May 27, 2009

JustSON at the Movies: Terminator Salvation

How long do we really have the drag out the Terminator series? When I saw the previews to the movie, I thought "Oh man, here we go, it's another Matrix Reloaded."

And for the most part it was. Great action scenes. Special effects. And absolutely nothing new. It throws in a little bit of "Cloverfield" to show you the up close feeling of fighting in a war against the machines, but it also jumps around to "yeah right" moments as well.

The draw of this movie, obviously, is to see Christian Bale play John Conner and his actually does an admirable job. However, one grip I have with this film is that if he's the leader of the human resistance... we're screwed. He sends more people to their slaughter than Custer and there's several times where if this were any sort of real-life situation, his soldiers would have turned on him.

This movie also doesn't really add anything to the saga of the Terminator series. The first movie obviously introduced us to the characters, the Terminator and brought up questions about a persons destiny. Terminator 2 shows that you could change a person's destiny and then Terminator 3 (which is actually a comedy) showed that a person's destiny is unavoidable. Now here comes along Terminator Salvation and it... shows us that Christian Bale likes to jump around and do a lot of stunts. Wonderful.

Had this been packaged as an action movie outside of the Terminator franchise, it would have been passable. But the fact that this somewhat decent idea for a movie has been squandered, makes it slightly unbearable.

Score 5/10. 1 very special cameo by you-know-who, 0 times somebody piloting an A-10 Warthog didn't get shot down, 1 slightly screwed up woman-machine love story, 13 years after being near a nuclear explosion and you can still jump cars and they'll do 80 mph, 0 times actual time travel occurs, Several times a pregnant woman goes into a warzone, 1 Michael Ironsides sighting.

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