Rage Against The Machines

Terminator Salvation is the first film in the Terminator series to take place in the future, and yet its solely obsessed with the past. The action takes place in 2018, when intelligent machines have nearly eradicated human beings from the planet. The only thing standing in their way is resistance fighter John Connor (Christian Bale), whose inspirational speeches and daring raids on robot strongholds are the human race’s sole source of hope. But the machines have an ace up their sleeve: if they can kill the human soldier Kyle Reese in 2018 before Connor can send him back in time (which he did in the first movie), then Reese won’t be able to impregnate Connor’s mother Sarah, which means Connor will never be born, which means the resistance will never exist either. Theoretically, anyway. As Sarah Connor remarks on one of the cassette tapes that John still obsessively listens to every night, “You could hurt your head thinking about this stuff.”

So... the mission of Terminator Salvation is to make sure that the first three movies — which clearly already exist and which we’ve already seen — still happen. In other words, the movie is deliberately designed to do nothing more than tread water; it’s like one of those filler episodes from the third season of Lost — one of the Sun/Jin episodes, perhaps — that do nothing but show you backstory that you’ve already pieced together on your own.

James Cameron has taken a lot of ribbing for the terrible dialogue filling the screenplay of Titanic, but there’s no denying his gift for writing instantly iconic action characters. In Cameron’s first two Terminator films, we got Sarah Connor, the T-800 Terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the liquid-metal T-1000 played by Robert Patrick — all of them vivid, larger-than-life characters with specific, unusual personalities, even the robots. But John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris, who took over writing the series after Terminator 2, have yet to come up with a single memorable character — and the only memorable lines in Terminator Salvation are the self-conscious reprises of Cameron catchphrases: “Come with me if you want to live,” “I’ll be back.”

The bit that got the biggest audience reaction the night I saw Terminator Salvation came during Arnold Schwarzenegger’s brief cameo as a T-800 prototype: Bale hits him, and Schwarzenegger, completely unhurt, cocks his head at him with that perfect mix of surprise, amusement, condescension, and menace. Schwarzenegger may not have had much range as an actor, but he had movie-star charisma to burn, and he strode through this kind of material with a marvelously unpretentious air of confidence that makes Christian Bale's grim, unrelenting intensity look ridiculous.

The problem is compounded by Bale’s co-star, Sam Worthington, who plays an android who may hold the key to defeating the robots, and whose performance is even more joyless than Bale’s. What this movie needed instead — this is going to sound crazy, but hear me out — is someone like Matthew McConaughey, who starred opposite Bale in the very similar post-apocalyptic dragon-fighting thriller Reign of Fire, and gave that movie a welcome jolt of good-ol’-boy energy.

I don’t suppose there’s a way for the two movies’ universes to cross over, is there? Some unexpected side effect of all that time travel? A Star Trek-style alternate universe, maybe? Aaah, forget it: you could hurt your head thinking about this stuff.