Rating:

I saw this movie over the weekend, but I was so entirely underwhelmed I couldn’t even bring myself to review it in a timely manner.  Besides, everyone else already reviewed it.  What else is there to add?  Oh yeah, this:  don’t see it.

Terminator Salvation was directed by a guy named McG, which is just silly.  And I’m not talking about his name — I’m talking about the fact that he’s employed.  The only other notable thing he’s done is direct Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and a couple of Cyprus Hill music videos.  (This is notable because: why do they keep hiring him?)

One thing McG does bring to the table is a slew of silly named people, some but not all of whom are former and current music pseudo-stars looking to be actors instead of the other things they aren’t very good at.  Things like music.  The IMDB cast list for this little blockbuster includes choice peeps such as:  Common, Jadagrace, Moon Bloodgood, and Helena Bonham Carter.  See?  Silly names!

And oh yeah, they made a movie all together.  It was called this one, and it tried really, really hard to be good.  If I told you all the scenes and themes that took place, you’d think it sounded like an epic and enjoyable blockbuster.  But you’d be wrong, and that’s why I write these here reviews.

It starts with a guy on death row, pre-Judgment Day, donating his body to Helena Bonham Carter and also to science. THEN, JUDGMENT DAY.  Explosions ensue.  Cut to John Connor being a hero and defying the orders of his superiors in The Resistance.  The Machines have taken over the earth, but it’s still pretty easy to infiltrate and destroy one of their main communications nodes (SPOILER ALERT: IT WAS ALMOST TOO EASY…)

Connor’s superiors don’t like him because all of the other grunts do, and that undercuts their command.  He has a pregnant wife, but they never mention it (not unlike another hero I could mention).  He also has a nightly radio talk show so hey, things could be worse.

And they do get worse, because that guy from death row is back alive, somehow, and he doesnt really seem to know how. He comes across a teenage Kyle Reese, who just happens to be John Connor’s future-best-friend-who-he-sends-back-in-time-to-impregnate-his-mother-and-thus-ensure-his-own-existence.

And this chance meeting happens to set off a chain of events that will lead the three men to one another, just as John Connor had always hoped.  The only problem?  One of them is a Terminator.  Find out which tomorrow on the Maury Povich show.

By the way, Skynet is an evil supercomputer controlling a legion of SuperEvolving Terminator machines, but it’s kind of dumb and ineffective and just anybody can sneak into their SuperBase in San Francisco — but ignore all that.  The real tragedy is, this movie tries really, really hard to be good.

It’s a very serious movie, with little of the crappy jokes and non-stop buffoonery so often seen in modern blockbusters (I’m looking at you, Transformers and Iron Man and Spiderman and Others).  The action scenes are big and impressive, if not particularly unique, and the characters take each other very seriously, which is kind of refreshing.  But a great deal of time is spent on trying to convince the audience in the most maudlin terms possible that humans are better than machines because of their “hearts” and other abstract things.

The heart is a motif throughout the movie, actually — in both literal and metaphorical terms — as if Terminator Salvation  were written by someone taking it far too seriously, and it may have been.  Generally, the scenes lionizing humanity and the human spirit are trite and wooden and entirely staged, and the irony of it is, it caused reviewer after reviewer to accuse the film of being the one thing it tried desperately to avoid being called:  heartless.

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