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Terminator Salvation – Movie Review

My father used to come home with copied Betamax tapes of movies before they hit the video stores and one day he brought home a movie I had never heard of – the bulky cassette simply said ËœThe Terminator’ on it.

I was eleven years old and my dad wouldn’t let me watch it. Which meant I HAD to watch it. It became my mission.

My parents went out one night and myself and two of my friends stuck the tape in the machine and we sat through 108 minutes of pure movie magic. The next day I asked for a grey trench coat just like Kyle Reese in the movie which I finally bought myself a number of years later (yes I still have it and sometimes I like to run through alleys in Sydney wearing it)*.

Reese exuded coolness, he was tight under pressure but never lost his desire to keep Sarah alive nor his love for the human race. He was, and still is one of the finest characters to appear on the big screen – his son should also have these qualities.

Alas, John Connor in Terminator Salvation has none of these qualities. He’s more robotic than the T-800 his mother killed in the first film and he seems to be channelling Batman which is understandable as Bale came from being Bruce Wayne to being John Connor but it feels at times that he no-one told him he had moved sets.

Sam Worthington is a lot less wooden and puts in a much better performance as Marcus Wright – a death row inmate who signs his afterlife away by offering his body and brain to Cyberdyne Systems. He wakes up after the nuclear war not knowing what the hell has happened to the world and is quickly set upon by a T-600 complete with minigun unleasing a rain of 5.56mm rounds to him.

Luckily the T-600’s are fitted with Stormtrooper targeting chips and the minigun which spews out 100 rounds per second dispenses with 500 bullets and misses him – luckily for Wright he is saved by a teenager named Kyle Reese and a young girl who doesn’t speak during the whole movie but is used as a plot device a number of times. There is no need for her to be in the movie at all and it feels like she was thrown in to make people get attached to her like they did with Newt in Aliens – but this fails miserably.

Anton Yelchin, who you may have recently seen as Chekov in Star Trek, pretty much nails Kyle Reese. Don’t get me wrong he’s no Michael Biehn but he does manage to give you an insight into the young Reese and what he goes through to survive and work his way into the resistance.

My main problem with the movie is the script and the direction. I feel that both of them are weak – sure there are some excellent set-pieces with giant robots and A-10 Thunderbolts but overall it’s hard to feel for the humans in their battle against Skynet because the heads of the resistance seem like a bunch of idiots (except Michael Ironside who is amazing in everything he stars in) and because McG seems to enjoy style over substance.

I realise that due to the previous movies they had to squeeze a number of key ingredients into the Salvation including John Connor giving Reese a picture of Sarah Connor, Connor becoming the head of the resistance and the unveiling of the T-800 range of Terminators -you know skin jobs.

Now being a massive fan of the previous movies and knowing what John Connor knows in those movies I was a little bit freaked out by the fact that the resistance didn’t seem to have any dogs anywhere – Connor doesn’t know when the T-800s are developed and surely he would have had dogs based all over the place knowing that they can sniff out the cyborgs. But I didn’t see one anywhere.

It wasn’t till I left the movie that I realised what was else was missing and that was Hunter-Killers firing plasma/laser weapons. All of it seemed to be based on technology currently available rather than phased plasma rifles with a 40 watt range.

I wanted to see the purple bolts of death lancing from the ships instead of I got the usual miniguns that seem to prevalent in all movies these days. I wanted a storyline that made me root every second for the survival of the human race but instead McG delivered a bunch of weak characters with some kick-ass action scenes all wrapped up in a bland storyline.

If you like any of the Terminator movies then drop along and see what you think but it’s not a patch on that grainy Betamax tape that I snuck a viewing off all those years ago.

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About The Author

Scott Rhodie

Veteran journalist, seasoned geek, sci-fi fan, gamer who spends way too much killing things and not enough time doing his work.

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Article Information

  • Posted: Saturday, May 30th, 2009
  • Author: Scott Rhodie
  • Filed Under: Film, Review
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Comments

One Response to “Terminator Salvation – Movie Review”
  1. Bruce Moyle Bruce Moyle says:

    I am keeping my expectations low, thou the trailers did get me excited. Finally will get to watch it this weekend and see if it is all style over substance.

    Thanks for the early review :-)

    June 1, 2009 at 12:24 pm

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