Terminator: Salvation

Review: Terminator Salvation

Dir. McG

Cert. 12a

115 mins

2009

Finally, the future has arrived. Since 1984 the Terminator franchise has been promising armageddon, and Terminator Salvation takes the long-awaited plunge. And you know what? The end of the world was a great idea.

It’s 2018, and John Connor has finally grown out of his larval stages (Edward Furlong and Nick Stahl) and into Christian Bale. Connor has become the prophesised leader of the human resistance, fighting a war against living computer Skynet and its army of murderous Terminator robots. This is the main event; the reason why Arnie spent two movies trying to protect a snotty kid and one trying to ‘terminate’ his mother’s pregnancy. And the film doesn’t disappoint. This is largely due not to Connor, but to Sam Worthington’s Marcus Wright. Marcus is a mysterious (and beefy) man without a past, whose last memory is of being executed back in 2003, and who is undoubtably the heart of the film.

The film realises that Connor works better as a myth than as a man. Terminator: Salvation dares to sidestep the intimidating destiny set up for him by the previous movies, placing the extremely grave and slightly boring Bale in a supporting role, and the gamble pays off. The film belongs to Marcus, who becomes the guardian of a young Kyle Reece. Terminator devotees will realise that this future is as dependent on Reece as it is on Connor - Reece is, of course, the man who has yet to travel back in time to father Connor. The human race depends on Reece surviving for long enough to have unprotected sex with a circa-1984 Linda Hamilton, and then get beaten to death by a circa-1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger. Life is a series of compromises...

It’s the first entry in the franchise to venture outside of its own imagined history, which had, frankly, dragged on for one film too many. There are some cute nods to the Terminator mythos, but they don’t turn into parody like Arnie’s embarrassing turn in Rise Of The Machines. The tantalising glimpses of the future from the other films are expanded into a full-blown dystopian universe with a strong story, solid performances (Worthington is a great action hero) and stunning special effects. Terminators frolic in deserted city streets, as relentless and intense as ever; huge robots roam the wastes scooping up people for loopy sci-fi experiments and mechanical eels prowl the rivers and lakes. And even the eels are pretty cool.

The Terminator movies will never be what they once were. The Terminator was a lean, mean, high-concept flick about a metal monster hiding inside an Austrian monster. Terminator 2 was a game-changing event for summer action movies in terms of star power, effects and scale. Terminator 3 was a disastrous, half-assed stab at replicating the magic of the earlier films. Terminator: Salvation doesn’t make this mistake, forging its own path as a simple, old-fashioned summer popcorn flick that does pretty much everything right.

From the outside, the Terminator franchise looked flabby and worn-out. Terminator: Salvation burns away the saggy flesh to reveal a surprisingly fresh and polished action movie. And if these films have taught us anything, it’s that it’s what’s on the inside that counts.

7/10

-James