It's been the better part of two decades since the last good Terminator film, and unfortunately it appears the team behind Terminator Salvation took the disastrous third installment to the series as their benchmark. Alas, while succeeding in making a better film than Rise of the Machines, for seasoned fans it's just not enough.
The best part about the film is that it ignores the conundrums of Rise of the Machines entirely (despite coming from the same team of writers): Judgment Day happened, but there's no need to dwell on it. Unfortunately, following this the film rests on various sci-fi formulas, attempting to mix a fresh cocktail out of old ingredients. The audience is treated to everything from the "disrupting the signal" plotline from Independence Day to a half-hearted run-in with Blade Runner concerning a "human" terminator, and even a taste of "you know what you must do" from the laughable Matrix sequels.
Dismissing all of this in the spirit of holding summer blockbusters to a lower standard (which I've never actually supported), Salvation still fails. The film's first action sequence has all the quality of a video game as far as graphics go, with actors running around a stage spruced up with computer graphics that, I'm sorry to say, just don't convince. Computer-instilled (and actual prop-based) set-dressing does improve as the film goes on, but many of the outdoor sequences contain a haze meant to be fog or smoke, which looks like poor work with the airbrush tool in Photoshop. It's this quality of work that I hope a forthcoming post-apocalyptic film, The Road, avoids.
The problems only continue with McG (the ill-advised working name for Joseph McGinty Nichol) in the director's chair. Boldly announcing his director credit a good few minutes after the rest of the credits have ended, we're treated to sequences we'd expect from a former music video director (for artists including Korn and Cypress Hill) whose major film credits lie with two Charlie's Angels films. That is, helicopter crashes shot from the cockpit viewpoint while the helicopter spins through smoke (it's not really intense when you can't see anything), sticking to claustrophobic close-ups in wide open spaces (the "Private Ryan" effect that J.J. Abrams, among others, have thankfully moved away from), and generally allowing all the silliness that Rise of the Machines used to destroy the series. Of course, "I'll be back" is uttered, along with some other one-liners from the first films ("Come with me if you want to live"), but by this point everyone within earshot in the audience let out sighs. This servesd as a mere reminder that we'd rather have been home watching one of the first two.
Indeed, perhaps the worst part of Salvation is that the future just doesn't seem so bad. Not compared to the tidbits we're given in the first two films, anyway:
Things are so good that mankind apparently now has the option to fight in the war against the machines. While bases are underground, characters can spend days walking around above ground with little to fear. There's even some places so far out from the machines' home base that they've never ventured out "that far." Judgment Day was a nuclear holocaust, and the blue skies that smile on our characters every day should have Greenpeace up in arms. It's no fun to show persons living in the squallor portrayed in the first Terminators, but it would make our heroes that much more heroic if that's what they were fighting against.
Speaking of heroes, Christian Bale is Batman... wait, excuse me, John Connor. After American Psycho we know that Mr. Bale is capable of another kind of American accent, so why did he have to stick with the exact Batman voice? Finally, the cameo by Helena Bonham Carter is unfortunate. If I Am Legend tought the industry anything (aside from making millions in profits from a mediocre film), it's to not cast an actor an in a cameo whose abilities far exceed everyone else in the film (paging un uncredited Emma Thompson...).
Last summer Iron Man had an unfortunate side effect: it was fun summer fare that worked, and it was released in May. Nothing that follow lived up to it (I was not as big a fan of Dark Knight as most), and I fear Star Trek may have set the same high bar for this summer.
_01.jpg)
