Terminator Salvation is a heavy movie. It definitely has a darker side to it than the previous films in the series, but then again, it takes place in the post-apocalyptic future that the earlier movies always presaged. This lends a stark, unrelatable backdrop in some ways, but it should almost feel familiar--after all, this is what we've already been lead to expect the future would be like.
(Note: if you are unfamiliar with Terminator, I genuinely don't think this film is best seen cold. It doesn't really stand alone. Things like John Connor's mom's recordings--did he really schlep those into the bomb shelter from the last movie, or did he dig them up later? Does everybody know in the post-apocalypse that John Connor is special--"prophesied", even, or would that not really be the sort of thing a guy would spread around? In a way, it has a hard time standing with the other films. I'm just saying, knowing about them will help orient one.)
There is no real comic-relief to be seen here. The catch-phrases ("Come with me if you want to live," "I'll be back") are dropped, but it's a little, um, forced? Christian Bale's John Connor, which, after all, is a character that has always know what was going to happen and has not ever been a Happy Warrior, broods and rages, but even though Bale is pretty much a high-caliber actor, they don't call this movie: John Connor: Salvation. He doesn't really dominate the movie, even though he does build up a John Connor that we finally see as a grown man and Resistance leader with a very credible action hero physicality.
Although the future has always been about John Connor in the storyline, the movies have really always been about the Terminators. And this movie really seems to focus on a character who isn't from the original story-line--Sam Worthington's Marcus Wright. We are introduced to him in a flashback to 2003, where he is a man on death row, who is persuaded by a very ill-looking Dr. Serena Kogan (Helena Bonham Carter, who somehow makes looking half-dead, look hauntingly pretty--me, I don't even look half-decent in the morning until I've had coffee) to sign his body over to science for research. He's a man who doesn't want any part of himself to live on--he's convinced he should die, and is a little cruel to her. He isn't automatically likable, because it's clear he has done wrong. Throughout the course of the film, though, he gets our sympathy and respect--
Because he's been made into a Terminator.
He re-emerges from death in 2018, after we've already seen him "die" in 2003, and the viewer can't help but know he's had something done to him. That he doesn't understand what's going on, and needs to be filed in by teenager Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin--solid performance, and actually super job on his part being in two culturally iconic blockbuster films this year) who has a small, mute girl, Star, for a sidekick, in between ducking, rolling, shooting, and dodging machines, only lets him know that the world has horribly changed. It serves as exposition, but it's for a story we, the viewers, should already know. When he decides he's going to travel north, the direction the children don't especially want to go, and posits that he'd go alone and leave them there, he is told by Kyle that the difference between humans and machines is that humans bury their dead, but Marcus will be buried by no one. Marcus consents to the young ones travel with him, because they seem to need him, and he them.
They come to a gas station where we discover the post-apocalypse isn't really a friendly place between humans, either. They are threatened by inhospitable people who don't believe in the Resistance, but in "keeping their heads down" and who are reluctant to share any food or supplies with them. Only an old woman among them decides they should at least be fed, but then the machines strike.
This is where my movie-watching brain piped up: "This is the obligatory Terminator-chase-scene." After all, T:2 and T:3 had them. The chase scene that ensues is grim, explosive, tense and action-packed, but curiously different. The people who are running away to save themselves are destroyed. Some of the people appear to be being "collected" by the machines.
There's almost a message about the value of keeping one's head down. This movie is like that. Little points made along the way.
Fast forward, and despite their best efforts, Kyle and Star are taken by the machines, and Marcus survives a phenomenal drop, to meet up with Resistance soldier, Blair (Moon Bloodgood). They "meet cute" as he helps her cut herself down from a bit of a tower she drop-landed on. He also helps protect her (her being very proficient, apparently, at handling herself) from being savaged by rapists later on. She and he become close, and she rests her head against his chest and hears a heartbeat.
A human heart. She believes he is a good man. And he is not so sure.
As they make their way to the Resistance base, they come across a minefield intended to cause trouble for Terminators. And that's where Marcus comes to calamity, and is brought to the heart of the Resistance, where Connor et als find that this is a machine, wrapped in a man. Who believes he is a man. With a human heart and brain. Which is nothing anyone had ever seen or expected before.
And this is where the "shades of Frankenstein" come in, and another reason why this movie is pretty "heavy". John Connor believes this machine was sent to specifically kill him, having long been accustomed to machines looking human, but being nothing of the sort. Marcus, nonetheless, is shocked to find that he is a machine. He could give a shit about John Connor, he tells the man himself, but he wants to find his friends. And he points out something JC already has reason to suspect--Skylab is taking lots of human prisoners. Knowing his young old man, Kyle, is among them, is troubling.
But nonetheless, while JC is angsting, the damaged, chained, suspended Marcus is left to be a target for other members of the Resistance, Like Barnes (Common--liked him in Smokin' Aces and just about spotted him in Wanted--I understand he's a possible for the John Stewart Green Lantern if Hollywood does a JLA movie--I'd be so all over that) and so Blair hatches a plan to help him escape.
What happens when the ruse is discovered is that Marcus is hunted in just the way the Terminators hunt humans.
In the meantime, although John Connor has joined the pursuit, he has a problem in the back of his mind: the Resistance command (Michael Ironsides as General Katana--no, wait, I'm sorry, Ashdown; obviously no long-standing cinematic-viewing injury compelled me to make that mistake) has authorized the entire Resistance to make a bombing raid on the HQ of Skynet since they have been made privy to a unique opportunity--a coded signal that stops machines dead.
He knows the signal is a lucky break, and wants to help use it against the machines.
But John Connor also knows there are people held there. Even if HQ knows that, they still want the raid to take place, human casualties aside. How can they justify killing other humans? It's not collateral damage--it's the very humanity they should hold dear, what with humans having become an endangered species. The word that his own father may be among them only clinches it for him. And seeing the monster/machine/man wrestle a killer 'bot to save him--he allies with Marcus, with the goal to rescue the "future". Which is his own past.
Which is where the Frankenstein dilemma creeps in--as I explained to my husband, I mean the Mary Shelley novel, not the Universal Pictures 1930's films. Marcus is a man and a machine, but he has a need to know where he came from since that knowledge isn't in-built. He wants to know about himself, yet he wants to be human (free-willed). But he also is artificial, and has to confront that, too. Meaning he has to face his Creator--and even threaten it, in order to become himself--to reject the monster in himself. He is, as White Zombie would put it, "More human than a Human." More human, because he knows how much of himself is not, and how aspirational humanity can sometimes be.
It is John Connor who tries to explain humanity in war--which made me sit up a little straighter in my theatre-seat. Man is not machine, and should not fight like machines. It is not just the human race, but it's own humanity they are fighting for. He, as the voice of the resistance, broadcasts this opinion and gets the war machine to stop, countermanding the words of his superiors--because people had come to trust in him. It was a good message. In a sometimes uneven movie.
For what it's worth, Worthington and Bale are excellent. The movie does make sense in the Terminator-context--you just have to be really familiar with it to like it. It is stark, but the CGI and FX's are super, and there is a nekkid Arnold T-800 CGI that is the bomb. Visually, it is pretty good--McG did great with that. I just think it was a deep movie with story for like, a trilogy all on it's own. It fit into one good action movie--but awkwardly.
But just recall, the awkwardness was because there was some deep-ass stuff going on in every scene. It's like, a three out of five stars if I graded like that. I thought it had some really redeeming points even if it was hard watching. Probably not everyone's idea of a summer action flick--but something better--if it makes people think. I liked it a lot.
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