Film - Terminator: Salvation, McG

I really wanted to like this movie. Desperately, actually. I love dystopic visions of the future (even if that future is only nine years off). I love Christian Bale. I love action movies. I thought it was a guarantee.

Well, I liked it. But I only liked it. Here are the good things about the movie. SPOILERS follow.

The acting. Almost everyone was way above the usual action movie level of acting. Christian Bale was his usual awesomeness and Aussie recruit Sam Worthington more than holds his own. My husband said that there wasn't enough Christian Bale in the movie, but whenever Bale wasn't on the screen, Worthington was, so it was all fine by me. Anton Yelchin is great as Kyle Reese, though his other summer release (Star Trek) is a far superior movie, even if his part isn't quite as big. The rest of the cast is good, but forgettable.

The action. Tons of great action sequences. I actually jumped a couple of times, which I didn't expect to happen. They found lots of interesting ways to destroy seemingly indestructible machines. I was particularly fond of the chase with the motorcycle class of terminators.

Still on the good things. The mood and tone of the movie were exactly what I was looking for. Dark, desolate and barren. Director McG did a fantastic job of realizing what most viewers of the Terminator series imagined for the future of that world. The world that Kyle Reese was sent back from.

The Ah-nohld cameo. Speaks for itself.

Ok, the Bad things.

The women. One was pregnant, and might as well have been barefoot and in the kitchen. She was basically only there to be John Connor's pregnant wife. I don't even remember the character's name. I could look it up, but I'm making a point here. She was played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who did a fine job, but had very little to work with. Ho hum. Dustin pointed out that she was a doctor, but that was completely not central to her character. The other, Blair, played by Moon Bloodgood, was just pathetic. She is supposed to be all tough, she's a Resistance pilot, for crying out loud, but she has to be saved twice in her first few minutes on screen by Marcus (Sam Worthington). Then, when everyone realizes Marcus is (mostly) a machine, she sticks by him and believes he's on their side. Whether she's right or wrong isn't important to me (and she's kind of right and kind of wrong, as it turns out), but the fact that she buys his story just because he made her go all weak in the knees is ridiculous. Come on now.

Some story points. First of all, the resistance has found this signal that shuts down the machines. But they have to get close enough to a machine to broadcast the signal to shut it down. Lame. Totally lame. Luckily it turned out to be a Skynet ploy, but that just made me wonder why they weren't more suspicious of such an obvious easy way out of all of this. Second, Blair and John Connor both trust Marcus even after they know he's part machine. WHY?! I mean, in the end, his intentions were in the right place, but he was programmed and sent to them by Skynet, so they really shouldn't have trusted him. And these people have been fighting against the machines for a long time, you would think they'd be a little more wary about trusting one of them. Third, at the end of the movie, John Connor is mortally wounded and Marcus offers to provide his own human heart (which has been described multiple times throughout the movie as being very strong) as a transplant to save John. This struck me as a little hokey, just on the surface. Blair is basically fine with it (even though she risked her own life to break him out earlier in the movie and she clearly believes that he is a person, not a machine), which is bizarre. Then, as they are laying on medical cots, about to be operated on, Marcus and John look over at each other, and John gives a little nod. I laughed out loud. The guy is a living being who is choosing to die so that he can donate his heart to you, and you're going to give a little grateful nod to him? It was ludicrous. It completely cheapened the moment (even though I already thought the moment was ridiculous).

The story was too repetitive. It seemed like the same thing over and over again, instead of a narrative which was moving forward. Eventually, it moved forward, but it wasn't moving forward for large chunks of the movie.

Lack of mythology. Terminator has an incredibly rich mythology about destiny and fate and free will. It was all but lost in this movie.

Basically, all the bad stuff, I blame on the writers. So, John D. Brancato, and Michael Ferris, you get a big thumbs down from me, and everyone else gets a thumbs up.