| A predictable CGI exercise Terminator Salvation offers almost nothing to the franchise - but Sam Worthington's performance saves it from being a complete waste of time
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| TERMINATOR SALVATION
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Coming six years after the largely mundane and unintentionally comedic second sequel to the Terminator franchise, Salvation announces itself as a brooding, listless CGI action exercise with a number of predictable man vs. T-600 robot sequences to pad an over two-hour running time.
Lame in its trendy nihilism, Salvation chugs along at a sluggish pace without any kind of internal logic. Worse, it feels redundant in light of the events previously depicted in the James Cameron films.
As the lead, Christian Bale is ineffectual, but Sam Worthington (as Marcus Wright, the robot-with-a-heart) offers a splinter of humanity in an otherwise dark and dire plot that once again pits humans vs. Skynet.
The first film to be set entirely in the future as predicted by the time-traveling hero of the 1984 original, Salvation diverts its storylines into two halves: that of Wright and an older, more wizened John Connor (Bale), previously portrayed by Edward Furlong and Nick Stahl in the earlier entries.
Wright, an android in 2018, was once a repentant murderer put to death via lethal injection. He gave his body to science post-execution, but has now woken up to find that robots have taken over the planet, leaving only pockets of human resistance fighters. He's unaware of what he's become, and his road to discovery keeps Salvation from being a total abomination.
Wright temporarily joins up with two precocious survivors, Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) and Star (Jadagrace), before an attack separates them. He's brought to Connor's base courtesy of Blair (Moon Bloodgood), a female combatant entangled in the good fight.
On the lookout for Reese for entirely different reasons is Connor, the prophet just beginning to ascend into his position as the leading force against the sentient, violent machinery.
Yelchin portrays the younger version of the Reese character that Michael Biehn played in Cameron's 1984 film. Here he's not even part of the larger resistance movement, but we do see how he'll become acquainted with Connor, the son he'll have with the Linda Hamilton character once he goes back in time.
Which leads me to the time-traveling gobbledegook: Reese obviously survives all skirmishes here because Connor still exists.
Worthington excels in his role as the awakened robot. He's a mess of confusion, still believing he's human for most of the film. The idea is pilfered from an old Harlan Ellison Outer Limits episode, which Cameron was caught stealing from for the first film way back in 1984, but it's such an unsettling concept that it still offers rewards.
— Aaron Graham |
Uptown
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