Terminating

We went to see Terminator Salvation tonight. I was a bit worried going in. I love Terminator films. I even liked T3 the first time I watched it (not so much the second time round).

I was excited by the idea of this film because I love apocalyptic movies. I love trained men with guns. I love killer robots. I get a little frustrated by the films' continual ability to say "We thought we killed SkyNet, but oops we didn't." Which is partly why I loved the end of T3. If nothing else the end and the crane and fire truck chase were way cool.

But sadly Terminator Salvation isn't really that good. Sam Worthington had a cool character. At least, if they'd not written the whole bit about him being a death-row convict with a need for redemption he would have been cool. I love the idea of the man who finds out he's a robot. I'm sure it's been done in another film but I can't remember what.

There were some cool helicopters, guns and planes. The whole thing looked great. The special effects weren't too shabby at all. But the whole film kinda feels like no one was putting in any effort. There was a lot of potential quality action, but it didn't really get there.

And while all the other films had a sense of fun to them, especially T2 and T3, this one had maybe one joke. On the other hand there was plenty of dumb over simplification and humanising of machines don't need to be humanised. Why would a bunch of robots need a graphical interface to deal with when they can just communicate wirelessly in ones and zeros? What machines type in access codes to open doors? And why do we need to have a scene where the computer tells another computer the whole back story, character motivation and plot of the film? Bah!

I was always worried that they handed the job to McG to make the movie. He's made three films before this: Charlie's Angels, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and We Are Marshall. Would you think these are safe hands to put the Terminator franchise in? Even Jonathan Mostow had a better resume.

I guess every summer season has to have it's disappointments, and this is one of them.

Still I haven't given up on the world of the Terminator future wars yet. If they learn from their mistakes the next film could be cool. Christian Bale is pretty special, even if he seemed rather bored through out this film. He could be a good John Connor. I have hope for the future.