Monday, May. 25, 2009

Jumbled plot, boring characters doom 'Terminator Salvation'

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

For a certain type of person -- mostly guys who eat dinner off junk mail and get confused when someone wants to interrupt our GoldenEye game to go meet girls (i.e. superstuds) -- Terminator Salvation had a basically perfect trailer.

Get this: robots exploding to a Nine Inch Nails song. Sounds simple, but the only way this could be improved is if when the robots blew up they showered everyone with candy. And it would have to be an especially good candy, like miniature Charleston Chews. None of that Tootsie Roll nonsense, you idiot.

Yeah, well you shouldn't have dragged Tootsie Rolls into this. Anyway, what's important here isn't your perplexingly bad taste in candy, it's that Salvation was written by the same team who wrote Terminator 3, and T3 was bad enough that while it didn't inspire me to go back in time and murder its creators' parents before they were born, it would certainly make me think long and hard about going back to key their mothers' cars. Thinking Salvation might be good was a stretch, but what can I say, I'm dumb as hell.

In the year 2018, most of mankind has been wiped out by Skynet, an army of self-aware machines. Christian Bale is the voice of the Resistance, the loose alliance of humans fighting back against extinction.

Bale and his superiors believe they've discovered a weapon they can use to shut down the machines for good. Problem is, Skynet is executing a plan that will wipe out humanity's leaders, including Bale, within four days.

Among the other targets: Anton Yelchin, the teenager who will one day go back in time to save Bale's mother (and in the process, become his father). Kill Yelchin, and Bale ceases to exist. Yet Yelchin's fallen into the company of Sam Worthington, a brand-new machine who thinks he's human but no doubt has a mission of his own.

This might sound confusing if you've never been so desperate to get laid you had to travel through time to one of those eras when the other men were too busy feeding themselves to dinosaurs to live past 25, but a muddy plot that doesn't give enough focus to any of its threads isn't the worst of Terminator Salvation's problems.

Its biggest sin is simply that there's no reason to give a damn about its characters. In first Terminator, why was it fun to watch Linda Hamilton get terrorized by a giant naked man? It wasn't just because Arnold acted the way we all secretly want to act ("Give me your clothes before I make you cry like an orphanage after lights out"). It was because Linda Hamilton was cool. She went from an everyday schmoe to a cold hard robot-crushing machine, and along the way we got to see the woman between both extremes.

For Salvation writers John Brancato and Michael Ferris, their characters have names, faces, and not a whole lot else, which is especially impressive considering they have extensively detailed pasts to draw on. Instead, Bale and friends are people with weird sci-fi troubles instead of personalities. That's not worth getting invested in.

You know what the movie does have, though? Explosions. And robots. And robots inside explosions. It's basically like watching the inside of my head on a 40-foot screen. Director McG has a lot of fun with the apocalyptic CG, and his numerous nods to the early entries in the series is nice.

That's enough to make a sick trailer. It's not nearly enough to make a movie around. I always wanted to see more of Terminator's post-nuclear world. Now that it's here in Terminator Salvation, it turns out it's not really worth taking the trip.

Grade: C