Lacks imagination and could have played to its strengths more

Rating: 6/10 (25 May 2009)

In Terminator Salvation, director McG creates a stark vision of a future in which a devastated world is filled with killer robots and humans who will do anything to survive. It's visually sublime, at times exciting, and introduces an interesting new character to the series. But while it's a decent part-reboot/part-continuation of the Terminator franchise, not to mention a marked improvement over Jonathan Mostow's forgettable Terminator 3, what keeps it from reaching the upper echelon of quality summer popcorn movies is a lack of fun and a story and characters that could have been beefed up a bit.
The first Terminator film was an old-fashioned low-budget monster movie that nonetheless contained some frighteningly visceral imagery. The second film remains to this day one of the greatest action flicks of all time; groundbreaking film-making on a number of levels. Despite the first two films in the series being worlds apart in some respects, the things they had in common, besides some entertaining action, were interesting characters as well as a sense of fun and innovation. Terminator Salvation, in contrast, is generally lacking in all three of these areas.
The movie opens in the year 2003 with a death-row inmate, Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) agreeing to release his body to the custody of Cyberdyne Industries for research after his execution. Despite a bit of awkward scripting in this scene, Worthington and Helena Bonham Carter (cameoing as a Cyberdyne researcher dying of cancer) make it work; a demonstration of how talented actors can at times overcome a weak script.
That said, Worthington's Wright is by far the most interesting character in the movie, and the movie fares its best when it makes him the focus, in part due to his character being the closest thing the movie offers to a new wrinkle in the franchise mythology. His interactions with a teenage Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), whom he meets while wandering the ruined streets of Los Angeles, periodically inject the movie with some desperately-needed humor. Worthington's low-key, understated performance is pitch-perfect; he is believable as a badass whose mere existence makes him vulnerable, and movie-goers will likely wish that the film would have firmly focused on Wright's struggle to both deal with the reality of the world he awakened to as well as solving the mystery of what exactly happened to him after his "execution." In contrast, the activities of the human resistance, led in part by an adult John Connor (Christian Bale), seem strangely tacked-on, fairly aimless up until the point in the film in which Connor and Wright finally cross paths. This is not the fault of the performers; all the actors do as good a job as can be expected for a movie such as this. Bale's Connor is thankfully (for the most part) not the clone of his Batman persona that the trailers at times had suggested it might be. As was the case in Star Trek, Yelchin succeeds in playing the plucky, resourceful teenager. Carter's cameo is fantastic despite it being a bit under-written, and her presence alone makes you wish the writers had done more with the role she was given. But the clear standout is Worthington, in part because his role is the one that is scripted the strongest.
McG's version of the future is fittingly bleak and colorless, and his periodic allusions and homages to the previous Terminator movies are a nice touch. Despite some impressive visuals, however, the viewer will easily detect a lack of imagination in McG's directing job. For example, much of the early action comes off as little more than a hybrid of Mad Max and Transformers (the "Transforminator" ridicule many of you have likely heard of by this point is well-deserved), while the climatic battle at the end of the film is almost a shot-for-shot remake of the one at the end of Terminator 2. It's not that the action is never exciting or fun to watch (which it is at times); it's simply not anything you haven't seen before. His pacing during the film's quieter moments is a bit hit-and-miss as well; it will become clear to the viewer that McG can direct action much better than he can drama after seeing how awkward some of the conversations between the characters are.
Enough was entertaining in this film to give me hope that the inevitable fifth Terminator film will be willing to return to the core ideals that made the series a marquee franchise; interesting characters, innovative action, and a sense of fun. For now, we're stuck with just another hunk of over-buttered, seen-it-before summer popcorn that takes itself way too seriously.