An underrated action movie

Rating: 8/10 (3 December 2009)

When I came to IMDb to check Salvation's rating, having just watched it at a friend's house, I expected to see a rating in the upper 7's, perhaps even an 8. I thought it was so much better than Terminator 3 that the latter could simply be written off from the franchise altogether. But apparently, if you're to believe the critic on the movie's front page, it's the worst one yet. I couldn't disagree more. This movie is better than Terminator 3, and it's not even close.
As a big Terminator fan, I have always been interested in the events of Judgment Day and the experiences of Kyle Reese and the other survivors of the apocalypse. One reviewer commented that setting the movie in this dismal future is self-defeating because it's like reading the Bible. I completely disagree. This story doesn't end with Arnold Schwarzenegger being lowered into a pit of molten steel; it ends with the destruction of Skynet and freedom for humanity from machines. That's always what Terminator has been about.
One of the great things about this movie is the lack of constant, grating clichés that have destroyed Hollywood film-making over the last ten years. That's not to say everything in the movie is original, but at this point it's a breath of fresh air to watch something as imaginative as Salvation.
For one thing, the atmosphere in the movie is fantastic. Wilted skyscrapers dot the horizon of Los Angeles like dead trees; and the silence as one of the movie's main characters trots through a long-dead town is as frightening as it is misleading.
The terminators in the movie are as creepy as ever--skeleton warriors with terrifying strength and speed. Some seem to wander the ruins of the world hunting for man, their human-like costumes tattered and soiled by months spent in the wilderness. These aren't the shiny new robots of Transformers: they're gritty, mercilessly violent, and feel authentic.
My favorite aspect of the movie is how cleverly it ties into Terminators 1 & 2. It gets down to incredible detail: the resistance fighters, at the beginning of the movie, break into a Skynet laboratory where they discover information about a new terminator, the T-800. This is the model that Arnold played in the first two movies; the synthetic creatures the resistance encounters during Salvation are the older, but somehow more frightening T-600s that don't have flesh or hair. That they are older and less advanced helps to explain why they are more easily defeated and evaded--if only readers would pay attention. Even so, I thought the action was compelling.
The connections don't end there. Somehow, Skynet has learned that Kyle Reese is the father of John Connor, and it is trying to kill him long before he is sent back in time. This struck me as a great hook for Salvation's story.
The resistance movement itself uses older weapons from the 90s to combat Skynet: retired A-10 anti-tank aircraft strike at the supercomputer's killing machines, and human fighters dress themselves in mostly civilian garb, wielding cheap and durable household weapons and AKs, as you would expect any post-apocalyptic army to do. The implication here seems to be that Skynet destroyed most of our military technology with the initial nuclear strike, and it is left to the technology of past generations to supplement the resistance.
I enjoyed the story, for the most part. There were some aspects that could use a lot of improvement--I didn't think John Connor was properly set up as the prophet that he is. I didn't get the feeling that resistance fighters were more loyal to him than their commanders at all, and that's an essential element of the story. Overall, though, I thought it was entertaining and fit very cleanly into the Terminator storyline. Rather than creating entirely new ground, Salvation looks to Terminator 2 and ties together the loose strings. It does a great job.
That said, the movie is not perfect and has its fair share of clichés. But unlike most other movies of this decade, it uses those clichés well, and they are masked by what this movie does best: atmosphere and action. But after watching the abomination that was Terminator 3, and virtually every other science fiction movie to be released in the last ten years, Salvation is a breath of fresh air. It's about time someone made a movie with a little imagination.