Todd Terwilliger

Bless me, readers, for I have sinned. It’s been a month since my last confession. Over a month, actually, but what a busy, busy month it’s been. I’m still chewing over my Cannes 2009 experience- the meat of it still churning slowly through my digestive tract. In the meantime, over the long weekend, I watched Terminator: Salvation and could only conclude my viewing with a single thought: when did John Connor become a complete and monstrous prick?

I will spoil just about everything that can be spoiled in my… let’s call it “analysis” below, so reader beware!

First things first. The future promised by The Terminator and Terminator 2 is not the future of Salvation. Sure, on the surface, both sets of humanity had been bombed back to the Stone Age but whereas, in the slight glimpses offered by the earlier films, humanity was living the desperate existence of a beast, the humanity of the realized future has jets, helicopters, and nuclear submarines. Are they desperate? Yeah. But it’s not the same sort of clawing feverishly at death, huddled by the fire, afraid of the dark sort of desperate I was expecting.

Aside #1: on the subject of fires, why must every bombed out urban location have a complement of untended, undying fires? What is this unquenchable fuel and why can’t we harness it as a power source? Who is tending these fires? And what the devil for?

Thrown into this not-quite-as-nightmarish-as-expected firestorm is a guy from the past. Don’t ask me why- it’s never explained in any way that makes any sort of sense- and he quickly finds himself in the middle of things, meeting up with the not-yet-portrayed-by-Michael-Biehn Kyle Reese. For the record, Kyle Reese’s father is a ponce. I know this because Kyle tells dude that his dad couldn’t fix the radio. A minute later, dude fixes the radio. The next morning, Kyle says his dad couldn’t fix the car. A minute later, dude fixes the car. Either Kyle’s dad was an idiot or this guy is McGyver and since this guy looks nothing like Richard Dean Anderson, I can only conclude that the senior Mr. Reese was a ponce. Case closed.

Aside #2: as much as humanity is living in armageddon, they don’t seem to lack for fuel. The car that dude fixes seemingly has a full tank of unleaded and a juiced up battery. Nobody lacks for getting around the landscape – our not-so-dynamic duo later run into some hobos with a full tanker truck – which might explain why, in this future, neither Lord Humongous nor Master Blaster rose to prominence.

In the meantime, John Connor is brooding. Oh, that brooding brooder. He knows the machines are after him. The machines know that he knows they’re after him. And he knows that the machines know. And we know. And if we didn’t know, the film is eager to tell us, over and over and over again. Clearly both the machines and Mr. Connor subscribe to the Great Man theory of history because they are both obsessed with little else but the destruction of John Connor. Connor, at this point, isn’t even the technical leader of the resistance, even though he’s the only one with a radio talk show and can put the kibosh on a nuclear strike with the merest of winks, a nod, and a throaty chirp. Yet tapes of mom and some nefarious machine database must have convinced both sides, though not, interestingly, high commander Michael Ironsides, that Connor is the heart of the resistance (remember this reference for later).

It was inevitable that our dude from the past and Connor would meet up and they do, but not before young Reese is hustled off to Skynet City (nobody gets in to see Skynet! Not nobody, not no how!) and not before we all find out that dude is a machine. A machine with a heart of gold. No, a machine with the heart of a man, and the brain of a man, but the rest of a machine. They don’t mention his nethers. I don’t ask.

With a young Vader-esque scream, we’re introduced to the great question of the film: what makes a man a man. Deep, philosophical, and more worn out than an old shoe. This has been done before, done to death, and done much better elsewhere. The entire premise makes no sense from the machine point of view. And they go through great lengths to explain it later but, sorry Helena Bonham Carter, it makes no sense at all. I lost brain cells just trying to comprehend it. It just doesn’t belong in the Terminator universe and if it did, it needs much more attention and setup than it got. It just doesn’t fit.

Fast forward to the climax- Connor and the Accidental Terminator go Tango & Cash, storming Skynet City to save Reese. Really, the only reason Connor cares about Reese is because he knows his own life is tied to Reese’s. That’s it. Like I said, Connor is a prick. For some reason, the machines, who made the Accidental Terminator, now have to convince him to follow their plans. Yes, convince him- despite their mass-murdering reputations, the machines are a cordial bunch, at least amongst their own.

In a city built, owned, operated, and populated by terminators, our heroes have only to contend with one of them (though a cool-looking Arnold version) as they literally fight through and around a factory building terminators. Our guys escape but not without paying a price, Connor is mortally wounded. His heart, you see, was impaled on a metal stake.

But wait! The Accidental Terminator, he’s got a heart, a strong heart (they told us so), and he decides he only wanted a second chance and this is it (I guess saving Reese and what’s left of Connor didn’t count) so he’ll give his super-heart to Connor so he might live. And guess what? Connor nods his head, agreeing. Not even putting up a token argument. He wants that heart- you can see it in his beady machine-killing eyes. Like I said, Connor is a massive prick. Roll the credits.

I skipped over pretty much all the action sequences. They were good. No complaints there. Well, nothing I want to discuss here at any rate. The problem, like my as-yet-unpublished issues with the Star Trek reboot, is the plotting. It starts from a ridiculous premise and nothing was going to change that, original ending or new ending, Bale rewrites or no Bale rewrites.

The promise of the premise (to borrow a Save The Cat! term) was to see the full on terminator-human war. We never get it. Everything is small scale. Maybe if I hadn’t, in my mind, the flash-forwards from T1 and T2 to compare it to, it might not have bothered me but I had and it did. I can’t unsee what I have seen.

I can’t turn my brain off either and I don’t try. I want my action but I want it smart. Salvation couldn’t deliver that. I’m not sure, a couple of months from now, what I’ll remember about this film at all- maybe the anabolically juiced Arnold terminator, I suppose, if I was pressed, at gunpoint, to remember something, anything. That and, oh yeah, John Conner- what a complete and monstrous prick.

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