Bleak, gritty, and depressing, "Terminator Salvation" is, visually, everything we imagined James Cameron's Judgment Day would be.
It's too bad Cameron wasn't the one telling this story. We might have actually cared.
Christian Bale's name comes first on the poster and in the opening credits, but it's Sam Worthington's Marcus who claims the story, starting as a death-row inmate in 2003 who seems to be making a deal with the devil scant moments before he's put to death. I've lived through Kevin Costner Robin Hood movies and countless Nicole Kidman flicks, and never before have I heard a less-consistent accent from an Aussie or British actor. That's probably as much director McG's fault as Worthington's, but it's unnecessarily distracting.
He awakes in 2018 in the middle of the war between Skynet, the evil supercomputer, and what's left of humanity. John Connor (Bale) is thought by some to be a messiah of sorts, the chosen one who will defeat the machines.
It's difficult to find a real starting point in evaluating this picture. Visually it's competently done, with a "Mad Max"-meets-"War of the Worlds" vibe, with monster mechanical collectors scooping up prisoners for...what exactly? We never really find out. We get vague impressions of a Nazi-Jew-type relationship, with the humans herded into large warehouse-type rooms, Terminator endoskeletons looming with giant guns and that soulless, skeletal grin.
And we get a lot of Connor running around, arguing with his superiors (including the usually-fantastic Michael Ironside, Bale's "Machinist" co-star, who is surprisingly ineffective), shooting things and generally being the hero that Sarah Connor envisioned he'd become.
But at the same time he's somewhat of an enigma rather than a familiar character, akin to Anakin Skywalker in that we have met him chiefly in three periods of his life; first as a rebellious child, then a post-adolescent whiner, and now an intergalactic badass.
There are several superficial nods to the previous films, from a visit to a certain gas station to a certain Guns 'N Roses song to those awkwardly iconic lines of dialog. But nothing else in this picture (save for that demonic smile, and a character we get but a brief glimpse of) feels like a Terminator movie. It's a post-apocalyptic thriller with anonymous robotic villains who sometimes vaguely resemble characters that we have loved for a couple of decades now.
And you could drive a liquid-nitrogen tanker through some of the plot holes. When Marcus awakens, he's been altered to be a Terminator who is technologically decades ahead of Arnold Schwarzenegger's first Terminator. How did this leap forward take place? Again, we don't know.
Skynet somehow knows that Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin doing his second impression of an iconic sci-fi character this month) is Connor's father, or at least very important to him, so when Reese is captured by the machines, he's held to draw Connor in, when simply killing him would have finished the job they've been working on since 198 freakin' 4.
And Connor spends the majority of the film confounding Skynet, the most advanced computer system in the history of humanity with...a glorified cell phone (it must have been the qwerty keyboard).
Bale sleepwalks through the role, rolling out the same gargling-gravel tone that annoyed so many in The Dark Knight.
But my biggest complaint is that we never build upon that wicked nifty ending of "Terminator 3," with Connor and Kate Brewster locked in a bunker as the bombs are going off. Quite frankly that was the only worthwhile moment to take from that otherwise pedestrian flick, and director McG chooses to fast forward and forget that film althogether, save for the Brewster character (replacing the lithe Claire Danes with the more physically imposing Bryce Dallas Howard), who is now married to Connor and carrying their baby.
If you go into this film looking for explosions, random robots doing outrageous Hollywood things, chasing people around, sometimes killing them, other times not, then this might be the movie for you.
If you want a coherent continuation of the incredibly layered, complex and satisfying story Cameron laid out for us years ago, you're going to be disappointed.
Rating: 3 Yaps out of 5
Read Nick Rogers' review of "Terminator Salvation" here.