The original Terminator film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger came out in 1984 and it quickly became a massive hit. It had everything a great action film should have. Cool characters, a hot leading lady with a no nonsense attitude, an unstoppable and fearsome villain and above all amazing special effects. The film helped make Arnold a star and it cemented the word Skynet and the phrase "I'll be back" into the public consciousness.
The film T2 is one of those truly rare moments in Hollywood where a sequel actually manages to be more amazing and awe inspiring than the original was. Turing the villain from the first film into the hero this time around, and pitting him against a newer and even more deadly machine, T2 became an instant fan favorite and is regarded by many people as one of the greatest action movies of all time.
T3 . . . . . well . . . . . is it too late to pretend T3 just never existed at all? There's good reason the TV show The Sarah Connor Chronicles jumped forward in time and completely negated the existence of the third film in the Terminator franchise. Many of us fans wish we could do the same.
But here we are, many years later, and a new Terminator film has come out. Terminator: Salvation. I've said before here many times that when this project was first announced, I was highly skeptical of it. It was being directed by a guy named McG, and it was going to be PG-13 instead of R. It wasn't even going to have Arnold Schwarzenegger in it (which in all honesty made since due to the fact that he's getting pretty old). As a fan of the Terminator franchise, I was fully expecting to hate the film.
Then I went to Wonder Con back in February and got my first good look at the film. I attended the Terminator panel which was hosted by McG himself, and I will fully admit that the guy won me over. He genuinely seemed excited that he was getting to add to the Terminator mythology that he so obviously loved himself. He was fighting with the studio for an R rating. He had struggled to get a great actor like Christian Bale to play John Connor. The footage shown and the trailers looked amazing. By the time I walked into the theater last Friday, I was pretty amped up and was really looking forward to seeing some Robot-on-human violence.
And the result? Unfortunately, it's a bit more underwhelming than I would have hoped for. Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy the movie quite a bit. However, there was a lot wrong with it too. I never expected this film to be as cool as T2 was. To do that is pretty much to expect the impossible. What I was hoping for was that the film would be at least better than T3 and hopefully as entertaining as the aforementioned Sarah Connor Chronicles. I'm happy to say that it is indeed better than T3 was. And yes, it's as entertaining as the Sarah Connor Chronicles were too. But Terminator: Salvation most definitely has it's strong points and it's weak points.
Let's start with the positives. The special effects in the film are amazing. Going against what most other big budget action film directors are doing nowadays, McG went out of his way to use as little CG as possible and actually built tons of robot bodies and destroyed buildings and actual sets for his actors to work in. This use of practical effects really pays off in my opinion as it added a whole feeling of realism to the film. Things in Salvation are dirty, dust covered and appropriately post apocalyptic looking. I had no problem whatsoever believing that the settings and the story's backdrop looked as real as they could get.
When there was CG used, it was flawless. The computer animation in the film is top notch. When John Connor goes toe to toe with a skeleton T-800, the fight scene is gloriously beautiful. And as for Arnold Schwarzenegger's much talked about digital "cameo" . . . . . frakking amazing!!! The effects of the digital Arnold were astounding in their awesomeness. When a young and still muscular Arnold walked onto the screen, my jaw dropped and I got the giant geeky nerdgasm that I was hoping I'd get. My only complaint was that digital arnold didn't get nearly enough screentime. I could have watched John Connor fighting him for an hour and wouldn't have cared about the rest of the film.
Action and effects aside though, the film does have some serious problems, most of which revolve around the story and the film's editing. You'd think a Terminator film taking place after judgement day wouldn't be that hard a story to create, right? Just put John Connor in charge of a small band of human rebels, give them a cool target to blow up, and let the fireworks go off. Simple, right? Well, somehow this simple concept totally escaped the writers who gave us a convoluted story that didn't really go anywhere, accomplished nothing important, and really didn't get the audience to care at any point about what was going on. A ton of new characters were introduced in the film, but none of them were really given much screentime and thus weren't able to develop or grow into anyone we cared about.
John Connor's wife, for example, was someone I would have liked to know better. John Connor was raised by one of the most badass women to ever grace the silver screen. Sarah Connor is a powerhouse of a character, and she's bound to have left her son John with some woman issues. The man has been raised since birth to lead the human resistence against the machines. He's been a soldier since before he was born. He's not going to just pick some random girl to marry. She's going to have to be as powerful an intellect as he is and she's going to have to be as hard as nails and as much a survivor as he is. Do we ever really get to see her do anything cool though? No. Do we see any reason why John Connor would pick this woman over any others? No. Would the audience really have cared then if she died in the fim? No.
The same goes for Salvation's only other major female character too. The pilot chick Williams. Her introduction is pretty cool. She's a pilot for the resistence, and she leads Marcus to the resistence. But just like every other story aspect of this film, she's never really developed and doesn't really do a whole lot in the end. The character of Marcus Wright is at least sort of interesting. He's a new hybrid Terminator with human organs mixed with machine parts. He's a cool concept and is an interesting move for Skynet to make, but he too never really does a lot and by the end of the film I don't really care about what happens to him either.
As for the editing, it was incredibly choppy in certain areas and I could fairly well tell when scenes were cut out to give the film its PG-13 rating. The most glaring of these was the topless scene with Moon Bloodgood which was cut from the film. The edit and the missing scene make for a very akward transisition from one scene to the next. I can only hope that when the director's cut of the film comes out on DVD, it will have a better flow to the story.
On a totally random side note, it was really cool to see the actor Michael Ironside again. That man was a staple of 80's sci-fi action films, and I hadn't seen him in a cool role in far too long. Seeing him pop up as the leader of the resistence was really damned cool.
In the end, Terminator: Salvation is a decent and enjoyable action flick. Don't expect a ton of amazing story and you won't be disappointed. The effects are awesome and if you're a Terminator fan it's definitely worth seeing. It was much better than T3 and I would actually look forward to McG directing another one or two of these. As a summer film, it works well but don't expect any oscar winning performances to come from this. On the whole, I'd say that this film was better than X-Men Origins: Wolverine but was nowhere near as good as Star Trek.
Final Grade: B
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