Terminator Salvation– Plenty of Mythos, Needs More Heart
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
*Minor Spoilers*
The thing that immediately impressed me about Terminator Salvation was how well informed it was by the previous films while simultaneously doing something brand new. I have to confess that I was never a big fan of the other Terminator movies and I felt like they were one-trick ponies. Every one of them was about a Terminator going back in time to kill John Connor, and I kept wanting them to get to the interesting stuff– the post-apocalyptic future where the machines have taken over. Even before they revealed it at the end of T3, I always assumed that Judgement Day couldn’t be avoided and John Connor’s destiny was always to lead the Resistance, so I always wondered why not hurry up and get there already? That’s where the big epic stuff can happen. This movie remembers what came before it, and indeed the time travel issue of Kyle Reese having to go back in time or John Connor will never be born is a huge part of the plot, but luckily, we don’t have to sit through yet another Terminator trying to kill him before he’s born, when he’s a kid, or when he’s a completely clueless adult.
So now that I finally got my wish, I’m not sure I was right that the post-apocalyptic future is more entertaining. Oh, it’s big. There’s plenty of Terminators flying and running around trying to kill humans, and they’re wonderfully scary-looking. And it does what all really good special effects movies do– it’s hard to tell what’s an effect and what’s real. But now that we’re past Judgement Day and it’s the year 2018, Terminator has gone from a sci-fi, time travel action flick to a war movie. It’s not all just gun battles (though there’s plenty of that); there’s a lot of plot, it’s logical, not too predictable, and usually interesting. The part of the plot I latched onto the most was the mystery of Marcus Wright, who we find is somehow both human and machine, made that way in a pretty cool scheme by the machines, and he has to decide which he’s going to side with. The other major subplot, as I mentioned, is John Connor’s mission to save Reese, who’s been captured by the machines at their home base, and the problem is that his superiors have a plan to destroy that base no matter what humans are there.
I do enjoy the Terminator mythos with Connor and Reese, but the real problem is that it’s the very thing that makes Connor too cold and inhuman to me. The cyborg is made more real and more human than John Connor! And in a movie about drawing the line between man and machine, the most important thing should be to make your main character very human. Christian Bale is really good and he’s playing this part with every ounce of feeling the story allows him to– which isn’t much. The issue for me is that John Connor gives a pretty good speech to his commanding officer, who wants to destroy the Skynet base, about how not acting like cold, calculating machines is what separates them from their enemy. That absolutely shoul have been the main theme, the driving force behind the whole film. But trying to be a feeling human being is not the reason John Connor doesn’t want to blow up that base at all. It’s for his own survival– if he doesn’t save Reese and eventually send him back in time, he’ll never be born. Survival is the reasson the machines do what they do, and it’s ultimately Connor’s entire motivation as well. So despite a lot of lines about the human heart being what makes humans better, I never see any real indication that John Connor has a heart, nor any of the other human characters besides Blair Williams, who helps Marcus escape the human compound when they find out he’s part-machine because he saved her life.
The machines have taken everything over and it’s a hard life for the humans, I get that. But even in a post-apocalyptic future, it’s hard for me to believe that no one ever has anything clever to say, no witty retort. Humor gets people past the hardest situations, but no one in this movie has any. At all. I didn’t want it to be hillarious, but again, humor is one of those things that makes people human beings. Certainly part of the point of the film is that this war is turning the humans into machines, and I hear that message loud and clear, but it’s sacrificing a good deal of entertainment value by taking that idea too far.
Having said all of that, it’s obviously a set-up movie. I expect bigger and better things from more installments, and as I understand it, this is the first of a trilogy. I just hope that the humans in this universe start taking better care of each other– there aren’t very many of them left, yet I often got the sense that most of them could care less who lived and who died. Doesn’t give much hope for the fate of our race, and it’s enough to make your audience want to go see Star Trek a second or third time.
LLAP
-Cap’n Logan
