'Terminator Salvation' keeps the action, loses its resonance

By Sarah Sluis

The new Terminator Salvation has all the action you would expect from a franchise that once starred Arnold Schwarzenegger. Filmmaker McG is incredibly comfortable directing car chases, planning for CGI-created monster machines, and making machine-to-human combat look fresh and engaging. Unlike in many action movies I've seen, you never get worn out by the fighting and chases. The characters' interactions with each other are believable, necessary, and real. You better believe that Christian Bale, as evidenced by his on-set outburst, was taking his job seriously.

It's also worth noting the performance of John Connor's opposite, Marcus Wright, who is played by newbie Australian actor Sam Worthington. His performance is a preview of what audiences can expect with Avatar, the action film directed by original Terminator director James Cameron, which releases later this year. Worthington plays a death-row criminal resurrected as something else, and he gives his character just the right attitude: redemptive without beating himself up over his never-explained crime. There's a moment where he realizes that he's not who he thinks he is, and watching him act through it is one of the most satisfying moments of the film. He's also forced into a Matrix-like scene where information is downloaded into his head. He makes the moment feel original and fresh, but the scene symbolized my main problem with Terminator Salvation: the sci-fi world of post-apocalypse Skynet seems tired, and little has been done to refresh it.

I prefer my action films to have some kind of soul, and for their battles to be proxy for some greater cultural anxiety (I loved The Matrix). The earlier Terminator films play on that Frankenstein fear, the idea of our creations taking over us. There's also the popular trope of malignant, devious corporations (Skynet) that pursue profits against the common good. Added to mix is the allure of seeing what a world looks like post-apocalypse, and, of course, time travel. All of these struggles seem global, epic, and resonate with the times. But McG doesn't seem interested in syncing up Terminator with today's sci-fi fears.

In this Terminator, the characters display little interest in their predicament. Even Marcus Wright, who woke up in 2018 after being executed in 2003, doesn't show any surprise at the great change in humanity's fortune. And devious corporations going rogue? That certainly could have been stressed more, to great effect. The one thematic glimmer is the tension between members of the resistance and people who merely try to survive, avoiding the Terminators where they can and not bothering to fight. Because it's an action film, we're on board with the fighting side, but the few scenes with the gaunt refugees who preferred avoidance to confrontation stayed with me. Odd, I know, but they piqued my interest in seeing the upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which follows a father and son on a path to survival--with only people, not machines, to fight.

The buzz after the Terminator Salvation screening, as everyone gathered their cell phones (which were checked into zip-loc baggies for security reasons) was "not as good as Star Trek." I'll add in myself that I found the film to be better than Angels & Demons. I expect the box office for Terminator Salvation will stack up somewhere between the two films, and wouldn't be surprised if we see a Terminator 5.