Terminator Salvation
- Director's Cut
(2009)
(SPOILERS) I wasn’t one of those (most people, it seems) who
threw my hands up in horror at Terminator
Salvation. Rise of the Machines
had left me decidedly unimpressed, so perhaps I was just grateful for small mercies and in a forgiving mood. I’d never been as down on McG as everyone else
(sure, he falls victim attention deficit direction and maybe lacks the gravitas
for serious sci-fi, but at least he can assemble a movie with reasonable
aptitude), and the picture impressed for the effort that had gone into creating
a tangible future world. On that limited basis, Salvation still impresses. I’d take it over Rise of the Machines, but only incrementally. However, revisiting
this one also lays bares its pervasive deficiencies in wholly unforgiving
fashion.
So I’ll get out of the way what I like about the picture
first. The production design is pretty good. The T-600 has a fascinatingly
primitive quality, and in some ways is actually more brutally impressive than
the T-800 (there’s a definite zombie vibe to McG’s treatment of the
terminators). I rather like the variety of terminating machines, from the
moto-terminator cycles, to the Matrix-y
water tentacles, to the towering transforminator. The doubt over John Connor
(is he the key to mankind’s salvation, or a false prophet)? is also the kind of
touch suggesting John D Brancato and Michael Ferris (returning from Rise of the Machines) have bothered to
thrash out some motivated “what ifs” with regard to the various constraining
and tentacular timelines.
The sound design is also fantastic. McG appears to have paid
attention to old school Lucas-era sound effects. So the robots, vehicles and
weapons are all distinctive and arresting.
And Christian Bale looks
like the kind of guy you’d expect John Connor to look like (more than Moses, at
any rate). That’s not saying he was right for the part (he is in perma-hoarse,
Batman mode, and his onset rant is his most impressive performance relating to
the picture), but he’s more believable than Nick Stahl (whose performance in T3 is probably better, but who just
isn’t Connor). Anton Yelchin, who reincarnated two SF characters in the same
year (Chekov being the other) is physically unimposing but does a grand job
getting the general demeanour of Michael Biehn correct. And better Kyle Reese
is physically unimposing than built like a brick shithouse (I’m looking at you,
Jai Courtney).
Also, I appreciate the desire to at least attempt to grapple
with the changing histories of the movies. T2’s
biggest problem is it wusses out and opts for just another chase movie (one
that both underlines the causal loop of the first movie while attempting to
disavow it). The problem is, Salvation
doomed to failure. By this point, such an unholy mess has been created, with
little clear and agreed set of time travel rules to guide the makers, that
confusion reigns.
Yes, as an idea it makes sense for Skynet to kill Kyle Reese
for the same reason it makes sense to kill Sarah Connor. But if Skynet knows
this information, surely it is also aware of the predestination paradox whereby
it comes into being (presumably the inevitability of Rise of the Machines means that whatever Cyberdyne came up with for T2 did
get channelled somehow, even if it was delayed; whether or not they’d have come
up with the goods in a similar timeframe if there had been no future tech is
unclear)? And how exactly do they get this information? From blabbing prisoners
(everyone seems aware of JC as saviour, so maybe Kyle Reese is known about
too)? From police records? Probably the latter makes most sense.
The problem is, the more this kind of time travel plot is
probed, the more unmentionables and problems arise with its very fabric.
Wouldn’t it behove Skynet to establish multiple contingencies? Such as sending
multiple Terminators with time travel technology (and other technology) back to
2003 when Skynet is first starting out, giving them incrementally improved tech
so John doesn’t stand a chance long before it gets round to 2029? What we
appear to have in Salvation is the
T-800 produced and raring to go (the CGI Arnie seemed a lot better six years
ago) nearly a decade before its time, suggesting Skynet’s tech has accelerated
through whatever means; it’s only JC blowing the place up that sets it back
again (presumably).
Which leads to Sam Worthington’s Marcus Wright. Worthington
failed as the next Aussie big thing more spectacularly than Kevin Bana, as he hasn’t
really convinced anyone he’s got much in the way of chops. He was fine in
Cameron’s Avatar, but woefully
miscast as an icon of Greek mythology (in a manner Bana contrastingly was not).
As the anti-hero/picture’s “Terminator” there’s an attempt to give Marcus a bit
of an edge (on death row, callous lines like “Now I know what death tastes like”, displaying a bit of Mad Max
self-first bravado). This soon disperses when he gets sight of a cute moppet he
can act as surrogate dad to (she even holds his metal hand right at the end!) Worthington,
like Bale, appears unable to find a nuanced line for the character, possibly
because they’re so thin on paper there’s nothing to inflate life into.
The problem is as much that the character of Marcus makes
very little sense conceptually. Somehow
this advanced cyborg has been fashioned well in advance of all comparable
termi-tech. Somehow he has incredible healing abilities (the scenes of Marcus
strung up with a hollowed out chest are frankly ludicrous; even Arnie in T2 notes that Terminator’s register what
we’d call pain; Marcus doesn’t even flinch) and Skynet can touch him up in
minutes. I suppose Skynet might have kept Marcus on ice for a decade before
infusing him with metal, but that’s not the way it looks (the Wiki pages
suggest enhancements were added when Skynet discovered him, but one would think
his main design was in place).
Even excusing the unlikeness, Skynet’s hatched plan for
Marcus is baffling. Why even make him a decade ago if he isn’t going to be used
(apart from setting up a mystery in the pre-credits sequence, obviously)? Assuming his subprogram as an infiltration prototype, what did they expect to
happen? That Marcus would be revived and stumble into Kyle Reese immediately?
Which is what he does. He “did what we
failed to do for so many years – you killed John Connor”. If he hadn’t
bumped into Moon Bloodgood hanging from a tree, Marcus would have followed Kyle
to Skynet rather than going after John. The whole thing is ungainly at best and
absurdly ineffective at worst. So Skynet is very lucky their shitty scheme
comes up trumps as much as it does. It also seems pretty dumb to have someone
who can be subconsciously manipulated to a tee but put no effort into placing a
control override deep within his brain, one he can’t rip out when he feels
like.
Skynet’s deception of the resistance is actually a decent-enough
twist, though. We believe gruff militarist Michael Ironside could be
sufficiently blinkered that he wouldn’t think things through. Less believable
is JC’s slipshod approach to planning a covert attack; just announce the time
and place on radio frequencies Skynet can readily pick up. Having the
resistance command a sub at sea isn’t a bad concept either (John jumping into
the sea to dock with it like an extreme sports enthusiast is pushing things,
though).
Marcus’ presence as the real protagonist can’t be disguised
by bulking up John’s role, and his demise is particularly egregious in this
regard. It just doesn’t bear any interrogation that Marcus’ heart would be
successfully transplanted into John’s body at an improvised field hospital (I
hope they’ve got a whole lot of anti-rejection drugs about the place!) The scars
of the original ending where John’s face is put on Marcus body are writ large
here (Marcus then guns down Kyle, Kate, and presumably even the moppet), since
what we get is just plain silly. I don’t think the bleak ending would have
really impacted how the movie is perceived in a positive way, though; it’s
flaws are in its DNA, not just how daft the denouement is.
Bale was all for that ending, and its notable that Connor’s
role was beefed up when he came on board. It would have made more sense to keep
John on the side-lines. He doesn’t endear as the leader (although he’s pretty
much right in his dogmatic vilification of Marcus as it turns out), and he’s
given little in terms of backbone other than pouring over his old Sarah tapes
and photo. His actions seem frequently barmy (going mano a mano with a T-800)
and Bale blunders through sporting his bat-growl to less than commanding
effect.
Speaking of fights, as has been pointed out, the T-800 seems
more concerned with throwing John about the place than actually killing him.
Which has the inglorious precedent of “bad” Arnie at the end of T3, I guess, but its not one you want to
recapture if you can help it.
This is one of just a number of head scratchers in the
picture. Like how a dirty great transforminator creeps up behind a tiny
building unseen to unleash havoc and mayhem on it. Or how you’ve got a
post-nuclear wasteland, with bombs still being dropped by the looks of things,
and Moon Bloodgood opts to stop of for a tits-errific shower under the
radioactive rain. Erotically charged, that cancer and radiation sickness. I can
only assume McG got so sweaty about this that he couldn’t be bothered to segue
properly into the next scene (rather inappropriately, the attempted rape of
Blair); Marcus has obligingly vanished so a gang of rapists can show up.
Bloodgood is fine, although she is used almost entirely to
eye candy effect. Bryce Dallace Howerd
barely registers. Common, well, at least he doesn’t have a sizeable role.
Helena Bonham Carter as Skynet was probably a bad idea. Personifying the
machine, or giving it some kind of presence, was inevitable as there are
otherwise too many unanswered questions about its motivations. Unfortunately the
explanations don’t help any (apparently at one point the idea was that Dr Kogan
had survived to 2018). Disappointingly, a 75 year old Dr Silverman is nowhere
to be seen.
McG’s approach to direction works best in disposable fare
where it doesn’t really matter that he has no insight into why he’s shooting
the way he is for a particular scene. His bubble-gum pop sensibility is perfect
for Charlie’s Angels, or the
self-consciously daft actioneering of 3
Days to Kill. Here, while DP Shane Hurlburt lends the movie a rusting,
grubby uniformity and editor Conrad Buff IV ensures the set pieces are never
less than competent, what’s missing is a mind that encourages the story to lead
with a director to support that rather than impose himself on it.
McG’s the kind of guy to suddenly thrown in a chest cam of
Christian Bale halfway through a shot because he thinks it’s cool rather than
because it serves the scene. The one-shot sequence early on where John gets in
a chopper that proceeds to crash was impressive when I first saw it on the big
screen. Now, not so much, Maybe he’s not wrong to make random choices to an
extent, since the script is so problematic, but while Salvation shows him as infinitely more earnest director than (say)
Brett Ratner, it doesn’t actually leave him with any evidence of a deep and
probing mind, one that can handle the demands of character and coherent
storytelling.
So yeah. I was much too kind to Terminator Salvation first time out. The first half of the picture,
up to around the point where Marcus and Connor first meet, is reasonably
effective, and the milieu of the future is quite engrossing. It works in reverse
to Rise of the Machines in that
respect, where the best scene was the last. McG’s movie at least tries to go a
different route, divesting itself of the time travel device. Unfortunately it
has very little with which to fill the void. The future drama isn’t compelling
when it is focussed upon, any more than Battle
of the Planet of the Apes made for an arresting conclusion to that saga. I
have no idea what they’d have scraped together for a sequel had his been an
enormous hit, but I can’t conceive that it would have been any good. Like Jurassic Park, Terminator is a repeatedly plundered franchise no one seems willing
to admit is fundamentally resistant to compelling continuation.
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