Terminator Salvation
McG finally made a movie better than Charlie’s Angels. Not that that really takes much.
I need to start by saying that this film won’t win any awards for its writing and dialogue. But I’m sure MTV has some award for most fossil fuels used in a film to make explosions look awesome, and Terminator Salvation is a shoe-in.
This is the Terminator film in which we finally get to see grown up Eddie Furlong (played by Christian Bale) fight the robots. He is determined to destroy Skynet, once and for all, and to protect his father, who is currently a teenager and will eventually go back in time to do his mom. Confused? It doesn’t matter. The whole point is the explosions and machine guns.
So, there is T-600, that doesn’t know he’s a T-600, and he is trying to help the resistance against Skynet, but John Connor doesn’t want to trust the robot. Eventually, they have to head to the Skynet base in San Fran to save Connor’s father and to destroy the base. Unfortunately, a well-recognizable T-800 shows up and decides it’s time to fight instead.
Oh yeah, it’s Arnold.
Well, not really. They just got some huge guy to be a body double and then CG’d Arnie’s face onto the body. This is one of the many incredible CG effects used in this film. There were maybe 3 or 4 that really put me off and just didn’t look good, but there were so many others that were incredible that more than made up for the crap.
The storyline also ties up a lot of questions brought about by previous Terminator films, so that was cool, but you don’t 100% need to have seen the earlier movies to totally understand what’s going on. You will just be less confused.
McG directed this film. Prior to this he made Charlie’s Angels 1 & 2 and We are Marshall. So, really, it was an easy point to make a cool movie. The entire chase sequence with trucks, robots and motorcycles is great fun to watch. The fight scenes are basically the same as most of the other Terminator movies, which means they are good as well.
If you like the Terminator series or action films in general. If guns and explosions aren’t your thing, avoid this film.
May 27th, 2009 at 9:18 am
Good review, I pretty much agree, and I liked it.
You should read the NY Observer’s trash of the film:
http://www.observer.com/2009/movies/about-terminator-salvation-ending
“The theatrical ending, however, is in stark contrast to the original. In that version, Connor actually dies, and his fellow Resistance compatriots decide to take his face and graft it onto Marcus Wright’s robotic body. But then Marcus awakens, looking like John Connor, and kills everyone in the room. The machines win. Now that’s an ending! But since it so diametrically opposed the canon established during the previous movies, the geeks revolted when it was released onto the Internet just under a year ago.”
Ha ha. Anyway, I’m personally looking forward to future versions of the T franchise.
From McG on the original ending:
“Connor dies, okay? He’s dead,” McG continues. “And Marcus offers his physical body, so Connor’s exterior is put on top of his machine body. It looks like Connor, but it’s really Marcus underneath. And all of the characters we care about (Kyle Reese, Connor’s wife Kate, etc.) are brought into the room to see him and they think it’s Connor. And Connor gets up and then there’s a small flicker of red in his eyes and he shoots Kate, he shoots Kyle, he shoots everybody in the room. Fade to black. End of movie. Skynet wins. F— you! It’s the most nihilistic thing of all time. And Christian went f—ing crazy, of course. He was insistent that it be done that way! He wanted the bad guys to win! Can you imagine the oxygen going out of the theater?! What just happened! It would piss you off! But maybe two years from now, you’d think it was ballsy. But in the end, it just felt like too much of a bummer.”
For the record, I thought the ending was lame. Bale should have died.