Terminator Salvation is surprisingly good. Given the disappointingly forgettable summer popcorn flick that was Terminator 3, the fourth title in the series didn't give one hope of being much better. Worrisome things like the fact that McG, the new director's most notable movie was "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" didn't help either. The fact that the credited writers were the geniuses behind the appalling Terminator 3 script really made it seem like an abandon-all-hope scenario. An audio recording of Christian Bale losing his temper on set was fairly amusing, but definitely not reassuring in any fashion.
Given all of this, I went into the theater with fairly low expectations, and came out stunned and impressed by what I'd seen. Certainly stunned by the fact that the movie was almost just as good as T2 had been. Impressed by how well everything had been done - the writing, acting, effects and the entire movie overall.
The scope of the movie's post-apocalyptic view of the future is simply breathtaking at times, the action is jaw-droppingly impressive with the unmistakably solid feel you get from sequences that were actually shot in real life, on location, not the green-screen cheesy composited sterile stuff that you see so often now. And robots. OMG, ROBOTS!! Giant assault robots the size fifty-story buildings, grim-looking chain-gun totin' T-600's and everything in-between. They're worth the price of admission alone. And the music drives it all home, with a score by Danny Elfman that really makes it seem like an epic Terminator movie. Overall, just... Wow.
The movie starts out with an interesting scene with Helen Bonham Carter and a death row inmate, and soon after that, a solid amount of action that really never lets up throughout the entire movie. Christian Bale plays a fairly good John Connor, though it's the rest of the cast that really pulls the movie along, especially the new friendly terminator played by Sam Worthington.
The future is indeed suitably post-apocalyptic, people are universally gun-shy (or robot-shy, I suppose) and seem like they've actually gone through a horrific nuclear war that destroyed the vast majority of humanity.
People in the future are also surprisingly radiation-proof, as John Connor and others go through nuclear blasts that should have teeth falling out and skin bleeding in a few hours from being so close to that much radiation. Not to mention the fact that John Connor can duke it out with a T-600 in a fist fight and not be dead after the first few punches. Although the skeptic in me dimly noted this during the movie, it really doesn't distract, and it's unlikely your average viewer would notice it at all. And that's really the worst I can say about the *entire* film. It's just that good.
Skynet has bigger and better robots, and some of them are extremely intimidating. At last, you feel like you're seeing what's truly possible, the things an AI with unlimited manufacturing and resources could pull off. Robots the size of buildings, etc. Skynet is still not very good at exterminating humanity, and it certainly seems to lack the tenacity the humans in the movie possess in surprisingly large and believable quantity. However, while you get the feeling that while it may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer at catching humans, it's got the 'overwhelming numerical and military advantage' thing down pat, and given enough time, wouldn't have a problem in killing off the human race in total.
Ahhhnold makes a surprising appearance as a CGI version of his 30 year old T2 self, and if I hadn't been told it was CGI, and hadn't seen Ahhhnold before, would not have been able to tell that it wasn't a human being. CGI, you've come a long way, baby. Some of the facial expressions, especially when he cocks his head to one side quizzically, gives one this eerie deja-vu that you're seeing Terminator 2 again, or somehow they really did have access to a time machine and got the exact actor from the exact same year to play a quick scene. His screen time as a human-looking terminator is short, but something that will seen as a pioneering moment in cinema for years to come.
John Connor goes to save the young resistance fighter that will one day be his father, and goes into the belly of the beast and comes out alive with him in tow. Mostly alive, anyway. No spoilers, I promise!
It's definitely worth your $9 to see in the theater, and for the first time as a reviewer, I'd be up for buying the DVD when it came out. There are very few movies worth watching more than once, and this is one of them. Color me happily surprised indeed!
Comments