Henry Saw: Terminator Salvation

The summer is off to a pretty weak start...

Well this was bad.

I had, somehow, gotten excited for this movie. Yeah, I know it was directed by McG (the man behind both Charlie's Angels movies) and the early buzz was less than stellar. Also, while Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was entertaining in a way it was actually really, really bad. So this movie had some knocks against it going in... but I was still pumped. I rewatched the three prior Terminators over the last 10 days to get ready and went into the theater expecting some mindless action entertainment.

Well it was kind of mindless...and it did have action...but it definitely wasn't entertaining.

The fourth Terminator is an utter mess. If you search the internet you can find reports detailing how the script had massive rewrites once McG convinced Christian Bale to join the movie. In short, Bale demanded to play John Conner (the "hero" of the franchise, previously played by whiny bitches Edward Furlong in T2 and Nick Stahl in T3, who is destined to save the human race in the battle against the machines). In the original script John Connor was mostly off screen, a voice on the radio inspiring others, and didn't appear until the end. Wanting to play the franchise guy, Bale got the script worked over by Jonathon Nolan (who wrote The Prestige and The Dark Knight) and Paul Haggis (who sucks...he wrote Crash) to beef up his part. The result, unfortunately, is a muddled movie that doesn't make a lick of sense.

The plot is actually kind of hard to describe because its a bit all over the place (even though it really only has a cast of about 6 people) so I'll let IMDB handle things: "Set in post-apocalyptic 2018, John Connor is the man fated to lead the human resistance against Skynet and its army of Terminators. But the future Connor was raised to believe in is altered in part by the appearance of Marcus Wright, a stranger whose last memory is of being on death row. Connor must decide whether Marcus has been sent from the future, or rescued from the past. As Skynet prepares its final onslaught, Connor and Marcus both embark on an odyssey that takes them into the heart of Skynet’s operations, where they uncover the terrible secret behind the possible annihilation of mankind."

Gosh, that makes the movie sound kind of exciting doesn't it? Well it's not. The character of the Marcus Wright, played by newcomer Sam Worthington, actually has more screen time (I think) than Christian Bale. He had potential to be interesting, and Worthington does an okay job (though he slips into his native Australian accent a bit too often) but his character arc is hurt by a confusing and cliche filled script. His entire presence in the movie (and what is revealed about Marcus' nature) contradicts the prior films and by the time all is "explained"...well we just don't care enough to try to make sense of it. Don't feel bad for Christian Bale though...he's flat out bad in this thing. He only whispers or shouts in an incredibly one-note performance.

Plot holes are a big issue with this movie...take this series of WTFs for example: The humans somehow get a list of the machine's "most wanted"...the men and women that the machines want to kill the most (Plot Hole #1: Why would the machines make a list? And one that humans could find? Are the machines actually just a 72 year old woman with a grocery list?). Number two on the list is John Connor (even though he doesn't run the resistance yet...) and number one on the list is Kyle Reese, the man John Connor eventually sends back in time to impregnate his mother (as shown in the first Terminator). Now... and this is Plot Hole #2...the machines, at this point in the chronology of the series, have absolutely no way of knowing this information about Kyle Reese. None. And yet, they want him more dead than any other human. Then, later in the movie, the machines capture Kyle Reese and bring him to a prison (coughCONCENTRATIONCAMPcough). And here was have Plot Hole #3...so the machines have Kyle Reese who they somehow know will sire John Connor who they must somehow know will lead the resistance to defeat them (again...they should not know any of this). They have Kyle Reese in a prison cell, ready to be Terminated (you know the movie is about Terminators) and they can put an end to this whole resistance thing...and they just use him as bait to get John Connor to come to them. So instead of just killing Kyle Reese, therefore killing John Connor, and ending the thing...they use Reese to lure John Connor so they can kill him.

Ugh. I disliked this movie very, very much. Even if the movie wasn't filled with problems like this I could still have enjoyed it if it had contained awesome action scenes. It doesn't. They're not terrible, it's easy enough to tell what's going on in each scene at least, but none of them are exciting. They're very evocative of other movie, been there done that, and none of them have a real "kick-ass!" or a genuine "I've never seen that before!" moment .

I dislike this movie more and more with each passing moment. Skip it, pretend it never existed, and reflect for a moment that the most entertaining "Terminator Salvation" related thing in existence is Christian Bale's crazy ass rant that hit the internet a few months ago.

Grade: C-

Best Scene: When an old and familiar, if obviously CGI'ed, face pops up...