Terminator Salvation: Ambitious But Imprecise

Marcus Wright is dead, executed for multiple remorseless murders by a government that didn't know that both they and Marcus were living their last days. Before his death, he signed away his body for a special and mysterious type of experimentation, but little did Marcus know that he would soon wake again to be greeted by a battered and broken world that had borne the brunt of a brutal nuclear fallout. Gone are the trees, the grass, and the people who once took them for granted, replaced by a hostile and arid world where the machines of Skynet hunt down and kill the few humans left to endure their apocalypse, many of whom are involved in a human resistance movement led by a legendary fighter named John Connor. But the world isn't the only thing that's changed. Marcus isn't quite human anymore, stuck somewhere on the philosophical and anatomical killing field halfway between being a man and being a machine. And both Skynet and Connor seem to want him dead because of it.

Terminator Salvation was a startlingly fresh vision of a classic franchise, one that asks a lot of good questions while wrapping its beautifully ugly perception of a post-apocalyptic world up in a dusty bow. Given, it's an occasionally messy movie, both on the screen and off. From a piecemeal narrative to a production plagued by a fickle script to a legendary on-set meltdown courtesy of Christian Bale, both it and its production were occasionally as unwieldy as the timeline of the Terminator franchise itself, a timeline that sometimes makes me wonder whether Judgment Day really happened at all. But as far as Terminator Salvation is concerned, the apocalypse is the new normal, and the world has paid the price because of it. Every Terminator movie before it recited the formula of the original, but Salvation does something entirely different, and though it may be a tad washed-out and gray as 2000s blockbusters were prone to be, the world of Salvation is an undeniably striking sight as well as a welcome departure from a familiar formula.

Marcus, the strangely empathetic cyborg some of Salvation is centered around, asks a fundamental but effectively implied question: What does it mean to be human? And if Salvation had been entirely focused on Marcus and the ethical problems he poses, it may have spared itself a lot of otherwise flimsy characterization. Its story sadly lacks ideas on what to do with the rest of its characters, among them the famous Kyle Reese of the original Terminator, and much of the supporting cast gets disappointingly relegated to the themes they represent rather than explored as if they were real flesh-and-blood people. The ensemble of this movie is too large, and Salvation drops and picks up supporting characters as if they were a dime a dozen, only ever seeming to study Marcus in any meaningful way.

Much of this movie also struggles with a level of spontaneity, a lack of the necessary planning or direction to make an otherwise promising premise work. It often leans on admittedly great action sequences that play out like Michael Bay's Transformers franchise would if it had personality, even if they may lack much of a reason to exist. Still, from a wonderfully written character in Marcus to a harsh vision of our future, there are a lot of good things to say about Salvation, a bold and visionary movie unlike anything else in the Terminator franchise. It's a movie I certainly respect for its attempts to do something new, a venture that fails on some levels while nevertheless succeeding on others. In some ways, I'm drawn to Salvation by a wholehearted belief that it's better to try and fall short than never try at all.

Terminator Salvation struggles from trying to be too big. And this is a shame because somewhere in its cold, overworked, and monotone steel shell, a heart of undeniable humanity beats like a drum. There's a truly great movie hiding somewhere in Salvation, and on occasion, it waves the colors it was obviously trying to paint, the banner of a question about the meaning behind being human itself. And so it's unbearably unfortunate that this movie is so disorganized and imprecise, not necessarily because it's terrible so much as that it occasionally gives off a glimmer, however faint, of true greatness.

Terminator Salvation - 5/10

Genesis 1:26-27