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| Tookey's Review |
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| Mixed Reviews |
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| Trailer |
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| Cast |
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| Released: |
2009 |
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| Genre: |
ACTION
ADVENTURE
SERIES
SCIENCE FICTION
SEQUEL
PREQUEL
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
115 |
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All action, little entertainment.
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Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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Frankly, if you’re in the mood for grim, apocalyptic drama, you might be better off just turning on the news. There’s nothing in Terminator: Salvation as scary as the sight of Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman trying to pretend that nothing has gone wrong, and it’s business as usual. It would be an act of kindness for an Arnie-type terminator to put them out of their misery, or - with a cheery “Hasta la vista, New Labour” - escort them to a nice long rest at the Priory.
The fourth Terminator movie is the loudest and weakest of a hitherto entertaining series. Technologically, it’s as advanced as you would expect from a Hollywood blockbuster. Plenty of ingenuity has gone into designing numerous killer robots, and there are explosions galore.
But I ended up wishing some of the bombs had gone off under the obsessively flashy director, McG (short for Joseph McGinty Mitchell), who gave us the vacuous Charlie’s Angels movies and screenwriters John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris, responsible for the mega-flop Catwoman.
Star Trek earlier this summer proved that, even in a blockbuster, it is reasonable to hope for a storyline that involves, characters who develop, and a sense of humour – all ingredients that this picture lacks. Even the post-apocalypse setting of an America laid waste is hackneyed, as it’s far too obviously based on the Mad Max movies.
The whole Terminator series is supposed to be about humans versus machines, and the differences between the two. Unfortunately, for the first time in this series, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the mechanistic has triumphed over the human.
The narrative of the first three Terminator movies was commendably clear. In T1, a woman, Sarah Connor, ran from a machine that was trying to kill her. In T2, her son , the young John Connor, did the same. In T3, John Connor as a young man and Claire Daines as his girlfriend did likewise.
In T4, there are three strands to the story, neither of them even slightly riveting. In one, the grown-up John Connor kills a lot of machines. In another, someone we don’t care about wonders if he’s a man or a killing machine. In the third, the terminators kidnap humans instead of killing them, which is what terminators are meant to do. None of this makes much sense.
Christian Bale (pictured) is surprisingly poor as John Connor, who’s grown up to become the most prominent member of the human resistance to machines that have done their utmost by 2018 to cull humanity from our planet. He scowls, growls and howls, but we never know much about him.
Bale’s much-publicised tantrum against the film’s lighting cameraman may well have been born out of frustration at his own performance. It’s robotic, his worst since his wooden fisherman in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. He clearly needs a rest, and on this evidence should spend more time reading scripts before he agrees to perform them.
He’s just as monotonous as the Aussie actor Sam Worthington, also tediously impenetrable as a convicted murderer killed by lethal injection, who wakes up to find himself transformed into a cyborg – and I’m not giving away information that isn’t obvious from the trailer. His inner conflict between man and machine isn’t dramatised in an interesting way, and even if it had been Mr Worthington was not the man to convey it.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s conflicted performances as terminators are starting to look in retrospect like acting masterclasses. They were also fun, which the performances in this film are not.
The most attractive character, because he has energy and shows a few recognisably human characteristics including fear, is the teenager Kyle Reese (played by Anton Yelchin) who will eventually become John Connor’s father – which makes it a bit weird that the terminators don’t seem all that bothered about killing him. Don’t worry either if the chronology doesn’t make sense. There’s no reason for you to worry about this more than the screenwriters, who clearly couldn’t care less.
But Kyle’s a relatively minor character in this lumbering, joyless and deafening dud. It is bound to do okay on its first weekend, but isn’t much better than X-Men: Wolverine. It’s brainless, it’s soulless, and it gave me a headache.
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, Marcus: Sam Worthington