It's dark and gloomy without Arnold

Rating: 6/10 (22 May 2009)

It's 25 years since the original 'Terminator,' starring Arnold Schwartzenegger and written and directed by James Cameron, but our memories aren't too dim to recall how much silly loud fun that movie was, in comparison. Arnold and James also teamed up for the slightly less successful but still breathtakingly exciting 'Terminator 2.' Cameron left Arnold to his own devices (or rather another director) for the still less successful, but nonetheless highly profitable and arguably quite entertaining 'Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,' which heralds the situation chronicled in this still louder and more high tech and more fatalistic 'Terminator' blockbuster, which has had just about all the fun squeezed out of it. What a pity Arnold was too busy struggling with California's hopeless state budget to lend his endearingly wooden charm and outsize body to this movie. The first thing that's wrong with this version is that the machines have no personalities, not even an Austrian weightlifter's.
We have to begin with a sci-fi plot device I can never quite understand: that the hero must enter the past to change things so the future--that is, the present--can turn out the way it is already. Or at least that's how it seems to me. I just find it hard enough living in the present. If anybody can go back and tinker with history, like Dick Cheney, at just about any time, what's the use? But this is the essence of the 'Terminator' franchise: delving back into the past to change things so your side, be it humanity or the evil cyber world, will have an edge.
Throughout the series, humankind has been enslaved by machines. (Now that part I get.) A man named John Connor leads a revolt of the human slaves. How do we know that, if it's changeable? There's always that struggle from one film to the next over going back in time to prevent Connor from being born, or kill him off as a kid, or make sure he is born. This could go on forever; but then franchises are designed that way.
What's equally mystifying in this cool-looking, stylistically distinctive, but relatively more pointless 'Terminator' film, the fourth in the franchise, is that this appears to be at least partly a prequel (maybe any time-travel story is?), but it's also thoroughly post-apocalyptic. The world, which just to keep things convenient let us call Los Angeles, is now a post-nuclear holocaust wasteland of broken metal and minefields. John Connor is Christian Bale. But--and this is another thing I can't quite follow--his dad, Kyle Reese, is among the prisoners, in the youthful form of Anton Yelchin, no longer spouting a Russian accent as in the new 'Star Trek'. And of course Anton has to be protected because the machines are out to kill him, because. . .well, if we know the series, we know why. Couldn't they just kill Christian Bale? Well, they'd like to, but they simply can't, because, well, he's Batman, you know, and he's a real s.o.b. as well.
The ghost in the machine, so to speak (the machine of this rather mechanical sequel) is Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a prisoner on death row in the film prelude who signs his body over to Helena Bonham Carter for "research." Somehow he pops up fifteen years later, very confused about what he is. A pity the muscular Worthington is rather bland, because he plays a pivotal role either as nemesis or salvation, it's not certain which.
A cyborg gives his heart that Christian Bale may live, which seems rather appropriate given the apparently dysfunctional Bale's rude manners both on screen and off. Bale is relentlessly one-note as the leader in battle against the man-killer machines, and the anticlimactic ending states that the war remains yet to be won. All that's been accomplished is a lot of explosions (set off nicely by the dark, monochromatic visuals) and a lot of ornately bent-up metal, somewhere in what is referred to as Los Angeles. Let's hear it for the explosions (as well as the fires, the detonators, the electro-shocks, the crashes, the monstrous death's-head creatures, and the computer-readout thingies, for this is their film, and they light it up both literally and figuratively against the prevailingly dark and ashen landscape). Nothing else much matters, other than a brief and shining moment when what looks like a naked Arnold does battle with Christian Bale. In the other 'Terminator' movies, especially the first two, there was a lot more human interest. Even the machines were (almost) human, and that made all the difference. All the noise and violence are very well done, but they're not as pretty as 'Star Trek's.' Space makes an even nicer background for a big explosion than a nuclear wasteland.