Freitag

WARNING: Spoilers. I take this movie to task by calling out specifics. Do not read if you’re still planning on wasting your money.

I forgive movies. I really do. I love to suspend my disbelief for a while and just be entertained. That’s not to say I enjoy every movie I see but I’m certainly not a critic. I enjoyed Wanted and Transformers and I even kind of liked the latest Indiana Jones. Please understand that I’m admitting that (especially the last one) because I really want you to understand what I’m trying to say here.

There is no redeeming quality to Terminator Salvation

That’s right. I said it. Nothing about that movie was entertaining to me. On some level I think the leaked studio freak-out by Christian Bale contaminated my opinion of the movie but not as much as the awful directing of McG who should be banished from Hollywood. I’m not a director or an actor and I rarely think about the making of a movie but this movie felt like big sets and elaborate set ups. You could actually see the crew of the movie in your mind. Every scene was set up in such a way that you knew it was set up. Kind of takes the fun out of it when all you see are actors posing for a director who doesn’t know how to take us on a journey.

Wait. Gandolf can talk to the Eagles?

Just like the major hole most people have figured out in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, about Gandolf just giving the freaking ring to an eagle and having it fly over Mordoor and dropping the thing off in Mt. Doom, TS opens in with a big, fat hole in the story. A nuke goes off, killing all of John Connor’s military buddies and knocking John’s helicopter out of the sky. He gets up and looks at the mushroom cloud which is so close to him you have to say to yourself “alright, forget everything you know about radiation and just move on.” But there’s a problem. The machines have nukes? If they have nukes why don’t they just blow up a bunch of strategic sites around the world sending the world into a nuclear winter and spreading radiation all over the place? A machine doesn’t need the sun, or warm weather, or a radiation suit. Alright let’s just forgive it right. In this movie’s reality a nuclear weapon can detonate and knock your heli out of the sky and you can watch the rising cloud with no fear. Let’s remember that.

For a post-apocalyptic world, people sure have some nice teeth and lip gloss.

A few times, the actor playing Kyle Reese smiled and I was temporarily blinded by the whiteness shining from his mouth. It wasn’t that they were just white but that they were a white unachievable by nature. So he looked like a freak. There are 2 women characters in the movie and they are so dolled up in lip stick and shiny shit on their face that you can not let it go. It’s impossible to let it go. It’s a post-apocalyptic world where every day is a struggle for survival and these women are slathering on lipstick like it’s just any old day. I simply could not get past this part, this is when I really started to hate the movie and myself for giving the studio my money.

Women are stupid and emotional and Reese has an identifying line.

Kyle Reese says to Marcus “come with me if you want to live” when he first meets him. You might say to yourself, “hey, I know that line, he said that to Sarah Connor when he met her in the classic original.” Yep, you’re right. And that’s the obvious tie-in that the director was going for (one of many I might add). The problem I have with this is that the phrase “come with me if you want to live” isn’t a catch phrase. It’s not a thing people say over and over. It’s a spur-of-the-moment thought that pops in your head when you realize this person doesn’t trust you but you have to get this person off of their ass so they’ll come with you so you can save them. He’s not walking around dropping this line at parties so people will know that it’s really him.

There’s a female helicopter pilot. She’s hot. She happens across Marcus, the stranger from the past that has shown up and is also hot. They decide to trek together back to base. On the way she has a situation with the guys from Thelma and Louise who want to rape her. Rape her good. Southern accents and all. The stereotype rapists try and get them some when Marcus shows up and puts the smack-down on these guys. Helicopter pilot is really turned on now. Because no way any man has ever saved her in this savage land. This is a first for her and she’s a woman controlled by emotion so all training and instinct go out the window. “Big man save me, me want sexy time.”

Dialog so bad, George Lucas would be proud.

Instead of letting the audience figure out that this spot is close to the machines and the 2 characters on the screen are going to test out their handy-dandy new weapon to make sure it works, the director felt it necessary to have the characters say this through dialog for that one nitwit in the corner who doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. It makes me cringe when actors setup the scene like that. Lucas is a master of this kind of “you’re never going to get it so I’ll spell it out for you” dialog.

There’s a big speech from John Connor to his fellow resistance fighters toward the end of the movie. It’s supposed to be the moment where you see what a leader he is and how much people want to follow him. Instead it comes across as a lame duck. No emotion, no awesome speech, just a bunch of words strewn together (kind of like this movie review).

Machines are just as dumb as evil geniuses

The character Marcus finds out he’s just a pawn of the machines. A mole to get inside and lead John Connor back to Skynet so they can kill him once and for all. Marcus seems a little confused so The Machine feels it necessary to spell it all out to this cyborg. The machines throughout the movie are cold, acting decidedly without hesitation and yet they decide that now is as good a time as any to go monologuing. So the machine spells out how easy it was to get John Connor and Kyle Reese trapped for an extremely elaborate kill. They aren’t just going laser these guys or crush them or something simple. No they’re going to unleash their newest weapons, the T800! That’ll show ‘em. And wouldn’t you know it, the T800 after John Connor is none other than Arnold himself. Nostalgia. At least, that’s what the director was hoping you’d feel. Instead you feel pissed off some more because the T800s were built to have human features that looked real enough to allow them access to human resistance pockets. I know mankind isn’t as smart as a machine but I think they’re wily enough to figure out that if a person looks like Arnold then they’re a T800. That’s why there was only supposed to be one Arnold T800. Many T800s but all of them look different. Get it McG? You ruiner of a good thing, you.

While the big bru-ha-ha between the Arnold T800 and John Connor is happening, all other machines on the planet are apparently out of order. The Resistance helicopters land at Skynet unchallenged, they all sit around and wait for the fight to be over, and the T800 is getting his ass kicked a little and not one other machine comes to help. Wait, scratch that. One other machine comes to help. But he comes to help John Connor! Zing! There’s a switch-up. Yeah, turns out the Marcus borg-dude doesn’t want to be a machine so he’s going to be human instead and help out. But not before John gets lanced. And that leads us to…

The worst Hollywood ending since I Am Legend.

Remember when I said that in this reality nukes can knock a helicopter out of the sky but not kill anyone with the radiation? Well that was only partially true. What actually happens is that if your helicopter is full of freed humans and the new leader of The Resistance then you can fly on while the nuclear blast is happening beneath you. You still won’t have any radiation problems but you can fly in that blast zone no problem.

But wait. John Connor isn’t going to make it. He’s dying. But he’s not just dying. According to the doctor-lady with way too much red lip stick on “his heart isn’t going to make it.” His heart. Again with the Lucas-style dialog. Earlier when The Resistance found out about the cyborg dude they made sure to let the audience know that he had a human heart and it was one of the strongest hearts they’d ever seen. Now you know what’s coming. Blood type be damned, the cyborg offers up his heart to save John Connor.

And we learn what it is that separates humans from machines: Shitty directing and writing.