A Categorical Disaster

Rating: 4/10 (17 August 2009)

James Cameron's stock rises with every passing sci-fi action movie that is released these days. The man who practically invented and certainly perfected the genre with Aliens and the first two Terminator films has watched his legacy be steadily diluted by today's imitators, and Terminator Salvation is a grisly reminder of just what Cameron did to make his films so special.
There's not much wrong with Salvation in technical terms. McG may deserve the cries of "MTV director" simply for his ludicrous, gimmicky alias but his style is competent enough, reigning in the whizz-bang editing and over-processed shots. The film looks nice enough: the special effects are very good, the action well staged and the overall look and feel of the film is pretty-yet-gritty. It's certainly better to look at than your typical, overblown Michael Bay product.
No, what makes Terminator Salvation so poor is not in how it looks, sounds or moves. This is, quite simply, a film of colossal stupidity, stupidity that is rendered even more starkly because it has to stand up to Cameron's films.
Where to start? How about with its utter disdain for continuity? In the original Terminator film, Cameron managed in a couple of simple monologues from Kyle Reese to provide both crucial exposition and paint a bleak picture of a future where humanity is enslaved by the machines and on the very verge of extinction before John Connor's intervention. McG spends a whole film carefully trashing Cameron's vision. Humanity isn't enslaved in a high tech circle of hell, it's a fully functioning resistance force with worldwide forces, aircraft and submarine command centres. John Connor doesn't lead the stragglers out of machine death camps to fight a desperate guerrilla war, he's a bizarrely mythologised sergeant in a clichÃ©-spouting military unit, complete with stereotypically uncooperative superiors running the show.
Even worse, the entire mise en scene of those future flashback sequences from Reese's hallucinations and the intro to Terminator 2 is thrown out of the window. Gone is the perpetual dark of nuclear winter, the bed of human skulls and the desperate struggle by ill equipped survivors. Instead the film looks more like Mad Max meets Black Hawk Down.
McG commits the obvious mistake of putting his ego over the wants of the fans. Terminator fans don't want some snotty upstart director trying to impose his ill-fitting creative vision on their iconic series. Why is this behaviour tolerated by Hollywood studios? The practise is so common we have a term for it now: retconning. McG retcons the backstory and feel of a winning and much-loved formula devised by a much better director in a display of either colossal naivety or extreme arrogance. And he fails.
What's really insulting, however, is how he attempts to wean the fanbase onto his new direction for the Terminator universe not by compromise or humbleness but by feeding the fans endless references to previous films, in the thick-headed belief that meaningless echoes to the old films will placate the fans. From repeated dialogue to carbon copy shots to You Could Be Mine blasting out of a boom box, McG lathers the film with self-referentiality and prays that the audiences are too busy fist-pumping and cheering at these moments to care what he does to the parts that matter.
Of course, it's possible I'm being too cynical. Terminator Salvation references, imitates or just plain rips off so many other sci-fi films it's possible that McG is simply a postmodern magpie who has so few ideas of his own he can only get by through creating a collage of nods to other, better films. These nods are especially weak when you put them against Cameron's intelligent subversion, expansion and development of key moments and motifs from his original film in Terminator 2. In comparison, McG looks nothing better than a film student smugly quoting lines from his favourite movies.
Special mention must go to the plot, which is so laughably bad I'm giving this review spoilers so I can properly skewer it. Set aside all the aforementioned retconning and inconsistencies and just marvel at the dumbness of a plot that rips off the Matrix Reloaded as hard as possible and falls short even of that.
A "chosen one" figure leads a human resistance against an oppressive machine hegemony in a post-apocalyptic future, only for it to be revealed that the entire plot of the film is a carefully laid trap by a controlling machine intelligence, you say? And where Reloaded's climactic twist was merely the end of intelligent plotting in that particular franchise, Salvation's twist is the revelation that the plot you've been following is actually considerably more stupid than previously suspected. It turns out Marcus Wright is resurrected by Skynet to set an elaborate plan to lead John Connor to Skynet, through the bait of a captured Kyle Reese. Watch this film again and consider just how much chance, coincidence and sheer luck is involved in Marcus Wright even meeting John Connor, let alone leading him to Skynet and you'll scoff at the very notion that Skynet could possibly have planned for the events you witness. And that's before you even question why the machines don't murder Reese on sight and end the whole shambolic mess 30 minutes before the closing credits.
I'd love to tell you how my friends and I laughed out loud at Christian Bale's delivery of several lines, how we're still making jokes about how a 300 ton giant robot ninja'd its way across open desert to ambush the protagonists in one scene and about the clumsy retreading of those tired man/machine subtexts we've been wearing into the sci-fi carpet since before Blade Runner, but this review is already too long. James Cameron will smirk yet again as we're reminded that it's not set pieces and special effects that make a good sci-fi action film: it's all about good writing and smart directing.