From a Ravaged Hollywood, Humanity Challenges San Francisco Terminators

Rating: 7/10 (25 May 2009)

Christian Bale stars as John Connors, trying to find his not yet mature father in 2018 after arriving there from the distant future, to see to it that Dad will live through the ten year earth takeover by the terminators, so that he will live to meet his mother, and as Richard Nixon said in Frost-Nixon, 'fornicate' with her, to conceive Connors, so he can save the earth from destruction in 2018! Are you following this?
Its all bang bang every 2 minutes but hardly anyone ever gets killed because the film moguls don't want to lose actors they've paid exorbitant fees for performance. Even the mute little black girl who does little but stand around and occasionally find absolutely essential stuff to save their a**es., even she never gets killed. There's a serial killer from 2008, Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) a challenger to John Connors. Wright traded his death sentence to be chemically changed instead, into a template body for revival at some distant moment in the future. Sam Worthington steals the movie from Bale, just as the Joker stole it from Bale in the Dark Knight a year ago. Late in the movie, we find that he has been revived as one of the terminators, so that now he has to fight his dark side to regain lost human qualities to inevitably side with the freedom fighters. He and Connors fight some mean-spirited battles before Connors is sure Wright has heart enough to be trusted. Oh the Humanity!
Before its known that the revived Worthington is a good guy, we watch him tear up the ruined territory around a Hollywood already brought low by nearly 100 years of steady, ravaging, humanity draining film-making and exploitation, now reduced to a tattered Hollywood sign and something like the ruined landscape of Mad Max imposed on Century City and the La Brea Tar Pits. Marcus Wright is a whiz at reviving retro engines from old Honda Isuzos, VW Yugos and Toyotas blackened from destruction by the Terminators, using abandoned, pre-digital, analog electronics technique. Wright summons intuitive knowledge about this gear from old memory banks. He can hot wire an old wreck in a Hollywood minute with just a paper clip, a baby aspirin and a rubber band. Connors listens to an ancient cassette tape of his mother explaining where his (in 2018) father who is still just 19 now, IS, on a retro radio shack cassette player/recorder like one I have on my computer desk. The saviors of the planet are stuck with analog stuff to try and take back the night from the Terminators.
In other words, the Terminators occupy the high intellectual ground and high tech terrain at their Fortress in San Francisco/Silicon Valley suspiciously near George Lucas' Special Effects ranch , while the undermanned and low tech retro forces of humanity are stuck with gear that predates the first cellphones in a bag and the first Atari home computers, in a Hollywood short on geeks. In order to communicate with the small groups of human freedom fighters still alive around the planet, Connors fires up the XERB AM Mexican Radio transmitter Wolfman Jack once broadcast his show on. In remote enclaves around the country, small groups of humans listen to transistor radios like the one Joe Buck schlepped to Manhattan in Midnight Cowboy (1969) to meet with Ratso Ritso. The Humans are reduced to using the remnants of a toy-like Atari computer from the seventies to invent a radio frequency that substitutes an oscilloscope-like radio pattern that undoes and disables the demonic digital algorithms of the terrorists of San Francisco.
Marcus Wright isn't certain he's human or terminator, but gradually, after many showdowns with Connors, including one in which the carnage of the Vietnam War, including napalmed villages and ravaged Huey Helicopters invoked for the battle, bring the two closer to one another. Now Wright is totally devoted to Connors. Toward the end, voice tracks from the Linda Hamilton character of the second Terminator are introduced along with stills of her from Terminator 2. Meanwhile, in Sacramento, a vexed Arnold, faced with a $12 Billion budgetary shortfall, is diverted from seeking new taxes, when he learns the Moguls have screwed him out of another $20 million screen payday, by using holograms made from from his three earlier Terminator performances instead of him, to fight the final screen battles with Marcus Wright. Arnold doesn't get a dime for this picture! Where's the humanity in that?
Comes the Dawn, which is hard to see because the film's cinematography is as bleak and dark as the taupe and brown rustic colors Al Gore was advised to wear for the 2000 Presidential campaign. The unforgiving OD look renders this production a forbidding context in contrast to Terminators 2 and 3. Both Wright and Connors are still alive, revived and racing away the victors over the terminators. But in Sacramento, Arnold, still short on tax revenues, is begging Obama for a bail-out!