Terminator Salvation not the definitive film it was intended or touted to be.

I was not very impressed with Terminator Salvation. It was a realistic and action-packed action/war film, and quite entertaining, but it was not the film I was expecting. Especially after the fiasco of the original ending leaked on the internet, and the subsequent re-working of the film ending, I was expecting the end-all-be-all of Terminator films. Not so much. There are really only two reasons I do not appreciate the film much: Christian Bale is not a good John Connor, and the film abandons the sci-fi themes critical to the Terminator ethos.

I like Christian Bale a lot. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are both the shit, in no small part due to Bale’s excellent serious portrayal of Wayne/Batman. In Salvation he cranks up the gravitas to the point of overacting, and to the point that his character is not very compelling or charismatic. He’s disquietingly fanatic , more jihadist than savior of humanity. Sure, terrorist or prophet is a matter of perspective, but I thought we were supposed to sympathize and identify with Connor. I didn’t.

 

There was no heroism in the character to inspire me like John Connor is supposed to do. In fact, every character that surrounded Bale outshined him as a heroic and sympathetic character. Anton Yelchin was great as Kyle Reese (though he’s a bit young I would have much preferred him as Connor), and Worthington’s Marcus was awesome. Even Moon Bloodgood’s Blair, though extraneous and peripheral, was a more interesting character than Bale’s Connor.

The character was dour and driven by a deep hatred of the machines, exceeding that of the people around him, casting him as the point-man in a grueling was of attrition against the machines. Yet much of what we know about John Connor from the other films and The Sarah Connor Chronicles portrays him as a much more pragmatic warrior. He understands that the machines are not people, or a culture ideologically pitted against humanity. They are programmed tools, and unlike humans they can simply be reprogrammed for alternate purposes. John Connor did this when he used and sent back T-800s in T2 and T3, as well as the unknown Cameron model in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and obviously trusts the reprogrammed machines as much or more than humans to give them such critical missions and put them in close proximity to sensitive assets such as his younger self. Yet Bale’s Connor is not this pragmatic strategist we’ve come to know as John Connor, he’s just a machine-hating ideologue. One cannot even argue this is a portrayal of the young Connor before he really comes into his own as the leader of the resistance, because lore from T2, T3, and Chronicles suggests Connor already understands the machines better than anyone else long before Judgment Day even occurs, so the hate-filled warrior played by Bale just doesn’t make sense. John Connor is a cooler and more intricate character than what McG and Bale make him.

The other reason I have problems with Salvation is because it veered off on a sci-fi tangent that is not really what Terminator mythology is about. I’ll keep it vague so I won’t give away any spoilers. The thrust of Salvation’s sci-fi theme is the identity crisis of Marcus Wright, the machine that thinks he’s a human. (This should have been a spoiler, but inexplicably the producers decided to use this as the trailer hook to bring audiences in rather than as the shocking reveal it could have been.) Is he a person? Is he a machine? Can he fight his programming? Are any of his decision really his own? Hello, Battlestar Galactica anyone? This has already been done exquisitely, in exacting detail, and much, much better in the BG saga. Salvation’s attempt was a very poor (and even wrong) gloss over the concept.

The entire attempt, poor as it was, was completely misguided anyway. Terminator is about the psychological schism between humans and machines. Machines are not, in any way, human, but their effectiveness in masquerading as humans makes them very creepy. The greatest scenes from the franchise hinge on this disparity between the machines’ human appearance and their non-human actions. Like when the “good” Shwartzeneggar T-800 in T2 tries to murder the guys that jump him before John Connor stops him, and Connor can’t explain why the Terminator shouldn’t kill (“You just can’t, okay?”). Like when the same Terminator realizes it must be destroyed and explains to Connor that it’s ok because it’s not human (“I know now why you cry, but it’s something I can never do”). Like how Cameron constantly seeks explanations for human actions that don’t make machine-sense, and then eerily mimics the actions even though she clearly still doesn’t understand the reasoning. The Marcus Wright character gives us none of this. He behaves just like a human, he thinks just like a human, he actually believes he is human. He has a Terminator body, but there is nothing Terminator about him. What’s interesting about the Marcus character is his humanity, not his Terminator-ity. He would have been equally entertaining as a mere human character with super strength and resilience, and that makes him an uninteresting Terminator and a useless addition to the Terminator mythos.

Terminator Salvation was a decent film with great action, horror, and effects, but I was dissatisfied because it never delivered the Terminator goodness I was craving and expecting, and it did nothing to advance the Terminator mythology.