Posted 17 June 2009 - 11:57
Terminator:Salvation
4/10
Seriously, this movie stinks... but let's start with the good stuff: Setting, Design and Music. The world shown in T:S is a bleak, barren desert; the remains of human society crumble to dust in the nuclear aftermath while the emotionless, efficient Terminator stroll through the wreckage of our civilization on their hunt for the last survivors. While the resistance hides in wrecked down bunkers, the Terminators depict a ruthless and efficient design - those guys are made to KILL. All the while, you can hear Danny Elfman's uber-orgasmic music playing in the background, giving emphasize to this cold and hopeless world...
...and then you realize how godamnid fucking STUPID the rest of the movie was made. The biggest shortcomings of the movie are in what is essential for a movie with this kind of self-understanding: story, characters and general logic. Spoilers ahead, ye have been warned. Arrrrrr.
So SkyNet, being the clever Son-Of-An-AI it is, nuked humanity back to the stoneage when taking control - good thing it didn't bother with the hundreds of Hueys, dozens of A-10s and a full-sized submarine including all infrastructure needed to maintain all this for decades so the stuff is ready for use by La Resistance. Good thing it didn't bother sending any of its flying battlecruisers (10 times as big as the robot that attaches to it - which is already as big as a huge building itself) after the huge, clearly visible hangars those are kept in. Or ever bothers tuning in the Resistance' tactical and strategic group meetings which they do over regular radio. Bonus points for sending not 10, not 100, but only 1 Terminator after both its primary targets - which were guarded by a rogue Terminator to top it all of. Speaking of rogue Terminators, good move creating a Terminator with fully human self-awareness and not building ANY kind of control mechanism into it...
Now, the list goes (and on and one, but you can just google it if you want), and let's be honest here, such shortcomings wouldn't be of any importance in a run-of-the-mill action flick, but T:S tries so hard to be a darker-and-edgier-after-the-end-serious-business-movie that it basically asks you to watch the movie with your higher brain functions unsuspended -and fails. A lot. Miserably.
Also, if you ever come to meet McG before he gets his hands on T:S2, remember to give him a big bottle of character developement. Seeing how little there is in T:S, he seems to be all out of stock. So you've got John Connor, played by a shockingly bland C. Bale, who spends most of the movie in I'm-Ya-Savior autopilot. But hey, who cares as long as he can show how badass he is by surviving two helicopter crashes, being the last surviving member of his squad twice and surviving HTH combat with frigging Terminators for over half an hour, right? There's probably a reason why the initial draft didn't feature him as a central character, and it's more than just obvious that most of his role was tacked on too late and too quickly. Kind of a shame, seeing that this makes the former main character, Mr. Marcus Wright, sometimes seem more like a minor character. Nevermind that his backstory is the most interesting of all T:S characters, perhaps of all T characters as well, his story simply can hardly unfold as there's nothing to properly interact with. Oh, there's also a hot chick that sets free an obviously fully functioning Terminator right in the middle of JC's headquarters, cause, y'know, he was such a nice chap before he had half his skin blown off. Then there's Kate Brew... erp, Connor, who's only reason for existing appears to be making clear that T3 is canon and SCC never happened. Also, if you ever played Tiberium Wars or watched its GDI movies, check out Michael Ironside's role - I swear you'll have a good laugh.
Now, the thing that most people dislike about this movie is its nonsensical plot, and I have to agree with them. Saying that it has plotholes is far from the truth - T:S has holes, and in some of them you might be able to find the remains of a coherent plot. Like, the big bad masterplan is kinda stupid (even if you DON'T fall for all the illogic time-travel theories that many people come up with to degrade the plot) in so many ways it hurts your head just thinking about it. There's tons of unlikely coincidences, stupidities, wall-bangers... too many to list anyways.
In short, T:S is a good movie if you are drunk or watching it purely for seeing stuff blow up. If you even remotely try taking it for what it seems to think of itself, it fails miserably.
Now go out and procreate. IN THE NAME OF DOOM!