Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Going into TERMINATOR: SALVATION Monday night I was optimistic. I didn’t like a lot of the things I was hearing as they were filming… The idea of a giant Transformers-like terminator made me laugh. In fact, we got a report in from someone working on the film describing this “building tall” walking robot that snatches people up and I thought it was fan-made bullshit.
But I liked the casting, I liked the look of the film as we started seeing pictures and then, eventually, clips at Comic-Con and BNAT. By itself, the Harvester sequence with the aforementioned “building tall” robot is actually quite good and add on to that the iconography of the Hunter/Killer ships I was starting to get jazzed.
And listen. I hate Terminator 3. Hate it. It seemed to take the things James Cameron (smartly) cut out of Terminator 2 and expand upon them. I’m talking about the goofy shit, teaching Arnie to smile, etc. Talk to the hand, the ridiculous-ass glasses… sight gags. They went too far, had a lame villain, but decent action and an ending that promised the movie everybody has been waiting to see since 1984.
McG, I knew, could handle action. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the action scenes in the CHARLIE’S ANGELS movies are easy to follow and well executed. He doesn’t tend to over-cut his action or get in so close you can’t tell what’s going on.
So, my exact words to Harry pre-screening was that I’m sure I’d like this movie more than I did TERMINATOR 3. And I did. Kind of.
The flick didn’t offend me, but it’s the kind of movie that lets the air out of the room in the first 2 minutes. Remember that feeling of the energy just dropping at the midnight screening of THE PHANTOM MENACE? The room is packed, the movie starts, trailers run, the 20th Century Fox logo and fanfare, opening scroll… and then the movie starts and something happens. It just feels off.
The opening credits of TERMINATOR: SALVATION felt that way to me. It was like a high school band trying to cover Led Zeppelin. You could see what they were trying to do, but the tempo was wrong and it felt like an imitation of the good shit you remember.
A lot of the blame for that rests on Danny Elfman’s shoulders. I don’t know what has happened to him in the last few years, but this is possibly his worst score. If he didn’t want to use Brad Fiedel’s Terminator themes and cues, that’s fine. But if you only source those familiar beats twice in a movie (one is the opening credits and the second time is at the end when the big cameo happens) you have to fill the rest of the movie with more than just noise, which is all Elfman does here.
But it’s not just Elfman setting the wrong tone at the beginning. They try to do a similar title scene to the first movie, following super-close up edges to the words that ultimately form the title. It just feels off.
But that’s the opening titles. Who cares about that? What matters is the film. Our first footage is in a death row cell in 2003 as Sam Worthington’s Marcus Wright is being propositioned by Cancera Bonham Carter (you know she has Cancer because she’s wearing a floppy cancer hat that doesn’t quite conceal her bald head). She wants his body. For science.
He’s a bad man and he lets her (and us) know that, signs the piece of paper with the Cyberdyne letterhead and then dies by lethal injection.
Now we’re in the future as there’s a raid on a SkyNet target, a series of above ground satellite dishes in the desert.
That first scene with Worthington and Carter has zero spark or charisma, but what’s even worse is the raid on the enemy target is just as lifeless. There’s a lack of drama to almost everything in this movie. It’s a film of moments that just happen without any lead-up or real conclusion. Shit just seems to happen, there are no peaks and valleys, no beats to the action or plot that feel thought out.
Connor’s introduction is that way. We see a bunch of choppers land in the desert and then one shot follows his chopper in as it carefully settles on a half-broken terminator. A pair of boots hit the ground and two bullets go into the terminator’s head, pan up and it’s Christian Bale as John Connor. You’ve seen the shot in the trailer and it works in the trailer because we’re not sitting there in the middle of the other action and just lazily watching a helicopter float to its mark.
In short, it’s intended as a moment, but it feels forced and a couple takes away from being what I’m sure they were wanting it to be.
When talking with friends after the screening I kept saying that Terminator: Salvation almost isn’t a movie. It feels like someone completed a real, well-shot movie and then they put the whole thing into a schizophrenic editing computer that haphazardly lifted moments or full scenes, leaving us with a movie that gets the point across, but is constantly jarring.
I can’t say anybody in the movie was horrible. Worthington is the main character (wrong choice) and he’s got enough natural charisma to breeze through the movie. He’s also the only character that apparently has any real arc. Both Kyle Reese and John Connor are in the exact same place at the end of the movie that they are at the beginning, as personalities.
So, mistake number one from the screenwriters. Why is Marcus the main character? They clearly couldn’t decide if they were going to follow Connor or Marcus and as a result Marcus gets a few cursory character building scenes and Connor stands around squinting like he’s trying to see the 3-D image pop out of the Magic Eye poster on the wall and just can’t get it to work.
The talk about Connor being this messiah, leader of the human uprising is all well and good, but if they wanted to go that angle then we honestly shouldn’t have seen him. He should have been the voice on the radio that inspires others. If they did it that way, then Kyle Reese could have been the main character.
Which would have been great because out of everybody in the movie Anton Yelchin knocks it out of the park. I never in a million years would have thought that his performance would be my favorite in this film, but the kid takes enough of Michael Biehn’s mannerisms (a lot of talking through his teeth) to make Kyle feel like the one we know without mimicking Biehn’s performance.
But instead Kyle is a plot device instead of a character and we have our lead split between two people, just enough so neither actually gets to be a character.
The rest of the cast, outside of Moon Bloodgood’s Blair, are just there to give us enough dialogue to get us to the next plot point. The biggest waste is Michael Ironside as the militaristic leader of the resistance and boy does he hate that John Connor! He grumbles about him a couple of times in the submarine that houses the resistance’s top minds so you know he seriously doesn't like that dude.
The effects are fine. You can tell money was spent and some fine artists stepped up and delivered. It’s easy to turn the mind off and enjoy the Harvester sequence, but that feels like an island in the movie, one of the only times when it feels like they cared about pacing and how things might cut together.
The much talked about Arnold cameo is pretty neat, but feels tacked on. There was a kid at our screening that shouted out, “Oh, it’s the guy from the other movies…” when CG Arnold steps into frame. Completely innocently, mind you. He wasn’t making a joke. And when he did that I felt like he vocalized exactly what McG and the studio execs had going through their minds when they came up with this. They heard that reaction going on in every audience member’s inner monologue and started salivating.
As a moment, yeah, it makes complete sense that Arnold’s there and I have no problem at all with the cameo. I just wish they had more time to develop it and actually made it part of the finale instead of “Oh, my God! It’s Schwarzenegger! Look, another shot of him, that looks… oh, his face is blown off now…” I realize they didn’t have the time to do that (and probably not the money that would cost to pull off), but that doesn’t change the fact that it feels tacked on as it stands.
Ultimately this film feels like it was two or three drafts away from being ready to shoot. Everything is so surface and on the nose and the narrative doesn’t seem to have a real driving force. It’s like they set up a ton of options, but couldn’t decide what to do. They could follow Kyle Reese through the wastelands with this lost man, Marcus, who is trying to find redemption, building on that dynamic (which admittedly has one or two decent scenes, like the much ballyhooed shotgun strap scene) or follow John Connor as he struggles against those in charge of the rebellion, growing from foot soldier to leader through his knowledge of the war and ability to inspire those around him. If they had decided to go one way or the other this would have been a much stronger movie. But they don't, they wanted to go for both options. It doesn't work. Trying to cram all that into one movie only makes the whole thing a mess.
Terminator Salvation is not trainwreck bad, but it’s lifeless and mediocre, which is almost worse.
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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