Terminator

As titles of apocalyptic blockbusters go, Terminator Salvation has just the right touch of post-traumatic (and post-grammatical) doomsday cachet. It certainly sounds classier than T4: Attack of the Robots, which would have been more accurate. We're in the year 2018, just after the fabled Armageddon known as Judgment Day, when the Earth's machines, rising up as one, launched their assault on humankind. Red-eyed, gleaming-silver-skulled Terminators now roam the wasteland, mowing down the last humans who try to scurry away from their programmed firepower. Even 
 a disembodied limb from one of these nasty droids can do damage. That's how the centralized brain of Skynet has built them: to come at you like Energizer Bunnies of death.

But where the unexpected part is when one of these insane cash grabs actually turns out to be good. That’s just unaccountable. Downright unfathomable, even.

In this installment, we’ve gone ahead to the not-too-distant future (nine years away, folks!) of 2018. A military installation called Skynet, an artificial intelligence designed to run the military has become self-aware and decided that humanity may be the greatest threat to its existence. So, with its control of the vast American nuclear arsenal, Skynet took care of the problem the only way it knew how—it enacted the Bush Doctrine and freed the hell out of us.

The story of Terminator Salvation starts out with Marcus (Sam Worthington) who after killing his brother and 2 cops are sitting on death row on the day of his execution, in 2003 if I remember correctly.

With him is Serena (Helena Bonham Carter), who is trying to convince him to sign his body over to her research. Apparently some cancer research, but the company on the top of the page he signs is Cyberdyne systems. This plotline is pretty much the one that carries the movie, as Sam Worthington simply put is the actual lead of this movie. He is also the one that I think McG gets the best performance out of.


I was very surprised and quite happy about this character as a whole. The lead on the page is of course John Connor (Christian Bale), which we find in 2018, jumping out of a helicopter in a lead strike on a Skynet facility. Our first perception is that this is the guy in charge, but we find out that he is yet to become head of the resistance at this point. He is in charge of a group of the resistance, but in a secret hideaway sits the actual resistance command structure.

The movie wisely stays away from most of the time travel issues and the convoluted chronology of the previous installments, allowing it play out as a fairly straightforward action flick. It does feel like we are just sort of dropped into the middle of the conflict with little explanation, and certainly newcomers to the series may be left in the dark about some of the details. Fortunately, the conflict and mystery surrounding Marcus Wright (played brilliantly by Sam Worthington) provides an interesting new angle for the franchise, and gives this particular story some dramatic weight. It does so at the expense of developing John Connor, but for most of us, there aren’t a lot of blanks to fill in.

MOVIE THEME

The plot revolves around a Death Row inmate called Marcus Wright, who signed his body over to Cyberdyne Systems. The body was later used to create a prototype Terminator infiltration unit that was a hybrid of human and robot. Unlike other Terminator units, Marcus retained his name and his memories, and until captured by Connor's unit, believes that he's human.

After escaping from a destroyed SkyNet base, Wright stumbles across a teenaged Kyle Reese. Along with another child, they travel across country in search of John Connor, who makes regular I Am Legend style radio broadcasts out to the remaining humans. Reese gets captured, and Wright makes it his mission to rescue him, finding Connor and helping infiltrate SkyNet to release the prisoners including Reese.

Inside the SkyNet base, Wright discovers that he is the dupe of the machines and was programmed to find John Connor and bring him in. We tip our hats at the cunning of the machines - the ultimate infiltration unit is one that doesn't know it's an infiltration unit!

As expected, Terminator Salvation is pretty damn bleak, which may disappoint some viewers who were hoping to see some of the humour that Arnold’s character previously brought to the equation. There aren’t many laughs to be had, although I happen to think that the grim approach suits the subject matter. The glimpses of the future that James Cameron offered in Terminator 1 and 2 weren’t particularly cheerful either. In a strange way, this is the Alien 3 to James Cameron’s Aliens, although aesthetically speaking, it seems to be combining The Matrix with Mad Max to create a believable, low-tech future on the human side with shiny high-tech robotics on the machine side.