Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
5/25/09
The
franchise that began with James Cameron's 1984 sci-fi classic The Terminator
has survived the collapse of two studios and two uber-production companies,
producing 3 feature films and one 31-episode TV series. With acknowledgment
to the works of Harlen Ellison, all were built around the same basic plot:
good and bad warriors from the future, many of them cyborgs called Terminators,
battled over the lives of Sarah Connor and her son John, who would grow
up to be the leader of the resistance after a collection of intelligent
machines called Skynet conquered the human race that created them.
Now, for something completely different: Terminator Salvation
fast-forwards to the year 2018, when the battle between man and machine
is in full force. Director McG presides over a fast-paced, tightly
edited action extravaganza that pays clever homage to the films that preceded
it while telling a nifty future tale of its' own. Most importantly,
it doesn't disappoint those of us who've been waiting to see a Terminator
movie that dispenses with the preliminaries and gets down to the main event.
2003:
Death row inmate Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) meets with terminally
ill Dr. Serena Kogan (Helena Bonham Carter), who persuades him to donate
his body to science. Her experiments, she hints, will do no less
than raise the dead, and she offers him “a second chance”. Fifteen
years after his execution, he awakens in a Skynet facility just destroyed
by John Connor (Christian Bale) and his soldiers. Marcus knows nothing
of The War With the Machines, but as he makes his way across the countryside,
he meets one murderous automaton after another. He also runs into
young Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), who teaches him about the resistance
of whom Connor is the public face thanks to nightly radio broadcasts that
rally the hopeless survivors. Meanwhile, Connor's superiors (Michael
Ironside, Ivan G'Vera) inform him of a remarkable new discovery:
a signal underlying all communication amongst the Skynet machines which
they've reverse engineered into a signal that could simply turn off humanity's
enemies. Marcus witnesses Kyle's abduction by Skynet forces and sets
out to rescue him, meeting up with Connor ally Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood)
who vows to bring him back to headquarters to talk about a jailbreak.
Little does she know just how important saving Kyle's life is to Connor
(fans of the franchise know only too well. For the rest of you, its
a long story), but in Marcus's very existence lies a secret that could
destroy the entire resistance.
I know,
I know, that secret's been blabbed in a ubiquitous trailer and Warner Bros.'
ad campaign for months, but you won't hear it here because it takes over
half the movie's running time to be revealed and I wished while watching
that I could rewind my brain to a time when it didn't know. But even
with that spoiler (something's not right about Marcus, after all; what
with the rising from the dead and all), his is an intriguing sci-fi tale
brought to life by a strong performance by the relatively unknown Worthington
(who made an impression on me in the “Samuel L. Jackson Deep Blue Sea
role” in 2007's giant croc flick Rogue). What he does so well
is play things close to his vest while letting you know that he's clearly
thinking something about his circumstances, it's just hard to say what.
He seems virtuous, is always looking to do the right thing, but wasn't
this guy on death row when we met him?
At
the early stages of its' development, Terminator Salvation (what
exactly is with the lack of punctuation in that title, anyway?) was to
focus almost exclusively on Marcus, but was wisely shifted back at least
in part to the established characters we've been waiting so long to see
on this future landscape. Bale makes an excellent John Connor, hardened
by war but still clinging to principal because of character, his mother's
rigorous example and the simple necessity that he keep the time loop that
created him intact. It's easy to see how Connor's “fireside chats”
over the radio would make him the inspirational figure we've always been
told he'd become, even at this stage in the story when he's not yet completely
in charge. Yelchin, who did such a spiffy Walter Koenig impression
just two weeks ago in Star Trek, here does
an excellent job of suggesting Michael Biehn as the young Kyle. Fans
of Terminator 3 will be happy to see that John's love interest Kate
(then Claire Danes, now Bryce Dallas Howard) is still alive and well, and
pregnant to boot. Two other actors from previous films make guest
appearances care of archival sound and the wonder of CGI.
The
film is a special effects triumph, successfully transporting us to a world
landscaped by nuclear attack and ruled by robots. The robot designs
(begun by the late Stan Winston and finished by his Stan Winston Studios
collaborators after his death) are tremendous, both following up on the
machines from the previous films and also adding new ones that serve specific
Skynet purposes. My favorites were motorcycles that drive themselves
and nasty mechanical snakes with giant pinching claws for heads.
A sequence where Connor must try to make it to shore as they swim all around
him underwater is filmed with intense realism that really makes it pop.
McG's command of the action is strong across the board, with highly kinetic
chase sequences that are impressively storyboarded for maximum “one damn
thing after another” kicks.
The
director has clearly been asked to cut what he's got to the bone, with
telltale signs like the minimal amount of time characters spend walking
from one side of the screen to the other and more subtle things like the
fact that character actor Terry Crews is glimpsed as a dead body on a battlefield
early on and never gets a line (OK, I admit someone else needed to pick
that one out for me). But the plot doesn't feel gutted, and in fact
many things that might raise an eyebrow early on prove to be part of a
grand design as the story goes on. The screenplay was reportedly
written by half of Hollywood, although only T3 writers John D. Brancato
& Michael Ferris made it past the WGA credit board, but between them
all they've crafted a clever and smooth-flowing story. And extra
points for the fact that while the filmmakers are clearly here to set up
a new post-apocalyptic franchise, the story actually ends.
This
is all a risk, of course, because it totally diverges from the established
formula, but if T3: Rise of the Machines and the Sarah
Connor Chronicles TV series taught us nothing else it's that John Connor
running like hell with a terminator in pursuit is pretty much played out.
And the filmmakers do their best to keep Terminator Fan happy with boatloads
of allusions to the other movies in the franchise from “Oh, THAT'S where
he got his ______” moments to a cameo by a Guns N Roses song from the T2
soundtrack. Prizes to anyone who spots them all, and it should keep
all but the most determined fan distracted from anything that doesn't play
out the way they'd always imagined it.
Terminator
Salvation could have gone wrong in a whole lot of ways, but the most
important way that it goes right is by feeling like an organic extension
of what we've already seen. McG adds a touch for gritty action to
his resume, Sam Worthington lives up to the hype as a movie star and Christian
Bale adds another notch to one of Hollywood's fastest-growing resumes.
If there is indeed a storm coming, I won't mind riding it out with this
reinvigorated franchise. |
