Terminator Salvation

The Terminator is back and back with far less bang than the 200 million bucks it cost to make. A CGI infested boreathon, incapable of conjuring even a modicum of the suspense or terror that made the first two so fantastic and the third at least watchable.

Christian Bale, adopting a slightly less irritating grunt than in The Dark Knight, is the grown up resistance hero John Conner, humanities best chance of survival against the machines. His task, in this convoluted plot, is to find his father Kyle Reese and send him back in time to save his mother, Sarah Conner, from a beefed up mechanical Austrian with one liners almost as deadly as his pump action shotgun.

Unlike the average sequel come prequel, this instalment of the Terminator franchise is set in the post apocalyptic future, after the destruction caused by Judgement Day.

While the part of my brain dedicated to the understanding of time travel is around the same size as the part that understands why anyone outside of West Lothian cares about Susan Boyle, I can still see why this was a story that needed to be told.

From the maniacal ramblings of Reese and Conner in the first two films, Judgement Day itself had started to feel like a myth, as if Terminator 1 was all a dream thought up in Sarah Conner’s padded cell. In T3 we find out it does take place and T4 seemed like the perfect opportunity to show how humans banded together under the guidance of their messiah. Instead they don’t band together and Conner goes head to head with his commander, played by Michael Ironside, in a gung hoe role so clichéd it makes my lungs deflate.

Somehow the humans find a signal frequency that will turn off all the machines quickidy split and form a plan bomb the cyborg headquarters sky high and end the war. Conner, aided by a super duper jazzed up Terminator/human hybrid and armed with his, “We’re Better Than Machines Because We Have Emotions” phrase book, finds something morally wrong with bombing the facility, which is filled with people, and charges in at the crack of dawn to try and save the day.

The action sequences are long, dull and unoriginal, with most borrowed from Transformers and IRobot. It even borrows from its previous films, throwing in lines and scenes with all the subtlety and imagination of a fart joke, only with a more pungent stink. With the decision to divert almost all animatronics to the CGI department, instead of the clunky, rigid, relentlessness of previous terminators, these machines wouldn’t look out of place prancing around in a skate park on a new Citron C2 advert.

Then there are other annoyances, like why nobody seems to see or hear a 50 metre wide robot plane hovering overhead, until it fires at something that explodes. Or why everyone in 2018 will have to introduce themselves by their full name, with a knowing look into the camera that screams, “John Conner, yes you know John Conner from the first three films and the last hour of this movie. Yes! That John Conner. Oh you still don’t get it, okay I’ll say it again in half an hour.”

Terminator Salvation is utterly disappointing, the questions about human’s relationship with technology totally ignored in favour of a flaky script, dime-a-dozen explosions and a grotesque amount of green screen. Or maybe it has answered the question inadvertently by showing how a film caked in technology can bore humanity into submission. Let’s just hope The Terminator will not “be back” again.