Full Marks to CGI (if that's your thing) but this is a bland, boring movie with little to offer

Rating: 4/10 (7 June 2009)

Terminator Salvation demonstrates all that is wrong with the modern Hollywood blockbuster. It's a Ford Escort of a movie cleverly disguised as an Aston Martin by a director that sounds like a cheeseburger. The Terminator universe was marvellously established by James Cameron. Terminators in those nostalgic days of film-making were the real deal and they scared you. If you saw a human being in the same frame as Schwarzenegger you knew that Arnie was going to kill them. Back in those days they were full-on killing machines. The same could be said for the less-sorry days of the Aliens franchise. The extraterrestrial stars of those movies were also effective killing machines. It's depressing how far the mighty have fallen. How the students of Fincher, Cameron and Scott have got it all so horribly wrong. Our bad guys are now more pantomimic. Nowadays you'd fancy the small kid's chances of escape. In Terminator Salvation the threat of death should be grandiose considering a landscape plagued with Hunter-Killers, Terminators and other sneaky robotic assassins but I'd gladly fight them in the trenches. Something I most certainly would not do is work anywhere near the bar that Arnie strolls into at the beginning of Terminator 2. Some movies work well when the ante is upped. Look at Aliens. This worked because the scale was well-contained. It was claustrophobic. It was strategic. It was tense and well-paced with a strong human element and a clever cut and thrust story. But more importantly the baddies always retained their sense of threat. The horror was not lost in all the combat and those spooky mothers were still well-hard. And then came Jean-Pierre Jeunet who thought his selfish brand of humour would in some way be endearing to Aliens fans. And then came the woeful Aliens vs. Predator films; an unimaginative holocaust for the franchise in a feeble attempt to cash in on younger generations. Aliens have lost their mojo. They're like any other bad guy. Soon they'll be appearing in the forthcoming A-Team movie if Hollywood gets its way. Terminator Salvation, as with Terminator 3 and the woeful Sarah Connor Chronicles, follows this predictable routine. It replicates other recent blockbusters like Transformers and War of the Worlds by churning out CGI at a canter and sacrificing the gods of characterisation and plot which are always deemed unnecessary these days. At least the Simpson/Bruckheimer High Concept movie usually had interesting human dynamics, ala Crimson Tide. This film is lacking that heart. It lacks the punchy script needed to elevate the boredom. Its CGI, no matter how hard it tries, cannot paint an interesting picture. It is a picture of a future offering nothing new: the usual mix of Blade Runner and Mad Max with a splash of AI. Salvation represents all that is wrong with the industry. It is watered down eye-candy; a car with no engine wrapped up in a lovely glossy veneer. A vehicle that can only be pushed downhill; it cannot go anywhere else. It is that predictable. Why do filmmakers insist on ignoring their fans? The mind boggles when you consider the money and talent pumped into mainstream film-making. How many writers worked on this script? Why are the ideas so mundane? This is a very boring movie. Bale's Connor is uninteresting. The fact he must send his father back in time, ultimately to his death, is conveyed through the usual grunts and snarls used for the battlefield. Sam Worthington's character is woefully handled. He's a terminator unit with a human heart and the memory of his previous life (having been executed years earlier and donated to Skynet). His motivation makes very little sense. His path is so badly handled it could've been conjured up on the back of a fag packet. Stripped of its special effects there is little joy here. This could be a porn film with sex substituted for random action sequences. It's a story about a war against machines. It's episodic. A series of skirmishes for an hour and a half. At no point do you feel the full force of Skynet closing in. There are no strategic developments on the battlefield. No sense of doom. No sense of war. Some of these flaws could be forgiven if the film wasn't so poorly thought through. If Skynet can lock onto your location by setting a car on fire, why, when Worthington escapes Bale's base and the resistance literally launches a nuclear strike against him, is the location of their headquarters not compromised? Why are terminators with rubber skin not shown as predecessors to the more realistic machines? Without consistency with Cameron's universe the film is less creditable. Why aren't dogs used to protect the camps, as they have done so in previous Terminator films? Whilst Terminator Salvation looks good in places, in particular the crash-landing of a helicopter, at other moments the future is simply represented by some deserted highways with overturned cars. The film at least is well-cast, with Anton Yelchin a believable junior Kyle Reese, whilst Worthington, at the very least, has the right presence. What really disappoints about this 12A film is that the machines are easy to beat. In one scene Christian Bale fights a Terminator unit with his bare hands; in fact he does this quite often. Similarly, once the heroes reach Skynet Central the lack of fight from the machines is pathetic. Only in this film can Kyle Reese, nominated as the number one target for Skynet, not be killed once he is positively identified. Indeed, having located Reese, the machines opt to lock him away somewhere so he can be found and rescued. In Cameron's universe, Reese would be dead one second after identification. Cameron's world was scary. This world betrays that realism. When the occasional nice idea flashes by you're screaming at the film, wishing it had been saved for a better movie. But don't worry folks, at least it's wrapped up in a very fetching wrapper called CGI.