CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Review of Terminator Salvation

Sunday, June 07, 2009

this entry brought to you by radiohead, "15 step"





I tend to have a critical mind and approach movies with that mindset; I generally agree with critics 9 times out of 10. There are times when I liked a movie that the critics hated, but it's usually the case where if a movie is critically reveled and I liked it, it's most often the kind of movie I won't defend, or that I find a guilty pleasure. For example, I enjoyed Wolverine fine, yet I recognize that it's a dumb movie and won't really defend it to detractors. It's got a dumb plot, it was predictable, but I enjoyed myself because I liked the performances.

But with Terminator Salvation, I didn't just like it. I loved it. I felt like the critics couldn't possibly be more wrong.

Firstly, of course Terminator Salvation is not as good as Terminator 2, the masterpiece by James Cameron that is, in my opinion, one of the top five action movies of all time. In fact, I would go so far as to say that in the scheme of cinema, is easily in the top 100 movies of all time, period. It wasn't just an action film, it was an allegory for humanity that hit home. But, as much as I love it (I named it my #7 favorite ever, behind One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; Aliens, another film by James Cameron, is my absolute favorite), let's face it, there were a few flaws. Skynet's plan to win the war against humanity is patently ridiculous. In the original movie, it decides to invent a time machine for the sole purpose of sending back a killing machine to kill John Connor's mom, rather than, you know, making the Earth's atmosphere in the future completely toxic to humans. In the sequel, it sends back another robot to kill John Connor as a kid, despite that this plan didn't work a few years prior. John Connor captures a robot and sends it back to protect himself, rather than sending it back in time to simply blow up Skynet. Let's face it, anytime there is time travel in a movie it is ridiculous. Granted, there are movies that handle time travel better than others, and Terminator is among those that do it right. I'm not a big fan of making excuses for plot holes, but if you've got a movie with time travel in it, you absolutely have to accept that the concept itself is ridiculous.

With that out of the way, yes, it is ridiculous that the entire plot of Terminator Salvation hinges on John Connor's ability to find and save his father, a young Kyle Reese, despite being older than him. It is ridiculous that Skynet makes such a convoluted plot to kill John Connor at the climax of the film. But these are two ridiculous plot points that have existed in the Terminator franchise since day one: Time travel is silly (and John Connor even acknowledges it in T2, by saying "You could go crazy just thinking about it"), and Skynet is woefully inefficient at killing humanity. I mention this because when I read reviews of the movie, critics would often pick at these plot holes which, in my mind, didn't mean anything because they were there, if you wanted to be picky, from day one.

Despite what I had initially thought of McG as being a complete hack, he manages to pull off an extremely tight, utterly exciting film that, I felt, perfectly executes the idea of pushing the Terminator franchise into the future, with a real imaginative eye to detail. It's true that this film is bleak and humorless, but with the flashes of the future in the first two films being so horrifying, it all fits in well in terms of tone. This franchise has always been about an impending apocalypse where a vast wasteland was expected, and frankly, I'd rather see bleak and unrelenting than to see the fourth movie in the franchise lean on too much humor. The third movie, which I actually enjoyed a good deal, sometimes got caught up in tacky humor. I thought McG's film was riveting, and literally had me on the edge of my seat throughout it. The director quickly sets up a world where nearly anything can happen at nearly any point in time, and there was always this sense of dread underneath the goings on. Even when what was going on on-screen was simply two characters talking, I still felt as if something horrible could happen. In fact, this is one of the most important facets of the film: while there are a lot of wonderful, frenetic action scenes that feel pulled more from a modern war movie or Children of Men than your average action film (keeping the camera up close and with the actors during most of the action pulls off the effect well), there are many more slow, deliberate moments with characters relating to one another than one would necessarily think, considering McG's previous work. I was expecting an in-your-face, big, stupid explode-a-thon. What I got instead was a gripping war movie with robots.

But what really sells Terminator for me is the acting. McG doest have a few sore spots-- what the hell is Common doing here? And why isn't Bryce Dallas Howard given anything to do?-- but those that matter deliver fully. Christian Bale is great as John Connor, a sort of Bruce Wayne if Wayne weren't always in control of the situation. Connor has the weight of the world on his shoulders, and while he's not the type of reluctant hero his character was in Terminator 3, there's an uneasiness about him that makes the audience feel he's afraid this is a war that can't be won. It's true that there's nothing here to make us see how, exactly, John Connor is supposed to be the savior of humanity the way it was obvious Neo in The Matrix was "the one", but then, it's also obvious from John Connor's storyline that this was supposed to be the start of a franchise, and that he's going to go on to do greater things than be the voice of the people, and, were the franchise to continue (which it probably won't), this is obviously the direction they'd go.

The heart of Terminator Salvation, however, is in Sam Worthington, who plays Marcus Wright. You could call it a bit of the old switcheroo. The story of the Terminator franchise has always been about John Connor, but in this movie Marcus Wright spends as much time on screen as our hero, and frankly, I found that refreshing as hell. It's not that I don't find John Connor's story compelling, but his ascension to hero-hood has already, essentially, been written, and there aren't that many ways from a story-telling perspective to have him be the savior of humanity without falling into the traps that a thousand other stories with someone taking the place of "the one" have done. Marcus Wright is the vehicle that makes Terminator stand out, an ex-con trying to redeem himself and, in the process, save humanity. It could be argued that there's not much done with the character that hasn't been seen before in other movies about criminals trying to right their wrongs, but Worthington is quite a catch, a man's man with looks almost destined to be an action star but not quite, with a sly, almost dangerous charm. He's a fine actor, and it was a wise choice for him to be the emotional centerpiece of the film. It didn't really bother me that, as the critics almost universally complained, Connor's character didn't have much heart. This was clearly Worthington's movie, and I was absolutely comfortable with that.

It's rare for me to watch a film and feel so completely different about a it than the critics. Usually I understand completely where the criticisms of a movie are, but in the case of Terminator Salvation, I honestly have no complaints other than it will definitely leave Terminator newbies utterly confused. But reading reviews of Terminator, I have no clue what it is about Terminator Salvation that got so much vitriol. I especially don't understand why it is doing so horribly at the box office. I thought the trailers were absolutely captivating, I thought there had been a comfortable amount of time since the last Terminator movie, I thought this was going to be a movie that, even if the reviews had come in badly (which they did), it was going to be a box office catch and people would see it, at least in its first weekend, from the excitement for the project alone. That people largely stayed away flabbergasts me-- I thought Terminator Salvation was markedly better than Wolverine, a movie which stomped on it at the box office. Ordinarily, I'm not the kind of person who finds himself defending a movie which has done so all around poorly as Terminator, and ordinarily I find myself chuckling at the kind of moviegoer who cares so little for quality that they would admit enjoying a film that had been this roundly dismissed. I consider myself a demanding moviegoer, and yet somehow, I felt that Terminator Salvation has been robbed.
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with love from CRS @ 10:17 AM 

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