Terminator Salvation

Terminator Salvation, the fourth entry in the series, represents the worst type of sequel: the unnecessary cash-in, not only bad on its own terms, but bad enough to tarnish the preceding films. As you’ll see throughout the body of this review, I hold Terminator 2 in very high esteem, and consider it a touchstone for action movies, and probably the best sci-fi actioner out there. What makes Terminator Salvation such an out and out disappointment, and has inspired that most fanboyish of reactions from me (“They’ve defiled the franchise!”), is the fact that it’s not a Terminator movie. If you change the name, tweak the robot designs, and get rid of that theme music, it’s unrecognizable, just sub-standard summer pablum without the fun, spirit, or sensibility of the previous movies. (Warning: this review is massive.)

The reason for this unfamiliarity is simple: they changed the formula. Terminator, though it’s a sci-fi action movie, actually belongs to the slasher genre, with the bad-guy Terminator being the Michael/Jason Voorhes/Ghostface analogue. Notice how the T-1000 stalks Sarah Connor at walking speed, just like any number of slasher villains. The inexorability, cool logic, and indestructibility of the machine makes the cat-and-mouse game unbearably tense and suspenseful. But James Cameron took that slasher template, and tweaked it. He replaced the vapid coed fodder and expendable morons with Sarah Connor, a tough and resourceful female lead. But even with Sarah, the oppressive feeling of “No where to run, no where to hide,” made Terminator so strong. Cameron refined his formula further with T2, by introducing Arnold as the Robot in the White Hat. This is a brilliant move in two respects: one, it rebalanced the dynamic, turning it less into a desperate game of hunter v. quarry, and more into a heavyweight slugfest. Two, it allowed the audience to root for Arnold, a very savvy move. Terminator 3 essentially maintained this formula, and it got stale. Its idea of an update was aging John Connor and making the Terminator a girl. Great stuff, guys.

Terminator Salvation throws out the original formula completely. What we have now is a war movie, plain and simple, which means we’re not really dealing with a Terminator film, per se. What’s worse, this isn’t just a bad Terminator movie, it’s a bad war movie. Pick any war movie you like — Saving Private Ryan, The Dirty Dozen, Full Metal Jacket — and you’ll see that TS is either missing their key ingredients, or botching them horribly. The ensemble is populated with a bunch of non-presences, including the unbelievably stiff Common, an exotic Moon Bloodgood with nothing to do (most of her scenes ended up on the cutting room floor, I suspect), and a tremendously disappointing Christian Bale. Their relationships go unexplored, which precludes any of that squad camaraderie that SPR handled so effectively. Other war movies focus on war’s paradox: how it is our most unnatural and yet natural action. Most good war movies have those moments (thinking here of the knife fight in SPR) that make you question the whole enterprise. None of that here — they’re genocidal machines, of course they have to be destroyed. So why do this? How did we get here?

Unfortunately, there’s nowhere else to go. The first three movies had time travellers warping in from the future — we couldn’t stay in the present any longer. The story, if it were to continue, had to move past Judgment Day. Of course, it didn’t need to continue, but here we are, so let’s talk about why it’s such an error.

Judgment Day is necessary to the Terminator lore, but only as a catastrophe to be forestalled or averted. Not only do the characters not want to see Doomsday, because that would entail their extinction, we don’t want to see Doomsday: because it’s not interesting. Look at the Matrix, a film that used pop-philosphy to mask the fact that it was cashing in on the same dynamic T2 set up: implacable machine-men from another world invade our familiar moment. Those who can recognize them, fight them. In the first Matrix, the real world — blasted, blue, patrolled by squidbots and devoid of human life, save a few crews — wasn’t terribly interesting. Everybody had shaved heads, wore beige and dirty smocks, and clomped around the ship, with its predictable grungy sci-fi aesthetic. The squid attack on the ship was cool, sure, but everybody was much more invested in the high-glamor gun ballet that took place within the Matrix. Mad Max did the post-apocalyptic wasteland right, filling it with the the leathered-up weirdos that the Wachowski brothers would appropriate for their later films. Those weirdos provided much needed interest in an otherwise brown and flat landscape. Here, in Terminator Salvation, the survivors feel phony, pale echoes of the insane denizens of Thunderdome. The apocalypse, rather than a new setting to explore the story, is just a convenient excuse to film in the deserts of New Mexico, which has to be cheaper than LA.

As I said, Salvation was shot in New Mexico. Breaking Bad, AMC’s classic in the making, is shot in the same place. The difference is, Breaking Bad is gorgeous, while Salvation is relentlessly and smugly ugly. If you’ve seen Salvation, or even the trailer, you know what I’m talking about: a lot of gray. All of this gray was added in post-production, too, which you can see from these set photos. Here’s a screen cap from Breaking Bad (credit to Alan Sepinwall) to show you  how Albuquerque can be shot:

The light in the scrublands is amazing, and Vince Gilligan and his team play with that. McG and co. ignore it completely.  Of course, you can say, “It’s the fucking apocalypse man, it’s not supposed to be pretty,” and I’ll accept that, but I see it as just one more symptom of the paucity of spirit which hamstrings the whole movie. There’s no love here (unless you count the laughable fireside scene between Worthington and Bloodgood, when she snuggles up to him like a tabby and says, “I just need some body heat”), no humor (just a handful of weak laughs), no beauty (excepting eye candy Bloodgood and Bryce Dallas Howard).

Terminator 2 had all these things in spades. Cameron lenses the desert much like the crew of Breaking Bad does, with an attention to light. And the movie is filled with love, from Sarah’s grizzly bear protectiveness to the T-800’s surrogate fatherhood. I cannot think of another action movie which so completely earns the gut-wrenching pathos of Arnie’s descent into the molten steel, and then has the good wit to undercut it with the last thumb up. Hell, just talking about the scene made me look it up, so here you go:

That thumb up is such an amazing, sad, and funny grace note. There’s plenty of humor like that, from the unintentional in Furlong’s fractured voice, to the purposeful in Arnie’s one-liners, like when he kneecaps the guard and deadpans, “He’ll live.”

Some of these one-liners are reprised in Salvation. McG’s moments of fan service, where classic lines are repeated in wholly new contexts, (this seems a popular and easy way to wink at the audience, viz. Spock’s sarcastic Live Long and Prosper in Star Trek) fall flat. The reason these lines are classic is because the filmmakers of T1 and T2 worked hard to make them that way. Take “Come with me if you want to live.” This scene is the payoff for a moment that’s been building through two movies: when Sarah Connor must finally confront the machine which has terrorized her, and accept its help. Cameron films the sequence beautifully, drenching the sanatorium in a twilight blue, and the performers rise to the occasion. Even the choreography works at a high-level, as I’m sure you remember that bone-crushing tackle Sarah suffers. Sl0w-mo is used to great effect. But it’s not all that which makes the moment so great. It’s the fact that Sarah, a character under such pressure due to her sadistic guards and skeptical shrink, a woman who’s been told she’s insane time and again, disbelieved by her own son, is finally brought face to face with the Terminator, her worst nightmare — but here, her only hope. The foundation has been laid so well for this scene, that even Arnie’s inability to act can’t mar the moment.

And there’s so many great moments in Terminator 2: Arnie blasting padlocks from the back of a Harley, Arnie rerouting his power and getting up off the mat, Arnie spitting depleted uranium slugs at an entire police precinct, but being sure not to kill them, a ripped Linda Hamilton sprinting barefoot across the linoleum, etc.  McG, in place of these kinds of moments, opts for explosions. And Jesus, are there a lot of them. I think there’s at least 2 nukes detonated in the movie, alongside a sundry of fireballs and blasts. We’re sticking to the Michael Bay ratio of explosions per minute, here, and they don’t even get those right. There’s something beautiful about roiling flame — Terminator 2’s opening credits betray a fascination with the effect:

But Salvation’s blasts are just as washed-out and disappointing as the rest of it, one more let-down in a film with a pretty lame collection of effects work. One of T2’s strong points is just how cutting-edge it was. Back in ‘91 (18 years ago!) the T1000 was a revelation,  a piece of CGI mastery of a kind that wouldn’t be matched until Peter Jackson’s Gollum, years later. This was jaw dropping effects work; not flashy or gratuitous, but a utilization of technology to get a shot that you just can’t get any other way. Notice that Cameron, always at the forefront of special effects, washed his hands of the Terminator franchise after the second. Right now he’s wrapping up post-production work on Avatar, which apparently will mark the advent of 3d at the movies. (By the way, Sam Worthington got his role in T4 because McG saw him on the set of Avatar.)

And let’s talk about Sam Worthington, the film’s lone bright spot. He plays Marcus Wright, a man who, while on death row, donates his remains to Cyberdyne — with predictable results. A relative newcomer, Worthington is an Aussie who shares that kind of bluff charisma seen in compatriots Jackman/Bana/young Gibson. His character is the only one in the film who has any kind of arc, since the writers foolishly decide to save time by relying on our familiarity with John Connor. Worthington does good work, and whenever the film has a moment of humor, empathy, or excitement, he’s involved. For example, once the resistance discovers Marcus is a machine, they restrain him, and dangle him over a pit. While he hangs there, some of the bitter Resistance fighters take out their grief by firing pistols at his exposed endoskeleton. As the slugs ding off his metal ribs, Worthington looses a howl (actually his 2nd or 3rd of the movie), not because of pain, but rather angst, and he does a great job of displaying  this agony in his eyes. Then you’ve got the movie’s most involving action sequence, when Worthington goes Pacquiao on a couple drifters. A simple beatdown scene, but Worthington sells it with a spring-loaded physicality, and honestly, I was just relieved I wasn’t watching another explosion. Good as Worthington is — and I’m anticipating him in Cameron’s forthcoming Avatar – he’s still not the terminator Arnold was. He’s too slight, lacking Schwarzenegger’s bulk, and too well-spoken, frankly. His Australian accent creeps in at times, but it certainly can’t compete with Schwarzenegger’s Austrian. In Salvation’s timeline, the T-800s are just rolling off the assembly line, all of them blessed with Arnie’s particular accent. So how is it we have another model, Marcus’s, which is so much more convincingly human? Of course these considerations are futile, since the whole movie is riddled with these kind of headscratchers. Point is, Worthington’s performance is good, but not a classic.

Which brings me back to Terminator 2. T2 is without a doubt Arnold Schwarzenegger’s finest movie. I know that might not seem like much, considering we’re talking about an actor willing to get pregnant (Junior),  police children (Kindergarten Cop) and appear onscreen with Sinbad (Jingle All the Way), but Arnie is also one of the most singular talents in film history. A man of his charisma, modest abilities, and sheer physical immensity positioned him as maybe the greatest action hero of all time. From 1982 to 2000, Arnold was simply the man. He started with Conan the Barbarian, an atrocious movie that nevertheless achieved cult status through Arnold’s muscles alone. Then you have Terminator, where Cameron cannily leveraged his liabilities as an actor by making him a machine. Later, with Commando, he perfected the brainless 80s shoot-’em-up, a kind of evolutionary dead end in the genre. Just a few years later, Predator, which introduced a great new villain to the screen, and also gave Arnie an opportunity to polish his one-liner skills. These skills would be on display a few years later in Total Recall. Then came T2. All this in a 7 year span, which is pretty amazing. Terminator 2 marked the pinnacle of his career and began his decline. Actors like Schwarzenegger always have a shelf life, as their entire appeal rests on their bodies.

(This is why the Rock’s insistence on becoming a family star is so galling, since he has all the tools to be Schwarzenegger’s successor, and even had the torch passed to him in the Rundown, but wastes his time making millions of dollars on movies like Race to Witch Mountain and Tooth Fairy. I’ll save you the trouble, and paste Tooth Fairy’s synopsis here: “A bad deed on the part of a tough minor-league hockey player (Johnson) results in an unusual sentence: He must serve one week as a real-life tooth fairy.” Ugh.)

The 35 year old hulk of Conan the Barbarian turned into the bloated – but still shockingly big — 53 year old of End of Days. In the intervening 18 years, Schwarzenegger managed to show up in almost all the touchstone sci-fi actioners of the day. For such a limited performer, he managed to dominate his chosen niche.

Christian Bale seems another actor determined to carve out a niche for himself. An intense (you’ve heard the tape, I’m sure) and gifted actor, Bale has the kind of talent that opens up roles Arnie could never dream of. As a result, he’s had a varied career. Starring in Empire of the Sun at just 13, Bale went on to immortalize himself in the hearts of musical fans everywhere with Newsies. Hard to imagine at that time what kind of actor he would become; after a pretty-boy phase highlighted by American Pyscho, Bale decided to reinvent himself as the hard-ass hero to men 18-25 all over the world… a much different demographic than his Newsies fanbase. This shift began with Reign of Fire, a disappointing movie that fumbles a great set up (DRAGONS, man, DRAGONS). After Reign of Fire came Equilibrium, a Matrix knock-off wherein Bale portrays a government agent in a world where everyone is on mood-depressants. Note that he still outacts Keanu Reeves as Neo.  Bale interrupted this new action-hero phase with The Machinist, where he took the DeNiro-in-Raging-Bull challenge the opposite direction, and ended up looking like this:

Right after that brief detour, Bale beefed up to tackle franchise reboot Batman Begins, sort of the T2 of superhero movies. Ever since then, he’s been riding this action star trajectory, doing good work with guns in Harsh Times, 3:10 to Yuma, and now Terminator Salvation. His performance as Batman/Bruce Wayne was good stuff, as his insane and bestial growl reminded viewers that, for the criminals, Batman was actually a scary fucking guy. But even within that movie, and throughout his resume, Bale is simply a more compelling actor when he ditches the tough guy growl. His Bruce Wayne scenes were just as good as the ass-kicking of the Batman scenes. And his simmering intensity works to great effect in The New World and The Prestige.

In Salvation, Bale’s a snarling cipher. From his first line, he’s rasping. You might make the claim this is what a beleagured, post-apocalyptic resistance leader might sound like. I would claim that this is a tone deaf Bale ditching his range for a one-note growl-fest which badly distracts the viewer. It’s most apparent when you contrast his performance with Worthington’s, which gives the film some much-needed liveliness. Acting opposite Bale must, at this point, be like sharing a scene with latter-day Pacino. No matter what you do, you’re going to get that growl. There’s one moment when John Connor and Marcus are forced into an uneasy alliance, and Connor must act against all his instincts and misgivings to make this deal with his devil. As Worthington backs away, Bale screams (and you probably heard this moment in the trailer) “WHAT ARE YOU?!” Worthington, to his credit, tries to sell his own doubt when he replies, “I don’t know.” But the scene’s wrecked by Bale’s overbearing performance — why would Connor scream this?  Watching Bale act, you want to take him aside like a kindergarten teacher and remind him to use his inside voice.

Before we wrap this thing up, a quick plaudit for Danny Elfman, who does terrific work on the score, which isn’t half as dumb or loud as the movie around it.

The whole production smacks of mercenary commercialism. No, I’m not saying the Terminator franchise is high art. They’ve always been out make money, but they go about it the right way. Terminator 2 is a popular movie because it’s exciting and well-crafted and good, Spielberg type stuff. Terminator Salvation tries to take a shortcut to a monster box-office take, by slapping the PG-13 on it (seriously? PG-13?), bringing on the blue-chipper Christian Bale, and hiring a slick director like McG. But there’s no artistry here, no sense of engagement with the viewer. When the film does attempt some kind of connection, it goes for a lot of dumb talk about how strong a heart Marcus has. Terminator Salvation has none.