On Saturday I dragged Sam to watch Terminator Salvation.  I always feel bad when I campaign (although weakly) to see a film and then it turns out badly.  But wait, I just gave you a spoiler (it sucks!).  There are more spoilers below.

 

below here

 

 

 

yes..down here…

 

 

okay, now that you’ve been sufficiently warned, I’ll commence with the McGeneric movie bashing.  I have no doubt that McG tried his hardest to return the Terminator franchise to glory. However, the problem is that McG has no idea what he is doing.  His last action film involved Cameron Diaz throwing fake punches and flirting with Bernie Mac.

Then again, Jim Cameron’s last film before Terminator was “Piranha!” and he seemed to be able to figure it out.

The biggest problem with Terminator 4 is that the terminators don’t…well… terminate.  At several points in the film we’re told Kyle Reese is the number one highest guy on the Skynet kill list.  Then when they catch him they do what… not kill him, but use him to lure in his son … so they can kill his son…  Umm… did I miss something here?  If you killed Kyle Reese the first time you ID’d him, wouldn’t that kill John Connor?

Some people described the new Star Trek as a film that is hard to watch if you care for accuracy.  These people would run out of Terminator Salvation with their eyes and ears bleeding.  Lets have a go, shall we?

Why does Arnold’s CG face make a cameo as the “new” terminator model just minutes after skynet explains to Marcus that they’ve “been trying and trying and failed at all previous (time travel) experiments.”  If you know the T-800 is going to fail, why are you still building it??

Why would skynet headquarters, a place to #1 house the central computer “brain” for skynet and also manufacture terminators have a human computer interface.  Also, why would the assembly area have pipes with shut-off valve wheels made for human hands to turn.  There is a particular shot where we watched an elevator go up and down and you can see at least three of these valve wheels in the shot… I was ready to jump up and down!  The answer is probably that the director knew only a few people (like me) would notice, and whatever power plant they filmed the scenes in would never let them actually take apart the pipes.  To CG the valve handles/wheels would have been another expense…

Anyway, the elevator scene was another example of how McG chose to include numerous allusions to other terminator films and in fact all Jim Cameron films.  There is a particularly obvious wink to any fan of Aliens near the end (except the recipient of the spike through the chest in this movie doesn’t get ripped apart afterwards).

After the movie even more inconsistencies with the story would hit me in waves.  Anyone around me must have had an enormous amount of patience.

For example:  Why would skynet kill Kyle Reese?  (try to follow me here, obviously McG couldn’t)  If you kill Kyle Reese he never goes back in time to impregnate Sarah Connor.  That is good for skynet, right?  WRONG… If the first terminator never has to come back through time, the microchip in its crushed arm would never be discovered – and skynet would never even be created.  John Connor and Kyle Reese in fact HAVE to exist (in the past) for skynet to exist in the present.  Now perhaps maybe this is why skynet lures John Connor into it’s headquarters by using Kyle (and this is why they don’t kill Kyle immediately).  

Okay, so kill John as soon as he walks in the building, you know where he is, you showed Marcus…  (which reminds me, why does skynet have a big TV to talk to Marcus with?)

Also, it would be incredibly easy to kill John, after all, we’ve been told throughout the entire first 75% of the movie that Skynet’s headquarters and in fact the whole city of San Francisco is impenetrable.  So, why is it that John is able to just waltz in…and then keep waltzing around?  Why is it that there is only one terminator there to stop him (yes, ONE)?  (p.s. we know there are several terminators at headquarters because we watched them herd the humans in in an earlier scene, remember?)

Once again we’ve found another movie that is inconsistent in it’s own rules.  Terminators are supposed to stop at nothing to kill their target.  Repeatedly the ONE terminator around trying to kill John in THEIR HEADQUARTERS is more content with just picking up John and throwing him than crushing his neck.  We see inconsistencies with the rules much much earlier though.  How about how any sound in the open desert brings around terminators, so much so that “central command” for the resistance hides their noise by operating out of a submarine?  This rule is established several times.  Right up until we see John napalm his own backyard at the other (???) resistance headquarters.   Nobody seems the least bit worried about all that noise.  There is more and more and more, but I’ll move onto another complaint.

Marcus, you wake up more than a decade after your own execution and never think to question why you don’t need to sleep, pee, eat or do anything a human would do.  And then when you’re blown open to see your computer innards you’re shocked beyond belief… how stupid are you?  Also, my goodness, how did you survive that atomic bomb blast in the opening scene?  You just walked right out of the fire (later that night) with some mud.  You and Indiana Jones should swap atom bombing stories, he needed a fridge to survive one, you just needed mud apparently

Add to this the horrible cheesiness of the story, the expensive but cheap looking CG work on the “large sets” and you’ve got yourself a disaster.  The first half hour was okay.  The opening scene complete with “one long shot” of the helicopter crashing was impressive, although I was hoping this wasn’t what McG had referred to on his blog as “something new and amazing I hope we can pull off.”  It was.

Obviously I could write more words about the problems with this film than the number of words in the script.

To erase the travesty from our memories, Sam took me to a “secret” beach in Malibu.  It isn’t secret, but it is a public access hallway hidden in all the beachfront homes on the west side of the PCH.  After we walked through and got situated we slowly realized that paparazzi were coagulating in front of us in order to shoot someone in a home behind us.  Every now and then some guy would come out and say “she isn’t coming out, just go away” – but they wouldn’t, and so we did.  Before we left though I saw something more engrossing than a pampered celebrity – a dolphin!  In fact, we saw a whole family of them heading north along the shore.  Although they were more clearly visible to the naked eye I tried to get a shot with Sam’s (brand new) point and shoot camera (I had left mine at home).  The result is below: