Terminator Salvation Is Not Very Good

This picture is basically a hojillion times better than the movie.

Ah, yes, the Terminator franchise. Yet another series that is generally badass in spite of the fact that it lures the space time continuum into its van, throws it into a dark cellar, and starves it for a few days until it’s thin enough to have its skin cut off and made into a dress. For other examples, see Back to the Future and 90% of anything with the words Star Trek in the title.

I’m always sort of surprised at how many people I see who walk around belting out Disney songs and fondly remembering the plot to movies like The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast, because those movies played a comparatively small role in my childhood. Sure, I watched Disney’s Robin Hood and The Jungle Book a few times as a kid, but by the time I’d reached nine or ten years of age I’d found something far better, thanks to TNT’s willingness to show movies during the day instead of actual television programming.

The movie was called Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and it had the perfect mix of cars, guns, explosions, and robots; four factors that can make or break a movie depending on their quantity. Transformers, for example, is a movie about robots who turn into cars when they aren’t creating explosions or shooting up downtown LA with guns. Hence, awesome. Last Tango In Paris is severely lacking in all of these categories, and it shows.

TNT’s censors had ham-handedly cleaned up the movie for TV audiences, which meant that Mom was more or less okay with me watching it every time it was on – and trust me, I did. I can’t remember all the words to every song from The Lion King (and nobody is impressed that you can – yes, I’m talking to you, every girl I know) but I am a champ at mimicking the brooding keyboard soundtrack we hear every time a Terminator walks purposefully down a hallway, and I have charted every one of the pubescent John Conner’s thousand or so voice cracks throughout the movie.* And at the end of the movie, when the Terminator has Sarah lower him into the steel because he cannot self terminate, and John is begging him not to, and he says, “I know now why you cry. But it is something I can never do.” – I cried every goddamn time. Yes, it was very sad in Titanic when Leonardo DiCapri drowned, but I find it much more arresting when the fatherly, mentoring killer robot has to die to save humanity. Interestingly enough, same director.

*”Dyson – Miles Dyson! SHEIGHe’s gonna blow him awHEIGHey!”

So please know my background and affection for the series when I tell you that Terminator Salvation is like watching a bunch of greedy studio executives punch my childhood right in the dick. The dick, I tell you.

The director is named “McG”. I’m sorry, but since when are we letting fucking hamburgers ruin my childhood memories? You should have seen the opening credits (but, since I’m going to tell you, you won’t have to, now) – all this ominous music and these ordinary Christian names and then, right at the end of the credits, when the music has reached its peak and the onscreen visuals have become the most intense and reached their climax, you get cockslapped with “Directed by McG.” It’s like if you were watching Gladiator, and the entire movie is awesome and intense, but then in the last scene he has to fight a bear wearing a tutu riding a tricycle. It’s like a joke. It’s a cruel joke. The movie is an insult to everyone who likes movies, the script is an insult to everyone who likes writing, and the director’s name is an insult to everyone who has a name. McG? Seriously? You’re not even a rapper. Sit the fuck down and stop making movies.

Yeah, it’s better than Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines*, but that’s not too hard to do given that that insult to my beloved childhood franchise started with the protagonist coming out of a gay bar wearing pink framed star shaped sunglasses. Being better than Terminator 3 isn’t the point of all this. This movie was supposed to kick ass. You saw the trailers! It was supposed to be good! But it wasn’t! It sucked, and if you disagree, you’re wrong, because you didn’t love Terminator 2 the way I did.

*This one time, Alexander’s family got a new dog and they made the mistake of letting him name it, so he named it Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. I’m not kidding.

The script goes beyond bad; it is downright insulting. Whoever wrote this piece of shit assumed that the audience lacked the basic mental capacity to put together cause and effect; for example, when John Connor learns that the machines have targeted for destruction one Kyle Reese, the man Connor is destined to send into the past to protect (and impregnate – weyhey!) his mother, he says something to the effect of, “If they kill Reese, then I won’t exist!” Gee, thanks, movie! I wouldn’t have figured that one out on my own.

Also, the writers saw fit to repeatedly bash into our brains the fact that Marcus, unaware protagonist-Terminator, has a “very strong heart.” The Official Woman in the movie (who, in spite of being an ace fighter pilot in the middle of what appears to be a worse-than-average Apocalypse still has clean, curled hair and straight white teeth) compliments Marcus on his strong heartbeat when she snuggles up against him, and I mean, was that supposed to be subtle? In the future, do people just go around complimenting one another on the superior functionality of their internal organs? “Man, Truman, your pancreas is producing hella insulin up in this piece. Damn!” Later on, a doctor who has examined Marcus reports to Connor that he has “a very strong heart,” just in case we forgot this totally off the wall, otherwise pointless fact. And guess what? When, at the end of the movie, someone’s heart is too weak to sustain his ailing, injured body, guess who steps forward to heroically sacrifice himself and provide a stronger heart? And then, to drive it all home, the voiceover comes in to explain that in the fight against the machines, we will need “heart” to win. At this point, the heart isn’t a metaphor or a symbol anymore, it’s just become downgraded to a Thing That Happens In A Bad Movie. It’s like if at the end of Citizen Kane Orson Welles were to run out and say, “By the way, if you didn’t catch it, the sled represents the one thing he could never buy – happiness. Tip your waitresses, folks!”

And in spite of what people have said, Christian Bale is really not that good in the movie. Nobody is that good in the movie. I’m not trying to degrade the actors; I’m trying to degrade the material they were given. If you heard the clip of Christian Bale yelling at the lighting technician on set a few months ago, that’s basically his character: He’s a guy who yells. He yells at people, he yells at machines, he yells at people using a machine (in this case, a radio), and when he isn’t yelling he’s pouting in such a way to suggest that he’d rather be yelling. Marcus too simmers with generic rage, while the young Kyle Reese is an ambitious yet inexperienced novice who slowly learns from the guys around him. The Official Woman shows up late in the first act and then takes a vacation from the end of the second act until the last scene, yet somewhere in there manages to form a loving bond with Marcus. Also, there’s a little girl who doesn’t talk and is very good at picking things up and handing them to people. I actually found her somewhat appealing because she was spared any of this movie’s terrible dialogue.

And you know what? The action scenes aren’t that great, either. Yeah, there are explosions, cars, guns, and robots. There are motorcycle robots chasing an armored tow truck across a post-apocalyptic highway, and there’s fighter jets in a big canyon, and there’s a giant robot that picks people up and sends them off to robo-concentration camps. But none of this – not one solitary second of it – was of any interest to me whatsoever because I had absolutely no personal investment in any of the characters. They were all stock cutouts with predictable motivation and dialogue worse than what I saw on video game fan fiction message boards when I was in middle school – I’d just as soon see them all get shot in the face as I would see them survive because they were all more or less interchangeable, with no defining characteristics that I could identify with or enjoy.

I can barely ride a bike and I’m wearing a pair of shorts held together with Scotch tape, but I can assure you that I’m vastly more intelligent and talented than the writer(s) of this movie because I fucking understand that all the beautifully choreographed action in the world isn’t worth a damn thing unless the audience cares about the characters and their motivation, and frankly I’ve found pocket lint I’ve cared about more than Christian Bale’s John Connor and his mission to shout at everyone and save the day. If the characters aren’t interesting or likable there’s no tension when they’re in danger because you don’t care if they live or die. The movie would have been equally interesting if every action scene had been replaced with Christian Bale playing solitaire and watching Law and Order reruns in his trailer.

Don’t spend eight dollars to see this movie – don’t do it even if you just want to be “entertained” or see some “eye candy.” That’s completely fine if you just want to be entertained for a few hours; you may have heard of a movie called Star Trek, which I have paid fourteen dollars to see twice in theaters. That movie has eye candy and plenty of entertainment; it also boasts competent direction and masterful scripting. I cared more about Kirk’s green skinned Starfleet floozy who appears in all of one brief scene than I did about anyone in Terminator: Salvation because she displayed more than one emotion, spoke lines that hinted at some form of depth, and had big tits.

It’s despicable that they sank this much money and effort into a movie when the script clearly wasn’t there. It’s this year’s Crystal Bullshit Adventure Skull - it clumsily bastardizes a series that was once brilliant and had gracefully run its course, all in the name of making more money. If indeed you do go, I’d urge you to steal the film from the projectionist and then throw those canisters through McG’s bedroom window just to let him know what he’s done.

Terminator: Salvation is a giant, putrid, festering turd of a movie from start to finish; this is not opinion, this is simply the truth.

Truman Capps thinks it’s perfectly acceptable that he’s written about movies two weeks in a row now.