Where do you start when it comes to reviewing a film like Terminator Salvation? Well, let’s begin at the beginning. I love the Terminator films. The first two are absolutely fantastic films, probably both in my top 10 films of all time. Well, top 15 for sure. I even like T3, although it’s clearly rubbish – and it IS rubbish. I’m sick of these people saying “oh, you know it’s not actually all that bad”. You know who you are, and don’t worry about it, but you do it and the reason you do it is that you saw it at the cinema, you thought it was gash, which it is, but you wanted to love it and then a couple of years later you saw it on TV and thought “you know, this isn’t half bad, or certainly not as bad as I remember it being” because you want to love it, you do – you want to love it because the first two were brilliant and you can’t bear to be let down by another trilogy because the third part is lazy.
But, try as you might, Terminator 3 is rubbish. The two lead actors do a reasonable job, but Clare Danes, likeable though she is, seems as confused as the audience are as to just what she is doing in a Terminator film – Arnold looks like his mind was elsewhere (which it almost certainly was) and Kristanna Loken is relatively pleasant to look at but let’s be honest, is almost completely without charm or charisma.
This is the problem when you don’t have the same team working on the third film. Losing James Cameron was a big blow, evidently. And it’s not the first franchise that this problem has affected – the Batman series was the same, and in fact that franchise also reached its nadir with a film featuring a performance from Arnie that ranked, shall we say, outside his best? This is certainly a problem that doesn’t go away in Terminator Salvation.
So, Terminator Salvation – let’s do Heat magazine’s water-tight film-reviewing technique – and I mean that without as much sarcasm as you think. What’s right with it, and what’s wrong with it? So, what’s right with it? Well, it’s important to say this – a lot. There is a lot to like about this film. In fact, I can’t remember the last film I saw that had so many small things to like, and yet somehow was still garbage.
And this is really the problem with the film I think, and I’m abandoning Heat magazine’s technique already because it’s really much easier to talk about what’s wrong with the film, and just interject with the occasional plus point.
You all know the story of the Terminator films by now, and so you also know that the first two films created a perfect story arc that did not need messing with in any way, and so you also know that Hollywood cannot resist a chance to make some money, and furthermore you know, given the recent trends in cinema, that nobody is capable of original thought anymore and so every single new film is either a) a bad adaptation of a novel, b) a bad remake of a beloved movie/TV show from between approximately 1974 and 1994, or c) a “reboot” of a franchise. This is obviously option c, but to a further extent it is also option b, in that it is a re-make of several beloved films, including but not limited to Mad Max, The Dark Knight, the first Terminator film, Blade Runner and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. “Charlie’s Angels?” you say? Yes – I say.
The director of this film, is called McG. I don’t mind people having quirky nicknames, but they have to sound good. It’s the same reason I don’t like Lady GaGa – well, it’s not – I don’t like Lady GaGa because she strikes me as a vacuous moron, but the nickname thing still applies. Now then, McG gets a lot of stick from a lot of people for having directed the two Charlie’s Angels movies. Now as it happens, I think the first Charlie’s Angels is a really good film. It’s not an Oscar-winner by any means but it is unapologetically fun, it doesn’t take itself seriously for a second, and it’s crammed full of decent set pieces and just general enjoyment. The second one, yes – it’s terrible. Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. Absolutely awful. And why is it awful? Because it forgets to spend any time on the characters because it got that out of the way in an earlier film, it fills the screen-time with pointless explosions and action with absolutely no direction or point.
And this has to lay at the feet of McG, because he took a perfectly good franchise, and indeed a perfectly good opening gambit film, saw there was a huge budget and just said “Oooooh, budget!!!” and proceeded to spend it on absolutely nothing. And this, my friends, is why Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, is the same film as Terminator Salvation.
Yes, they are superficially different films, in the same way that you don’t immediately notice any similarities between say The Lion King and Hamlet. But at the end of the day, they’re both the story of a young prince whose father was murdered by his evil uncle who steals his kingdom. Terminator Salvation is set in a bleaker world, with considerably less emphasis on fun, and Cameron Diaz doesn’t dance in her pants at all, (not that I expected she would, but it was such a highlight of the first Charlie’s Angels film I thought they might put it in there, but life is full of little disappointments I suppose.) but the two films are basically the same, and the reason is that McG has looked at his budget, and decided to spend it all on blowing things up so much that he accidentally forgot to put a plot or any character development into the film. An easy mistake to make I suppose, but a pretty crucial one nonetheless. And, as a direct result, the first two-thirds of the film are unimaginably boring. I mean, not just for Terminator films, but for any film. The final act is pretty good, I think, but by that time I was so bored it took me too long to get myself involved in the action. For example, there is a point where John Connor kisses his pregnant wife before he heads off into battle. All I could think about was how stupid Christian Bale’s nose looked when it was squashed into Bryce Dallas Howard’s face.
So what else is there? I’ve heard Christian Bale get slagged off from pillar to post for his performance in this film, and I don’t think it’s all that terrible – by any means. First and foremost, I think he is a terrific actor and he doesn’t reach his potential here. That’s partly his fault, but it’s partly the fault of the people making, writing, and basically creating the film. He doesn’t help himself though by continuing to talk like Batman. Now, the Batman voice worked in Batman Begins, I think. The film is practically flawless and that voice doesn’t spoil it. That’s largely because Batman has next to nothing to say. In the Dark Knight, people commented on the Batman voice because a) it’s even more ridiculous, and b) it’s used for more lengthy dialogue. And it continues here. Bale’s opening lines sound like a man who is just learning to speak for the first time. Of course John Connor is not someone who’s relaxed, by any means, and he does and should take things very seriously – but there are times when it is just ridiculous.
Ok, enough about how much I didn’t like it. What’s good about it? Firstly, Bale has several good moments – and I quite liked him as John Connor. Two other characters have a lot of promise. Sam Worthington is particularly good as Marcus Wright. A character who would have stolen the show in the hands of a better director is still the most impressive character in the film, and Worthington is really good – putting in an almost Bale-esque performance in terms of the nuance he gives the character. But I still don’t think I was as impressed with him as I was with Anton Yelchin as a young Kyle Reese. He’s done his homework, and his performance absolutely nails the character as a young man to a T. And in fact, when those two characters are sharing the screen, the film does step up a notch, seeming to get some kind of injection from their charismatic portrayals of their characters.
The film makes quite a lot of reference back to the other films, which is something some people hate, but I love. I love films that do this, I don’t know what it is but so long as it is done well, I can hardly get enough of these little in-jokes – to the point that I’m almost sorry I’m not a trekkie because I missed all the references to the other films, of which I’m told there are many. This film does it well, for the most part. There is a point at which it goes horribly wrong, but 9 out of 10 references are well-placed and appropriately delivered. There is also an “Arnie” moment, and I won’t spoil what that is in case you haven’t seen it, but suffice to say, it will probably polarise opinion, but I really, really liked it.
It feels strange to say that a film lacks the kind of charisma that Arnold brings to the screen. After all, he has consistently been slagged off by “proper” film critics for his lack of personality, and it’s hard to deny that he was probably born to play a robot. Well, not a robot, sorry – a “cybernetic organism” – but I think a lot of critics are missing a trick with his acting ability. Yes, he probably wouldn’t be able to carry off the subtle anguish of Michael Corleone, but he is a massively charismatic actor. Think about it – he must be. He’s not good looking – chiselled maybe, but he’s no George Clooney, and you can’t really understand him half the time, but for a long time he was the world’s most bankable movie star and that doesn’t happen by accident. His performance as the Terminator is more subtle than people give him credit for – in the first film he is completely believable as a ruthless killing machine, and his presence electrifies the screen. In the second film, he has to play a protector, and the journey that the character undergoes is played brilliantly – as he slowly learns human characteristics, the confusion and dichotomy between machine and man is brilliant. In the scene in which Linda Hamilton threatens to destroy his CPU chip, the audience is genuinely conflicted as to who to root for, and a lot of the heart of the movie lies in Arnie’s brilliant performance. And this film misses him, gigantically. It doesn’t have a character that you completely buy into and it doesn’t have an actor capable of such a performance either, and that’s a great shame, because who knows? Maybe they could have rescued the film after all. Some other good things? Well, the supporting cast is fine, if unremarkable; in the final half hour the film remembers that it’s supposed to be a high-octane action movie and it suddenly acts the part well – the emotional climax to the film is believable and pleasant enough, and the earlier films evidently matter to the film-makers, because they go to great lengths to respectfully reference the previous films and not to tread on their toes.
Oh, the last thing that’s wrong with it by the way is the dialogue. It’s terrible. In the first film, Arnold only speaks 17 sentences. This is perhaps a trend that should have been continued here, because with the exception once again of Kyle Reese and Marcus Wright, who deliver their lines with enough passion and conviction to gloss over any troublesome moments, the dialogue is absolutely appallingly written and appallingly delivered. The nadir of this is undoubtedly a scene between Moon Bloodgood (seriously, that is her name) and Sam Worthington, but it isn’t fair to just pick this one scene as unusually bad. I mean, it is unusually bad by most films’ standards, but not this one. Christian Bale is given precious little to work with, and the stuff he is given, he tends to waste. Bryce Dallas Howard does even less in this film than Clare Danes did in T3, which is saying something, and the other characters do a lot of pained expressions and guttural choking but not an awful lot of communicating. If these people were the last outpost of human resistance against an advancing army of super-computer controlled killing machines, I wouldn’t put my money on the humans managing to outwit them since they can’t formulate sentences properly, and surely communication is a key aspect of an underground resistance against the aforementioned machine army, n’est pas?
Finally, there is the time-travel conundrum. As I said earlier, the first two films created a perfect story arc. And this is why I think that T3 and this film should never have been made. The single biggest problem with the entire franchise is that it is based on a completely impossible time-travel scenario. The entire “send back your own father before he becomes your father thus negating your entire existence” thing is just a horribly giant plot-hole, of epic proportions. To talk in Jim Cameron terms, you could sink the Titanic through it. And even if it wasn’t, T2 establishes that Skynet is created because of Miles Dyson’s work on the original computer chip from the first Terminator, except there can’t have been a Terminator for him to discover if it requires his input to invent it, etc etc, blah blah. But the thing is that the first two films are so brilliant, that you don’t care. You’re prepared to overlook it because the films are set in the present day, and you just kind of go with it. The films are incredibly good, and so you’re prepared to buy into the fact that under no circumstances does it even hold together as a premise. However, now that this film is set in that future, this future that people have been talking about, it brings front and centre a problem that did not need attention drawing to it. I found myself practically unable to stop thinking about it as I watched John Connor come face to face with Reese for the first time. The other thing I have an issue with is this idea of “no fate except what we make” blah blah. Ok, it’s fine – and in the first two films it works its way through and it does really well, and in fact sets up the second and third acts of T2 – and compliments the ending particularly well. Then the third film comes along and just blows that out of the water. Yes, there’s no fate – except the apocalypse and the war, that is fate, but other than that, there’s no fate. Except for the bits that are. Ok, that doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. Why do that? Why take two of the greatest films of all time, which are held together with a story and moral that I think are not only hugely interesting, but vitally important too, and just make them somewhat disappointing?
I think there is plenty more that you can get out of the Terminator story, and this film almost threatens to do it at several stages, but at the end of the two hours, you are left with an overall feeling that they have failed, and failed miserably. I suppose it should count for something that they tried, but with films like this, films that were so important to people – films that actually changed cinema and certainly the way that people thought about all kinds of issues – you cannot afford to get it this wrong.
Check out these excellent articles at Cracked.com for more Terminator time-travelling insanity.
http://www.cracked.com/funny-254-the-terminator/
http://www.cracked.com/article_17390_5-reasons-terminator-franchise-makes-no-goddamn-sense.html
And here's Christian Bale being a good colleague and generally spearing right through its heart the concept that actors are overpaid jumped-up primadonnas. Of course you've all heard it by now, but just in case you haven't, this is Bale reacting in a measured and mature manner to a lighting engineer who got into his eyeline during a scene with Bryce Dallas Howard. Since all the scenes between these two in the movie have all the tension and emotion of an omnibus of Family Affairs, I don't know why he was so bothered to be honest.
PS, some* of the language is quite unpleasant and so if you are in one of my classes, then don't listen to it, because you're young, and young people don't know swear words. Certainly I would be setting a bad example as a teacher to allow such easy access to words that are a bit rude, so I'm going to trust you not to listen in case you hear a rudie.
*actually, replace "some" with "all".
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