I watched Terminator Salvation last week (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0438488/), expecting a train wreck. Geek reviews were generally negative, a co-worker who actually went to the premier said it was meh, and it clearly didn’t resonate with viewers based on domestic box office (though it will be somewhat profitable in the end, going by box office mojo’s numbers). Sam Worthington got negative marks for being wooden (which I assumed had to be true based on the trailers for Avatar), and of course Christian Bale and I are done professionally.
So we popped in the DVD and started watching it, digging the opening, but waiting for the inevitable letdown.
And waiting.
And waiting.
And eventually the movie was over and I went “huh, that wasn’t bad at all.” So I don’t understand the complaints, I guess. Really, what are we looking for in a Terminator movie?
* Tons of action, chases, gun fights, etc.
* John Connor vs the Machines
* John Connor working with a machine against Skynet
* Issues relating to time travel – (this was downplayed, but it was adderssed in dealing with Kyle Reese)
* Arnold – at least on the small screen, the scene played out pretty well
On top of that, we got:
* Insight into how the resistance survives
* Nice callbacks to the previous movie – the T-1, the continued existence of Kate Brewster
* New terminator designs – the bikes, the harvesters, a variety of exo-skeletons
All this stuff was in there, with great production values, solid pacing, and reasonable performances. So given all that, at least I understand why McG is thinking about sequels to this movie. I give it between a B and B+, leaning towards the higher end, with T3 being a slightly lesser movie. (Both of the Cameron Terminators get an A, but this is not saying anything interesting.)
For the naysayers though, I’ll call out a couple things did bother me about the story. They were pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, but made me scratch my head.
* One of the plans of the resistance involves taking out Skynet at the source. It is established in Terminator: Rise of the Machines that Skynet is a distributed neural net and can’t be taken out that way.
* The convenience of Marcus waking up the way he did, felt pretty lazy… I tend to be forgiving of the setup of a movie though, so I let it go.
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It’s a mild one, but just in case, you have been warned.
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* This one required me to do the writers’ work for them. At one point in the movie Skynet has an easy way to get rid of Kyle Reese, and doesn’t take it. One would think that getting rid of John’s father before he goes back in time would solve a lot of that friggin’ computer’s problems. Instead it waits long enough for Kyle to be rescued.
Here’s my explanation for this: other sources of Terminator fiction (comics, novels, even T3) show that there is a “temporal inertia” in place that keeps the humans from stopping Skynet and Judgement Day by sending things back in time, just like the machines can’t seem to kill John Connor. The date can be moved, the details can be wiggled, but the major stuff seems to be “fated” to happen. If Skynet kills Kyle Reese when he’s a kid, there’s a good chance John will send a different guy back in time to help his mom, and -that- guy would end up being his father, and nothing significant would change. Therefore it’s actually totally reasonable to use him as bait instead, to lure John into the trap and take them both out at the same time. Once you think of the computer weighing the probabilities, and the fact that it doesn’t even seem to have functional time travel tech at the time of the movie, it’s believable that it might make the decision it does.
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