T4 lacks heart… and it’s not the robots’ fault

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/05/2009 (6313 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It seems Transformers director Michael Bay was reportedly miffed by the trailer for Terminator Salvation.

The presence of giant robots was, in Bay’s eyes, derivative of his robot movie franchise.

It’s rather depressing that Bay would even bother to compare his insipid cinematic offerings to a Terminator movie. The Terminator films represent the gold standard of killer robot movies.

Transformers, by contrast, was spawned by a toy company as a means of selling plastic crap.

An equivalent quibble might be the makers of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe raising originality issues with Homer’s The Odyssey.

But in the case of this fourth film in the series, Bay has some basis for comparison. With its relentless onslaught of clanging cacophony and skull-smashing visual effects, Terminator Salvation is every bit as headache-inducing as Transformers.

At least T4 aspires to live up to the excellence of the first Terminator movies even while it goes in a different direction.

Almost entirely set in the year 2018, Salvation posits a post-apocalyptic population that lives to evade the machine domination of the supercomputer Skynet.

The human resistance fights the good fight against the mechanized fascist force. They’re led by the prophesied saviour John Connor (Christian Bale is the third and, pardon the pun, most baleful actor to play the role, preceded by Edward Furlong in T2 and Nick Stahl in T3). Connor pursues a plan to destroy Skynet’s robotic troops through a hidden glitch in the Skynet system.

At the same time, a mysterious stranger named Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), supposedly executed in 2003, wakes up in 2018 with the recollection of donating his body to a scientist (Helena Bonham Carter). He finds himself in the ruins of Los Angeles where the population has been reduced to a resourceful teen named Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) and a mute child called Star (Jadagrace).

That arrangement is interrupted by a giant robot who gathers humans the way Farmer Brown gathers eggs. Marcus finds a more photogenic team-up with tough-but-beautiful resistance fighter Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood), attempting to make her way back to Connor’s unit. Once they get there, Wright gets a disturbing answer to the question of his unlikely survival…

Director McG, hitherto known as the man who gave us the giddy-silly pop action movie Charlie’s Angels, does his best to give gravitas to this movie, eschewing the dark humour of previous Terminator movies for bleak blasted landscapes and bravura single-take action sequences.

But McG went too far to establish his serious-movie credentials, jettisoning elements of fantasy and fun.

It especially hurts that the cool new iterations of the Terminator robots are mostly far more interesting than the humans.

Bale attempts to build a character out of glowers and growls. Bloodgood projects all the gritty humanity of a sexy video-game character. Worthington is supposed to have the star-making role here, but even he lacks a hook into his human heart.

It’s appropriate that the character of Kyle Reese is the man destined to go back in time to father John Connor, given that Anton Yelchin is the only actor in the cast with some real life in him.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Other Voices

Selected excerpts from reviews of Terminator Salvation.

The only reasons to see this structurally messy, poorly directed flick are the spectacular effects, which overwhelm the plot, and the charismatic performance of soon-to-be Hollywood star Aussie Sam Worthington, who steals every scene he is in.

— Emanuel Levy, emanuellevy.com

A fast-moving, rock ’em-sock ’em movie that continues the man-vs.-machines series begun 25 years ago.

— Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News

The machines rise to the occasion. Too bad the dramatic element’s just as robotic.

— Michael Rechtshaffen, Hollywood Reporter

This is everything a good summer movie should be and, while it does not dishonour the Cameron chapters of the saga, neither does it prove to be an indispensable adjunct to them.

— James Berardinelli, ReelViews

It’s far from awful, but Salvation is close to joyless.

— Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel

With McG’s migraine-inducing jerky-cam and monochromatic palette… Terminator Salvation puts the numb in numskull.

— David Edelstein, New York magazine

Darker, grimmer and more stylistically single-minded than its two relatively giddy predecessors, Terminator Salvation boasts the kind of singular vision that distinguished the James Cameron original.

— John Anderson, Variety

There’s no invention in it, no sense of discovery. Only the impressively orchestrated action sequences feel fresh.

— Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald

— Compiled by Canwest News Service

Terminator Salvation

Starring Christian Bale and Sam Worthington

Grant Park, Kildonan Place, Polo Park, Swt. Vital, Towne.

14A

2 1/2 out of 5 stars

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