Director: McG
Cast: Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Moon Bloodgood
Country: USA
"So that's what death tastes like." – Marcus Wright
It was hard to imagine a more meaningless addition to a cinematic franchise after Underworld: Rise Of The Lycans. Kudos then to McG and the ‘creative’ team behind Terminator Salvation for such a valiant effort: not only have they managed to neuter a once genuinely terrifying vision of the apocalypse, but they have done so in a way that inspires little more than apathy for all involved. In fact, if this John Connor is the man they’ve been crooning about for 25 years then frankly we’ve been conned because apparently he couldn’t inspire so much as a story in a room full of writers.
Traditionally this is the point at the reviewer gets into some synopsis of the film, which is all well and good, but there are some many holes perforating John Brancato and Michael Ferris’ (the geniuses behind Catwoman and The Net) script it would take a thesis to explain it all. Not that they haven’t tried, starting off the film with exposition in title cards, forging on with voice-over narration and rubber stamped with dialogue straight out of daytime soap territory.
For your benefit: a man on death row, Marcus Wright (Aussie Worthington), signs his body over to Cyberdyne to for scientific research in the year 2003. Fast-forward to 2018, a computer defence network Skynet (develop by Cyberdyne) has become self aware and nuked humankind almost to extinction. The resistance leader is a man named John Connor (Bale, scowling/growling/dreadful) and he is trying to find another man called Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) who he will eventually send back in time to protect/shag his mother so that he can be his dad. All the while there are machines that take the form of planes, motorbikes, water snakes and terminators (pretty much anything you can welt a machine gun to) working hard to eliminate humans. Oh yeah, turns out Wright is a machine who thinks he’s a man and may be the resistance’s only hope, or something metaphorical, sorta.
The resulting film takes itself so seriously it is left utterly lifeless and is so devoid of likeable characters that any supposed tension is striped from the relentless action sequences. Not only that but everything is derivative of/ripped off Every Other Post Apocalypse War Movie Ever right down a pointless mute child called Star; it may as well be one of those genre parodies, which works because they aren’t funny either.
Asking lofty questions like “doesn’t everyone deserve a second shot” while single-handedly sending girl power back to the 50s (tough as nails female fighter falls instantly in love with Wright, Connor’s wife is a pregnant doctor) Terminator Salvation fails to accomplish anything other than blowing shit up bigger than ever before and more frequently. If this is the best of humanity has to offer then perhaps it isn’t worth saving after all.
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Terminator Salvation is released nationally in Australia 4 June, but only go if you can't get tickets for the Sydney Film Festival, actually I wouldn't bother going at all...
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Film review: Terminator Salvation
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Human Cyborg Relations and Terminator Salvation
"You think you're human?" – John Connor
One of my earliest profound experiences in cinema was seeing James Cameron's original Terminator movie. It was probably the darkest, bleakest film experiences I'd had up until that point and it featured Bill Paxon dressed up like a punk rocker and getting stabbed by a naked Arnold Schwarzenegger in the first five-minutes. Crazy. Between the first film and Terminator 2 I salivated at the prospect of seeing the future post-apocalyptic world envisioned by Cameron as a place where humans are hunted down by robots only to fight back under the leadership of John Connor and realised in its own standalone film. Now that time is nearly upon us and the last person I would have expected to be delivering on it was McG.
Here it is, the second trailer for Terminator Salvation which is currently hosted on Yahoo! Movies. It certainly gives a better idea of what we might be able to expect and what kind of weight the screenwriters (Jonathan Nolan, Anthony E. Zuiker, Shawn Ryan, Paul Haggis) who have worked on the project have been able to insert into this massive studio project. It's Warner Bros and that gives me hope, but it also big budget and the pressure is on to prevent an R-rating. Four screenwriter credits isn't the most appealing advertisement, but considering the hoops this story has been through with the studio it's unsurprising. I'm feeling pretty good about this film right now, especially the concept of Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) the discontinued terminator who believes he is human. Plot synopsis after the jump, trailer looking suitably mechanised and grundgy is embedded below:
Set in post-apocalyptic 2018, John Connor (Christian Bale), the man fated to be the leader of the human resistance against Skynet and its army of Terminators, and the future he was raised to believe in is altered in part by the appearance of Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a stranger whose last memory is of being on death row. Connor must decide whether Marcus has been sent from the future or rescued from the past. As Skynet prepares its final onslaught, Connor and Marcus both embark on an odyssey that takes them into the heart of Skynet's operations, where they find out a terrible secret that may lead to the possible annihilation of mankind.
