonah Nolan and Bale got their hands on it.
I mentioned in my review that Marcus Wright gets the majority of the screen time and John Connor is a secondary character. In the original script, it is completely Marcus’ movie. McG was actually in London asking Bale to play Marcus, but Bale was enticed by the idea of John more. John doesn’t even appear in person until the final 5 minutes of the movie. That’s right, John Connor, the driving force of the entire franchise, was going to be relegated to a voice on the radio. Oh, and when he does finally show up, he gets killed, but more on that at the end of the script run down. Basically, the entire movie is Marcus and Kyle Reese creating a father-son relationship. Yes, I’m referring the Kyle Reese that in Terminator one raves on and on and on about John Connor taught him everything and how he believes so much in John that he would die for him without hesitation. Marcus teaches Kyle to drive and how to use weapons better. Not only is this stupid, but it means more screen time for Yelchin as Kyle, who, despite what everyone else in the world seems to be saying, was not good. But anyway, he and Marcus really bond. At least this way, it makes sense was Marcus decides to go to Skynet city in search of Kyle, but it makes no sense to give Marcus and Kyle such a strong friendship. That friendship belongs to John and Kyle and to rob them and the fans of that is insulting.
As bad as the script sounds thus far, the story is pretty much the same as what we got on screen, just with a beefed up John Connor. The problem is that you can tell that he was added after the fact and the movie’s pacing suffers because of it. It is the third act where the two stories greatly differ. If you’re a fan of the Terminator franchise, be prepared for what you’re about to read. I had to close out of the script because I was so hurt by what I read. You’ve been warned.
Where in the movie, Marcus and John go to Skynet city, which leads to the Arnold cameo (in my opinion the hands down best scene in the movie), it is just Marcus who goes after Kyle. Instead of a massive machine factory, he finds a paradise resort. Oh yes, a resort, complete with Terminator gardeners and servants. Marcus is confused and the fans are crying when Dr. Serena comes out. Instead of being a hologram projection like she is in the finished movie, she is a fully functional human-robot hybrid like Marcus. She then explains everything to him. Marcus is part of something called Project ANGEL. The machines did some calculations (I assume all machines do are calculations) and realized that the human race only had about 200 years left to live before they destroyed the planet. So, the machines decided to take a few of the humans who “deserved to live” and turn them into cyborgs so that they may live forever. The machines start a nuclear war in an attempt to kill all the other humans. The machines then created Terminators to hunt down and destroy all the survivors of Judgment Day. So, everything we’ve seen throughout the course of the trilogy was the result of the Terminators trying to save the world. If you need a few minutes to go throw up, I’ll still be here.
After Marcus learns all of this, he still wants to find Kyle, but Kyle has already been killed. Serena then activates the chip in Marcus brain, preventing him from doing anything, but suddenly (and coincidentally) there’s a power surge and Marcus is able to remove his chip. He then jumps into the conveniently placed time machine, goes back just far enough that he can save Kyle. They then hop on an ATV (thank god for those driving lessons) and Kyle drives them out of danger. As they are leaving Skynet city, they see that the power surge was caused by a resistance attack led by John Connor himself. John shows up only to be shot by Serena. Marcus attacks her and is somehow knocked out.
When he wakes up, Kate Brewster tells Marcus that John is dying. Everyone gathers around the dying leader of the resistance. John gives Kyle the picture of Sarah Connor and tells him sentimental crap and then he dies. Kate (mind you, she’s just lost her husband) tells Marcus that people need John, and asks him to become John Connor. Marcus then rips off John’s face and has it transplanted on to his body (by the way, that’s what gives John the famous scar). I don’t know about you, but I didn’t wait 20 years to see John Connor die and become a robot.
Now that you’ve seen what could have been, does Salvation still suck as much? Yes, but it sucks in a way that doesn’t undo any of the Terminator mythos that we love and doesn’t do anything that the series can’t recover from. At the end of Salvation, we still have a John Connor who is alive and human (thank god for heart transplants in the middle of a desert).
Salvation was damned from the start. The second the decision was made to make a movie where John Connor was not the driving force, the movie was given a death sentence. Like I said, John deserved the friendship with Kyle and the other characters. He should not have been relegated to a foil of Marcus. The reason Bale wasn’t as good as he can be is because the script provides him no range of motion and no depth to the character. To use the Batman dynamic, we should have gotten two sides of John: the softer, wounded side (Bruce Wayne) and the angry ass-kicker (Batman). All he was given a chance to be was Batman, and he didn’t even kick any ass.
Now you see it. Terminator Salvation was not good, but it didn’t make that little boy who watched T2 on laser disk cry. It’s better to have a bad movie than a bad movie that ruins something you love. At the end of the day, we got aTerminator movie slightly more entertaining than T3 and the studio still has a second chance at their post-Judgment Day trilogy. And that boys and girls, is the story of how Christian Bale saved the Terminator franchise.
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