|
 The movie pretends that it's about discovering that which separates humans from machines--an idea of "functional equivalence," if you will, that Duncan Jones does a much better job with in his zero-budget Moon than McG does with in his small-country-GDP-budget Terminator: Salvation. But what it's really about is blowing shit up real good for two hours. A tanker blows, a gas station blows, a field of satellite towers blows, a hole blows, and, accordingly, the movie blows. The real secret for success that the human freedom fighters of 2018, led by saviour guy John Connor (Christian Bale), should search for is the one that allows the evil Skynet robots to distinguish manmade fires in the desert that it should examine from those it should leave alone. What they discover instead is a "kill code" they can play on their futuristic boom boxes that "turns off" the machines hunting the people remaining after a nuclear holocaust has left the planet completely habitable for the hundreds of huddled masses tuning their transistor radios to fireside chats with Connor. (But not the types of fires the robots are interested in--see, the robots are only drawn to fires that humans set as ambush traps (and Guns N' Roses (you wouldn't understand)).) While those familiar with series lore will wonder about a lot of things that don't jibe with their understanding of the mythology, for the uninitiated there are a few scenes of a pensive Connor listening to cassettes that his mother, Sarah, recorded before her death somewhere between the events of the second and third films. It's the third-worst kind of expository device and Terminator: Salvation uses the first two as well (the opening informational text and voiceover), because Terminator: Salvation doesn't know what it's doing, predictably makes no sense doing it, and ends with one of the most idiotic declarations in the history of such things as Connor gruffs that what separates us from machines is...wait for it..."the human heart!" The whole enterprise reeks of a certain desperation to explain its own inconsistencies after the fact.
What might be the problem is that this sad, wasted thing not only wants to kick ass, but also wants to be an anti-death penalty picture, sort of, about redemption, I guess (look at the title!), with executed killer from 2003 Marcus (Sam Worthington) finding out he's a Voltron version of himself in 2018 and deciding to be a good guy by saving John and his daddy Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin). First, though, he makes a dumb girl (Moon Bloodgood, sort of the female Keanu Reeves) fall in love with him and forces her to say things like, "You're a good guy, you just don't know it yet!" and, "I look at him and I see a human!" It has B-movie legend and professional saddlebag Michael Ironside growling like a ripcord in a couple of non-sequitur sequences in a submarine, and it has Mrs. Connor (Bryce Dallas Howard, who's no Claire Danes) be both a doctor and visibly pregnant, thereby fulfilling her unspoken macho-movie mandate to be life-giver in its multifoliate incarnations. Should've had her in pearls with a watering can and serving meatloaf, too. The problem is that there's not a lot of stickiness to the question of whether or not something is human or machine, not because they're equally capable of emotion but because they're equally capable of not emoting. There's nothing at stake in this picture, because when Connor howls that killing Reese as collateral in a raid on the Skynet facility will rob them of their HUMANITY, you can't figure out if he means that it will wipe out saviour Connor in some weird time-loop thing or that it's amoral to cause collateral damage in war. It's either deeply selfish or deeply naïve and neither is worth getting excited about. Terminator: Salvation essentially wants to be an anti-war film--and pro-life, and anti-medical research, meaning that the assclowns writers of this thing (their previous credits include Catwoman and The Net) are children who don't know their asshole from their elbow; to bail them out, McG segues into a giant mecha wandering around the California desert, picking up people just stumbling around, or else he breaks out those cool motorcycle GoBots from the superior-in-every-way trailer. You'd think that in a future controlled by machines and computers that mankind would--like Al-Qaeda, for instance--go off the grid. You'd also think that machines capable of locating a campfire or a radio playing bad '80s metal in a haystack would also be able to locate a ginormous firefight in a minefield surrounding the human's top-secret stronghold.
Whatever. The action isn't very exciting because you don't care about any of the characters and because you don't understand any of the stakes. John Connor has to save his future-dad Reese in order to send Reese back in time to father him so that he can...what? Contrary to how much he's been deified (three films plus a TV series have campaigned the legend of John Connor), Connor doesn't seem all that special, nor do the machines seem all that menacing. And if the movie has anything to say about anything, it appears to be that we should give toasters rights because even though they'll wipe out most of humanity, it's only through them that we have any chance of survival. It's a fascinating devil's bargain if handled with pathos and irony, as it was in the first two films. Because Marcus in his "past" life was a cop-killer, it's possible to view Terminator: Salvation as one of those throwbacks to fifties centrist films where cops are bad and experts are good, but then what to make of all the grunt-love in the rest of it? The only conclusion to draw is that there are no conclusions to draw: despite the apocalyptic doom and intelligence that worked so well for its predecessors--even the much-reviled Terminator 3--the picture is apparently content to pretty much be about running/driving around, shooting guns at things that aren't harmed by guns, suffering unimaginable losses that are imaginable and not tragic, and passing time until the perfunctory final battle in a foundry, following which there will be cheap philosophizing and the promise of another sequel. Did I mention the mute little black girl who isn't one of Will Smith's kids but may as well be?-Walter Chaw
© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.
|
MOVIE MALL
TERMINATOR: SALVATION
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack CD
Buy at Amazon USA
Buy at Amazon Canada
Published: May 21, 2009
|
dvd reviews: a to k | l to z | special categories