you are a soldier, now how about the soul?

Rating: 4/10 (21 May 2009)

Terminator Salvation is what people looking for some a few gritty and nifty action scenes will salivate for. This is because McG takes this as his specialty; he came up through music videos and commercials, so his eye is on the visual, specifically effects and trying to get his look for the film to be (perhaps quite contradictorily in this case) super slick and super grimy. The only problem is he leaves his actors fending for themselves. The plot is tended to up to a point, though it's one that will only make sense to those who are familiar with the Terminator franchise. This is at best what the Wolverine aspired to and falled flat on its face trying to be; it's a fan-boy movie made for the fan-boys of *2009*, as opposed to any year like, say, the 80s and early 90s, with tons of cash to spare.
This may mean you'll have a difficult time explaining what the story is to someone who has limited knowledge of the chronology. It's set in the future in time-line, so it's a sequel, but it's also a prequel, sort of, since the film is about John Connor, defacto leader of the resistance against Skynet and the machines programmed to kill (almost) on sight, *and* about his father, Kyle Reese, as a slightly younger man (here played by double-duty young-role filler Anton Yelchin after his Chekov appearance in Star Trek two weeks ago). It's about, in a nutshell, how Connor has to contend with his battle with Skynet's robot army on top of the emergence of a more curious cyborg would-be threat: Marcus (Worthington), a man who submitted himself to some sort of "test" while in death row in 2003, and in exchange turns up in 2018 not knowing where he is but *thinking* he's still human when he very much isn't. It's past vs. future vs. past vs. present in a smoothie blender that will keep you trying to puzzle out certain things... if you think about them.
McG's film starts a little sluggish, actually, and for at least the first half everything feels and looks a little too re-cooked in the genre blender. Not just with in-jokes, although there's plenty of them, such as, young Reese: "Come with me if you want to live"; Guns n Roses "You Could be Mine" popping up in a convenient moment; cameo from the original model 101 himself Schwarzenegger. There's also the little kid tagging along with Reese and Marcus as they venture along to seek out John Connor and quasi safe haven with the resistance (thankfully he doesn't talk, which may have been a worse move, but it's still a little irksome as the precocious tyke who seems to be a lucky charm when script needs), or the predictable lines and character moves when it comes to just simple dialog exchanges or methods of action. It's really only in the last third, when the stakes are raised and Marcus has to go back to Skynet to find out what the hell happened to him, with Connor tracking him and going it along to rescue the hundreds of prisoners Skynet's claimed for some reason or another, that it gets interesting.
If only, because, Worthington is such a pleasant find as a new leading male. As Marcus he compels more emotional response than any other actor in the film - Christian Bale included who, sadly, doesn't do a whole lot with what he's given as far as being a barely 2-dimensional "Lead-machine" - as the first character in the series to be a cyborg who we can sort of sympathize with, as a character given a second chance in a world that is about crushing them if at all possible (i.e. traveling back in time, Skynet's 100th attempt to stop the Connor family tree from spreading). I might almost want to rank the film on a higher plane if everything else around Worthington was just so... average. It's certainly a step up from the corniness of Rise of the Machines, aka TALK TO THE HAND. But McG doesn't really step up to the bat except for delivering a few cool robots and some ragged action bits.
To be sure, there's some fun to be has as a *summer blockbuster* with some cleverly shot chases and fights, and as a fan it's hard not to get wrapped up in a mano-a-machino match as the climax between Connor and his former nemesis in skeleton form. As a dark sci-fi spectacle of A- budget proportions on a B-movie story scale it's not bad at all. But as with Rise of the Machines the problem, at least for me, is the lack of shelf-life. If the films James Cameron directed pop up on TV at any time of day I can stop and watch at least a few if not fifteen or twenty or the whole rest of minutes of running time that's left. They have a sustainable appeal as pieces of pop-art, of a strong story coupled with the action. For McG, it's all about the look, not the substance. We can leave Skynet for that.