What Went Wrong: Terminator Salvation

There are some movies whose success defies logic. If I were to say to you that there was a big budget action film starring Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Anton Yelchin, Bryce Dallas Howard, Michael Ironside, Helena Bonham Carter, and Common then you would most likely assume that film would produce financial wealth. You know, be successful at the box office. It’s rare that Christian Bale doesn’t produce a successful film these days and Worthington had just come off of the massive success of Avatar. Not to mention, this film would be following along with The Terminator series which had already produced two excellent and one mediocre film. It’s hard to imagine this movie wouldn’t do well, isn’t it? I guess it’s time to tell you that the movie in question is Terminator Salvation and that its cumulative worldwide box office gross was more than $371 million on a $200 million budget. So why am I sitting here talking about it like it wasn’t a success?

Trilogy Fail: The first reason I deem Terminator Salvation a failure is that it was always meant to be the first film in a trilogy and obviously that never happened. That had to be something of a blow to the studio as they had poured in a ton of money and two of the biggest stars of 2009 were in leading roles. I think that when your film is manufactured to be that first in a series it is more than likely doomed to fail. McG and the rest of this team should have never went forward with this script the way that it is. It never feels like it has a beginning, middle, and end because we barely get off the starting block with the characters before they start rushing us headlong into the finale of the film. I would have had the discovery that Marcus Wright is some sort of hybrid Terminator be the big twist at the end instead of showing it off halfway through the film. Let that simmer and make the second film in the series deliver on the promise of that twist. And that’s just the start….

Are you John Connor: Christian Bale fills the combat boots of the savior of mankind once played by legendary actors Edward Furlong and Nick Stahl….but seriously, getting Bale was like hitting the lottery for this script and yet they gave him absolutely ziltch to work with. The character felt like he came straight from the generic GI Joe film made the same year. Instead of Connor dealing with the thought that he would be leading the resistance against and almost unbeatable enemy while also knowing that he would eventually be sending his own father back in time to protect his mother, we got Bale listening to cassette tapes of his mother and shooting motorcycle robots with an AR. How about the emotional weight that Furlong and Stahl talked about? What happened to that?

New Terminators: All of the films in the series feel the need to update the machines in a way that makes it more difficult for the heroes and I think it is expected at this point that each subsequent movie will just keep doing that. What Salvation does, though, is to add some new machines to the mix while also making them less deadly and less cool. Instead of machines who can form weapons with their liquid metal structure or control other machines we get one that looks like a snake and one that looks like a motorcycle. It’s like it was written by an 8 year old. More machines are killed in this film than probably any other (on screen) because they’re just not a threat anymore. Remember how hard it was for Michael Biehn and the other survivors holed up in that tunnel to survive just one of those early versions of the infiltrator terminators? Well, in Salvation one is killed by a child. Then there is Marcus Wright….

The ambiguously lame duo: For the life of me, I just can’t believe that for a few years Sam Worthington was THE MAN in action Hollywood. He did Avatar, Salvation, and Clash of the Titans all within the span of like two years and somehow I could run into him on the street today and probably not recognize him. What the hell happened bro? I remember not being impressed by the guy at the time and I’m willing to admit after rewatching Terminator Salvation that he didn’t deserve the animosity I had toward him. Compared to guys like Channing Tatum and Jai Courtney, Worthington is freakin’ Daniel Day-Lewis! The problem for Salvation was that his character should have had this big secret at the end where he learns he’s a machine. He could have been rescued from a transport ship by the Resistance and simply used his recent head trauma as a reason for his lack of memory. Then he could have been having flashbacks for the entire film, all the while helping Bale and his troops get the upper hand on the machines. It would have all culminated with us all learning about his machine condition at the end. Instead, Bale and Sam spend only a few minutes together Bale almost instantly trusts him despite knowing he’s a machine and being confused about the very existence of such a creature. In a word….lame.

We need a villain: I could easily go all day talking about the missed opportunities with Terminator Salvation but I’ll stop with this last one. The Terminator and Terminator 2 have some of the most iconic villains in movie history. They are focused, deliberate, and ruthless in their mission to eradicate Sarah and then John Connor. This film is much less focused, far less deliberate, and downright laughable at eradicating folks. Despite all of their cool Transformers toys, the machines aren’t much better at killing humans than they have been in previous films and even I am super confused at the timeline business with which series of Terminator should even be running around at this point. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that none of the machines feel threatening to our heroes. Not even the young version of the T-800 who really didn’t stand a chance. The original films really felt like you were up against it. How on earth are they gonna kill these things without some serious arsenal? In this movie they already have an arsenal, and a friend who is part machine, and we are really just waiting for them to pull the trigger on it.

One last thing: While I’m at it, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this one last thing. There are just too many things happening in this film. Marcus Wright is trying to find the resistance, he doesn’t know what he is, John Connor is fighting the machines and trying to save people, Kyle Reese is befriending Marcus and getting captured, Connor is trying to save his child father from the machines while also dealing with the Resistance leadership. It’s just too much. A better film, to me, would have been one in which Marcus was rescued at the beginning from a transport and then joins up with Connor’s crew. They embark on a mission to find the young Kyle Reese who has been targeted (they learned through espionage!) by the machines and we get a big reveal at the end that Marcus is in fact a hybrid machine/man whatever. The lingering question would be whether or not he would “listen” to his programming and kill Reese and Connor or had he “learned” something about humanity with all this time spent with JC?

What do you think? Am I way off or am I on to something?