Source: IMDB. Click for more images.
Seriously?
I thought I’d made peace with the fact that summer blockbusters are stupid. I really thought so. But this, this … man, I have a headache.
Not to go all “they raped my childhood” but the first Terminator was life-changing for me—science fiction noir with a mind-bending premise. And then they made the second one, and it was stupid and annoying, but with some cool effects. And then they made the third one, and it did horrible things to my will to live. And now they’ve made a fourth one.
I actually had hopes for this one. Christian Bale did a fantastic job with Batman. Yay. It was supposed to be darker and grittier, kind of like the Batman reboot. Again, yay.
But what Hollywood ended up coughing up was a Generic Summer Blockbuster. Sure, Terminator Salvation (the lack of a colon is killing me) has terminators. Tons of terminators. Or at least things that look like terminators. You know, chrome skeletons with red eyes. Clank, clank.
Here’s where the problems start: In the previous installments in the franchise, the glimpses of the future we’ve seen have been horrific—people cowering like animals in underground tunnels while Skynet’s hunter-killers roam the sky. Intense stuff. But in Terminator Salvation the resistance has a freaking air force. And a submarine. OK. And apparently nuclear annihilation will just leave some cool ruins behind. No radiation, no messed up weather. OK. And apparently a lot of survivors aren’t even part of the resistance; they’re just hanging out getting their Mad Max on. Sigh.
No matter how sweaty Christian Bale gets, this is not gritty.
But what really, really brings on the headache is the complete asinine stupidity of Skynet. Oh, sure, they can build terminators, but apparently they can’t make them actually kill anybody without first giving them a chance to find the right gun or tool to dispatch the terminator. This whole pushing people around thing is just bullying, not terminating. Look it up, Skynet. I know you have a dictionary built in.
The terminator programming basically seems to be: sneak up on somebody (ti-hi!) then give them a shove and wait a bit so they have time to think.
But OK. Moving on.
Then there’s Skynet’s insistence on building in displays and terminals for humans to use in their super-heavily defended base. (Which, incidentally, is very easy to get into for people who want kill their d00ds.)
I know, I know, I’m overthinking this. But you know, I don’t know the exact budget for this thing, but you’d think they could have spent a few thousand on somebody to come in and point out the places where things are just way too freaking stupid.
So yeah, it’s called Terminator Salvation without-a-colon, but it could just as well have been called Independence Day or Transformers. Same generic crap.
Clap when stuff blows up, monkey boy, clap!
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I’ve been meaning to post my own issues with the film, but since you did, I’ll just tack onto yours. Whee!
First read this, and I think it will explain some of the plot issues like: why in hell would they be collecting people up rather than just killing them?
http://chud.com/articles/articles/19577/1/EXCLUSIVE-WHAT-WENT-WRONG-WITH-TERMINATOR-SALVATION/Page1.html
Okay, so beyond what the movie could have been before Bale made them cast him as John Connor:
The motorcycle terminators have this super advanced object recognition and avoidance programming that allows them to avoid even small bits of debris traveling at high rates of speed and do acrobatics to avoid them. But somehow that programming doesn’t work on a rope stretched across the road.
Apparently t600s didn’t get this advanced object recognition tied into their targeting systems because they can’t hit the broadside of a barn with a fucking gatling gun.
I guess the same molten metal used to make the t800 somehow isn’t hot enough to actually melt one, despite the fact that in the second movie, they destroy one with molten steel. Not only is it not hot enough to melt its frame, it’s also not hot enough apparently to melt any computer components within the frame, or destroy any hydraulic fluids, lubricants or seals.
It is nice to see that skynet has standardized around USB though.
Apparently any terminator in a hundred mile radius will hear a loud stereo, but I guess its no big deal to fly around in fucking planes. I guess there’s been enough jet fuel left over from judgement day that the resistance can afford to just have a couple of military aircraft randomly patrolling. Skynet was just stretched too thin to go out and secure the remaining military assets that weren’t destroyed in judgement day despite ostensibly having records of where all of it was stored or deployed.
Also, I guess skynet only really has about 5 hunter killers and none of them were on duty around skynet central when the resistance decided to fly in and pull out connor.
Apparently skynet thought the best course of action for killing john connor was to send just one unarmed beta model t800 against a person who has killed or reprogrammed every other killing machine you’ve sent against him since he was a teenager. I guess their whole army of t600s were out in the wastelands shooting at stuff and missing.
A heart transplant, from a donor of dubious qualification, in the middle of the desert, without a sterile operating theater or bypass machine (Is heart disease still the #1 killer of humans? I thought it was nuclear weapons). I hope there’s enough anti-rejection meds left in the world to last the most-important-human-alive for the rest of his life.
I watched T1 again the other day, and remembered what was so great about it: hopelessness. Not only was Sarah confused and scared for her life watching this machine tear through a police station (if a building full of heavily armed police can’t protect you, who can?), but Kyle Reese, the dude who’s been sent to save you, who’s used to dealing with these things, is completely terrified of it. It will never stop until you’re dead.
A future where John Connor has been killing terminators for most of his life, and where 16 year olds kill them by dropping masonry on them just sucks all of the menace out of the movie. We know they can be killed, and it’s not really even all that hard. In a way, the terminators have become the bumbling bad guy who just got lucky with those nukes, but by golly, humanity in all its awesomeness will prevail. In T1, it was really just dumb luck that they managed to kill it, not humanity’s undying will to overcome adversity.
Good link. Does a good job of explaining how things got so neutered.
And yes, you hit a really good point: It’s not that hard to kill terminators in this movie, and that really sucks the menace out of them.
I really wish I hadn’t seen this movie.