Terminator Salvation

The first Terminator movie without Arnold Schwarzenegger. How will it be – especially since the last one with Arnold was pretty terrible ?

Well, Terminator Salvation manages to uphold the tradition of the third millennium Terminator movies – it is a disaster too (the first two good ones were made on the other side of 2000). If you want to cherish your memories of the ubercool Terminator, then better buy/rent/download T2-Judgement Day and watch it again. While Terminator 3 : Rise of The Machines might have somewhat sullied your Terminator memories, Terminator Salvation will change them forever.

That is because, unlike the first three movies which had our present day timeline and Terminators were sent back in time, Terminator Salvation is set in 2018, in a post apocalyptic world - after Judgement Day (where Skynet precipitates a nuclear holocaust and wipes out the majority of humanity). Some of the survivors organize themselves as The Resistance and fight Skynet – but Skynet unleashes an army of terminators to hunt and kill humans. Yes there are scores of different terminators, flying/swimming/motorcycle-like etc. And they all are very vicious, but they behave exactly like the dumb inanimate robots that they are – totally devoid of any character.

Terminator Salvation has Christian Bale playing John Connor – not the leader of the resistance yet, but revered by most of the Resistance as the guy who knows the future. Bale brings his enormous talent into play and his reading of John Connor is spot on – he looks like a man who knows that on his decisions depends the fate of mankind. However this very mood also makes the character very dry and devoid of charisma – making it difficult for the audience to connect with him,.The surprise package of the movie is Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington). A new character, he is an unknown entity at the beginning of the movie – though by the end of the movie, he has had slightly more screentime than John Connor himself. Acting overall, is good all round.

The setting of the movie is the first thing that probably puts your off the movie. As you can imagine the world after a nuclear holocaust, its dry, dreary and completely devoid of life. Cities are in ruins and human survivors behave more like rats – hiding under the ground and scrapping around for food. And ofcourse, they have to evade the terminators who are programmed to kill any humans sighted.

The biggest disappointment was the terminators themselves. While they are bigger and badder – some of them are huge machines which resemble the transformers while others are flying Hunter’n’Killer units, there is just no wow factor in any of the battle scenes with these machines. The CGI is good, but there is just no involvement !

The plot isn’t much either. After giving us a good idea of what post-apocalypse life will be like, it tries to align itself with the Terminator franchise by focussing on the young Kyle Reese (the guy who fights the Terminator in T1). And tragically, it hinges everything on the last climax battle between the humans and the Terminators/Skynet. But that fails to excite us too. The ONLY time the audience was on its feet hooting was when the T900 Terminator is revealed – a CGI mockup of Schwarzenegger. It sort of shows what the movie lacked …

The problem with Terminator Salvation is that it’s a pretty ok post-apocalypse movie. It just isn’t a good Terminator movie …