Movie Review: Terminator Salvation
I have always loved the Terminator movies. I even enjoyed Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, a movie most fans consider to be the weakest installment. I went into Terminator Salvation with both excitement and nervous anticipation. It succeeds as a Terminator movie, but comes up a bit short as a film in general. In the not-too-distant future, Skynet will launch a worldwide, nuclear attack against the human race. John Connor, the leader of the human resistance, lived with this knowledge growing up. However, it seems to John that the future is different than he was told. As humanity is pushed farther towards extinction, it seems their fate may lie with one person, Marcus Wright.
The movie tells a great segment in the franchise. I loved all the scenes in the future in the Terminator movies, so seeing how things play out was exciting. I’m glad humanity is not shown living in caves and impossible to stand up to the machines; the machines sometimes go on the offensive, and other times the resistance attacks. Humanity has to be smart about their moves, but the machines are relentless. Then Marcus appears, and everything changes.Marcus is probably the best aspect of the movie. Since his last memory was his execution, and he wakes up in a future where machines are in control, the audience is able to feel how he feels, that is, the audience feels out of place like him. Marcus is an experiment to combine human tissue and organs with Skynet terminator systems. His journey begs the question, “What does it mean to be human?”, and the film brilliantly leaves it up to the audience to decide where the line is drawn.
However, one of the problems I could not overlook was the script. At times, the dialogue fits the scene. Other times, it sounds Sci-fi channel bad. Michael Ironside plays his typical military role, not willing to send in rescue to retrieve captured humans from the San Francisco Skynet Facility. The graphics look stunning during the actions sequences, but some of the landscape views look less then stellar.
With a new breath, Terminator Salvation got the franchise off to a good jump start. What do you think, did Terminator live up to the hype?
Fanboyz Grade: B
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2 Comments
I just got back from seeing this movie. It was about what I expected. Visually, the movie is stunning and the action sequences are brutal but not so frenetic that the viewer can't follow along without having a aneurysm. I also enjoyed some of the nods to the previous films (e.g.: the 7-11 that gets destroyed was the gas station where Sarah Connor stops at the end of the first film and there's a battle sequence between John and a T-800 that recalls the one between his mother at the T-1000).
I guess overall my biggest problems with the film were its predictability and the absence of the philosophical musings from T1 and T2. I had no problems seeing where this movie was going with the Marcus character, and the scene what revealed his function and purpose seemed straight out of "The Matrix" playbook. Additionally, where the first two were great action films and also offered great commentary on Cold War paranoia and humanity in the post-modern era, the last two films have just been balls-out action flicks without any of the substance.
But, just like "Rise of the Machines," this was a great popcorn flick and has to survive on that merit alone. As long as I checked my inner film snob at the door, I had a lot of fun watching it.
Edit: I had no problems seeing where this movie was going with the Marcus character, and the scene that revealed his function and purpose seemed straight out of "The Matrix" playbook.