Terminator: Salvation

I watched this movie on blu-ray, a 50-inch tv screen, and with a very nice surround-sound setup. I say that because I don't think the movie would've been half as impactful otherwise (this is a bad thing). The immersion was stunning, and all the more so in comparison with how the movie felt on my little home LCD screen with simple stereo (and which in itself was still a big jump from the tube set I had before). To give a concrete example, the first ten minutes of the movie end with a big explosion, and as we are lulled into watching Christian Bale take stock of his surroundings there's a jump-scare as a terminator hand lands on his shoulder. Watching it on my TV at home, I thought, "Oh." On the 50 inch screen, knowing it was coming, I jumped in my seat.

And despite the stunning audio-visual setup, this film was pretty bad. Sure, the movie cost millions upon millions of dollars, and the visual effects are getting ever-closer to photo-realism, but the core of this story was simply too hollow to sustain itself for almost two hours. The whole terminator franchise is now tied to a superfluous idea of time travel continuums, which is never explored in this new movie beyond, "you have to save this person, or you're not going to be born!" (I think). As we complicated film-buffs know, there's other ways to invest yourself in a character's actions, time-travel not being a very popular choice. The idea is that John Connor (Christian Bale), who we've seen as either yet-to-be conceived, as a kid, and as a young adult in the first three terminator movies, is now an adult leading the human resistance against a world dominated by "Skynet," an evil artificial intelligence with an army of terminator robots at its command.

The walk-away impression I got from the movie was that there's a really neat, Max Max-style sequel that was struggling under the weight of the previous terminator movies. We're meant to believe that a human "resistance" has been fighting against the terminators for a decade or so (my timeline's a bit shaky). Remember that opening scene from the second terminator movie, once James Cameron had a bit of budget to burn? We saw a big, trench-warfare style fight between humans and the terminators. Things were pretty evenly matched.

Well, to some degree that fight continues as envisioned. Except things aren't looking up for the humans. At all. We're told that there are only two people left defending all of LA, and they consist of a teenager and a mute child (whose character is never explained) who traipse around the city, springing elaborate metal traps on chaingun-weilding terminators. They've been doing this for ten years? And yet they haven't been able to fix a small, transistor radio, which would've tuned them into John Connor's regular broadcasts.

Good sci-fi rarely takes the time to explain every niggling detail of the imaginary world that it invents. It instead has to create a suspension of disbelief through a combination of atmosphere and a drip of details about why human existence in the future is different. When we watch even the well-equipped arm of the resistance be simply annihilated by giant robots, it's hard to believe that a bunch of lower-level resistance people are eeking out an existence at a gas station. But going into the details of why this movie universe doesn't "work" would be beside the point, as it's just indicative of the lack of emotional investment in the characters.

Christian Bale does a fine job for the most part with what he's given to say. There's a funny moment where he's basically doing a deep-voice contest between him and Michael Ironside, but his pregnant pauses and hard looks give you a good idea of how difficult this conflict has been on him (as well as the camera crew...)

Jake Worthington plays a death-row inmate who has mysteriously come back to life years after his execution, and he may or may not be the key to saving humanity (spoiler: he is the key). Most of the other characters are forgettable, especially Connor's pregnant wife, who has a couple wretched line-deliveries and an unexplained pregnancy.

Oh, wait. I forgot why we all came to see this movie.

"I'll be back...if my worldwide returns are good enough."