Movie Club: Terminator Salvation

Welcome back everyone to a new movie club review, this time focusing on Terminator Salvation.

Now I know, this is a bit of an odd one to just randomly watch, but I promise there’s a rhyme and reason to why I’m reviewing this, and I have some deeper meaning Hollywood trend stuff I want to get into as well.

But before I do so, let’s go over the plot, and spoilers are of course to follow as well.

Terminator Salvation follows John Connor (Christian Bale), and Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), as they navigate through the wasteland of the future after Skynet determined humanity was a threat, and began attempting to “terminate” all humans. The key difference between them is that John is a key leader in the human resistance, and Marcus wakes up in the future, and is unaware of how he got there, as he “died” fifteen years ago. He then meets a young Kyle Reece played by Anton Yelchin, and the two go looking for John, who is also looking for Kyle, who he knows to be his father. Now I know, that’s a bit complex, but let’s be real, the whole Terminator franchise timeline/canon is so jumbled and messy that I don’t think that’s a half bad explanation. The movie then moves forward as Kyle is captured by Skynet, John fights with the rest of the resistance as they just want to bomb Skynet and kill human prisoners, and Marcus makes his way to John, where he discovers he’s actually a new Terminator model, and is just a machine with memories and human organs. John initially distrusts Marcus, but after a quick think and discussion with a pilot that Marcus rescued earlier, John lets Marcus leave, and he then infiltrates Skynet with John, and the two save Kyle, and fight a T-800 portrayed by a poorly digitally de-aged Arnold Schwarzenegger. Marcus and John of course survive, but John’s heart is failing, and Marcus sacrifices his human heart (which he conveniently still has), and John is able to survive, and ultimately lead the human resistance to victory over Skynet.

Ok, with the plot out of the way, let’s get into my thoughts. If I had to use a phrase to describe this movie, it would be, “wasted potential”. There is so much here that could have been really cool and worked so well, but it just fell flat in so many ways. The cinematography was boring, the soundtrack was bland, the acting for the most part was just ok, and for a story set in the future where we’ve seen futuristic laser weapons in previous movies, everything sure as hell just looks like standard modern military equipment.

The movie also will have you believe that humanity is on the ropes, but the resistance seemingly has pockets of fighters across the globe that all have access to military fighter jets and bombers, the command team lives in a nuclear submarine, there’s human survivors scattered across the surface of the wasteland, and nothing effectively embodies any absurd levels of desperation on the human side.

Conversely, Skynet here makes no sense, as the entire time it’s seeking to kill Kyle and John, but at multiple occasions it has Kyle and does nothing to him, and then at the end it reveals how it used Marcus to bring John to it, but all I could think was why not just have Marcus kill John once he gained his trust? Or why not use Marcus to find the location of John’s resistance and attack them there? It just made no sense, and it felt like the writers wrote themselves into a corner, and just handwaved away why John and Kyle weren’t killed.

On another note, I really wish this movie leaned more into the futuristic elements of this franchise, or at least tried to show something interesting in terms of Skynet and the machines it built. All the machines we see were either just shitty recreations of the T-800, or just giant walking robots, and we barely see any of the cool giant mechs or menacing T-800s that we saw in Terminator one and two. Everything is just vague grey robots, that are visually uninteresting, and it’s just so disappointing when you think about how visually amazing Terminator one and two are.

To me, that is the problem with modern Hollywood. Studios are no longer looking to do anything new, unique, exciting, or hell, even visually appealing. Instead, studios by and large just want to shit out bad legacy sequels to classic movies, and just copy and paste boring formulaic plots. Which is a damn shame because you get movies like Terminator Salvation, which have a lot of potential and a really cool source material to work off of, but instead just end up being duds because nobody wants to do anything new, take any chances, or increase the budget. It’s movies like this that further perpetuate the notion that all movies are just shitty sequels and spin-offs, and that movie theatres are going the way of the Dodo. So yeah, not only is this movie bad, but it’s also harmful to movies and pop-culture in general.

That all said, the one bright spot in this movie is Anton Yelchin, and it really is such a shame that he died so young, because he was great, and I have yet to see a performance of his that I did not like.

All in all, this is not a great movie. It’s unoriginal, it misses the mark seemingly at every opportunity, and it kind of tarnishes the source material. Because of this, I originally had this movie rated as 3 stars on Letterboxd with no like, but the more I think about it, a more apt rating would be 2 1/2 stars, and no like.

Conclusion

Well, I thought I was doing something by reviewing a movie I knew wasn’t amazing, because then I could talk about Hollywood’s sequel problem, but honestly, this sucked, and I wished I would’ve watched something better or at least something new. But oh well, a movie club review is a movie club review.

Looking ahead, my review of Ready or Not 2 will be out on Friday, and after that, we’ll have our final March movie review coming next Monday, and this will feature They Will Kill You.

I also have not forgotten Reminders of Him, and that review will be coming out next Friday, April 3rd, so there’s plenty to look forward to, and I’ll see you all soon!