Questionably Content

Terminator Salvation (2009)


Directed by: McG

Starring: Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Moon Bloodgood

Other Actors of Note: Helena Bonham Carter, Bryce Dallas Howard, Michael Ironside, Anton Yelchin

Plot: After Skynet has destroyed much of humanity in a nuclear holocaust, a group of survivors led by John Connor struggles to keep the machines from finishing the job. Taken from www.imdb.com.

"Officer Token Angry Blackguy reporting for duty, sir!"

Kids, don't cheat on your wife. Seriously, bad shit happens. When James Cameron sold out and made the horrible film "Titanic" proving universally that shit can be successful so long as you have an army of tasteless screaming teenage girls on your side. (This hypothesis would later go on to be tested when "Twilight" came out.)

So anyway, Cameron offered a role to his then-wife Linda Hamilton A.K.A. Sarah Connor. Well Linda turned down the role apparently to further pursue her successful acting career (that's a joke) and the role was given to Cathy Bates who to this day remains the only person in that whole goddamn movie who actually manages to act. But I digress, so anyway, long story short Cameron ended up sleeping with on of the actresses and Linda Hamilton won the rights to the "Terminator" films in the divorce.

Now surely, "Terminator" being Linda's only memorable role, she's going to make sure that the series is treated with the utmost respect and care, right? Well, according to "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" the answer to that question is a most emphatic "fuck no!"

So this was the chance to make everybody forget the third movie. Arnold is busy ruling California with an iron fist so he's out and that's for the best. Nick Stahl was politely asked to fuck off, that's 2 for 2. And they hired... the guy who directed the "Charlie's Angels" movies to direct.... okay, now you're just trying to fuck shit up.

So after hiring McG (A monicker that implies he's Irish, a gangbanger, AND a douchebag) they approaced Christian Bale, hoping for him to play the role of the terminator for this movie. But Bale said, "You know what, why don't you take this page and a half of dialogue for John Connor and stretch it out to encompass most of the movie, I'll play that."

McG tried to negotiate but then Bale took off his pants and began screaming "I AM BATMAN!" in a raspy voice and proceeded to noogie the fuck out of him. The producers eventually agreed to rewrite the script so he would quit giving McG swirlies and asking him if he liked Huey Lewis and the News and proclaiming that professionally they were "fucking done." And thus "Terminator Clusterfuck" was born.

So, let me see if I can try and piece this jigsaw puzzle together in a way that makes a modicum of sense. So, it's the future and John Connor is not leading the resistance at all, in fact he's getting bossed around a bunch by Michael Ironsides and anyone else who fits the stereotypical grizzled-army-commander template. He finds out about a signal that can be used to stop the machines and decides to field test it. Flash on over to LA where Marcus Wright, a convicted murderer who we met in the prologue with a completely superfluous appearance from Helena Bonham Carter, walks on screen naked and screams. We immediatly know he's a Terminator cause that's how this shit works, also because they told us he was one in the trailer.

Marcus meets Kyle Reese who gets kidnapped by robots and he hooks up with super-hot downed pilot Blair (played by Moon Bloodgood, who is apparently a night elf) and then trek on over to an inevitable confrontation between Connor and Wright. This confrontation is both needlessly epic and inevitably homo-erotic.

So some shit goes down, some more stuff blows up, the Arnold-bot shows up for reasons unexplained and the movie ends with a kind of weird ending. But given the alternative I think it's obvious that this turd was polished as much as can be reasonably expected.

They're totally about to kiss.

So, Christian Bale is not the star of this movie despite what he and the producers clearly want you to believe. I think he's finally going the way of Kevin Spacey and slowly selling out as this performance is at best "good." His role in the movie feels like it was written in last minute and even the part that was written into the script originally just isn't overly impressive (we get to watch another John Connor futiley try to fight against yet another T-800: oh gee fire didn't work, maybe you should try punching it!)

Contrary to Bale, Sam Worthington is actually quite good, oh sure he's a bit two-dimensional and badass. But on the scale of cool Terminators he falls somewhere between the T-1000 and the T-RiverTam. Even in his 2-dimensional glory he actually manages to be a compelling protagonist. This would work better if he wasn't interrupted every 15-minutes by Bale whispering dramatically into a walkie-talky.

Anton Yelchin is 2-for-2 on franchise destroying sequels. Not only does he actually manage to look like Michael Biehn but he manages to have that raspy voice without it feeling forced. He seems to have studied the part and it's easy to believe that Yelchin's character in this film eventually becomes Biehn's in the first movie.

Moon Bloodgood and Bryce Dallas Howard serve no purpose and could have been entirely removed from this movie without anything important having changed. I don't know about Bloodgood but Howard is too good of an actor to be relegated to such a small bland role.

Oh, park a helicopter on top of them and shoot them in the face, Sarah Connor should have just tried that.

Despite my annoyance with Christian Bale, McG, James Cameron, and really everybody who brought this into existence not to mention my overwhelming indifference for seeing the robot war, there are a lot of things in this movie that actually work.

For one, the post-apocalyptic atmosphere works perfectly. Everything feels suitably desolate and barren and despite the fact that they ignore everything that Kyle Reese said in the first movie (I.E. that they fight during the day and young-Reese says that Hunter Killers hunt best at night despite the fact that old-Reese said that the resistance only fights at night.) Things are suitably explodey and filled with all sorts of different kinds of killer robots but that help is also a hinderance.

Some of the T-1s are still hanging around from "Rise of the Machines" but not many, perhaps ED-209 threatened to sue for copyright infringement, I don't know. But we also get to see the Hunter Killers from the opening of T2. There are water snake terminators, giant people grabbing Terminators with motorcycles in their legs. Yes you read that correctly, there are evil robot motorcycles.

Now, this movie did do something that the T2 changed and T3 ruined entirely. For the first time since the first movie the T-600s are scary and all I can say is it's about fucking time. Finally the T-600 looks like it has some size and weight to it and not a very elaborate animatronic puppet that could break in a stiff wind. Honestly the T-1000 was cool but far from scary and the T-X was just fucking pathetic so it's nice to feel a sense of at least mild fear from them again. But of course my big problem is with the lone T-800 in this movie.

So the Arnold-bot shows up for no real reason (unless he's fulfilling the prophecy he gave in T3, but it doesn't really come to pass as he said it would and what happens would break continuity and end with past-Connor totally dead) but then decides to break continuity entirely. You see, thus far in the movie the T-600s have been uncharacteristically weak, they die far too easy seeing as it took a hydraulic press, a vat of molten iron, and a nuclear blast to kill them in past films respectively. So when Arnold-Bot gets a vat of molten iron poured on him I was understandably confused when he didn't fucking die. That shit killed the T-1000, why is the lesser-model surviving from it. Does this mean we're going to be seeing an even more powerful T-1000 in a future sequel? Someone call Robert Patrick, he's not busy Governating anything! (I'm sorry Kristana Loken, but you can eat shit and die.)

Other than that it's action-packed, not as bloody as it should be but at least much ballsier than T3. I was kind of bothered and annoyed by the gratuitous line quotes ("I'll be back", "Come with me if you want to live", "What day is it, what year?") and there were far too many T3 references (Mrs. John Connor, the Arnold Bot, the Terminator nuclear fuel cells, the T1) as hoping McG would ignore that movie and just move on.

Pictured: Scary

It's an entertaining and suitably desolate and dangerous, but it never really feels like a Terminator movie and that's really what hurts it. It's still twice as good as T3 but if you're a hardcore fan that maintains the series ended at T2 this won't change your mind.

McG almost seemed to get it and he's got two more sequels to figure it out. Mr. G, if you're reading this (and you're totally not because I know only like 3 people read this) my first advice is to beat away Christian Bale's ego with a big stick (use fire if you must) and try and write a movie that meshes with your idea as well as Cameron's. I fully believe you can do this if you just try harder.

I give "Terminator Salvation" a 3 out of 5. There's nothing really wrong with it but there's certainly nothing right either.