Tha-thunk thunk tha-thunk. Tha-thunk thunk ta-thunk – he’ll be back. Well, actually he isn’t if you catch my drift, well, not entirely, but some of his mates are. With McG wielding the megaphone the latest installment of the Terminator franchise wasn’t exactly the most anticipated summer movie of the year but I think a secret excitement was building at the prospect of returning to the tech-noir time jumping genre hybrid which cemented the careers of some of the biggest American film action talents of the past twenty years. Ignoring the lamentable ‘Terminator 3′ the first two movies remain classics of their kind, the first as a regular staple of any movie fan’s viewing habits of the 80’s and the second as a benchmark moment in the development of new SFX that will be culminated in Cameron’s return to the big screen come December. That fusion of state of the art action with vaguely arresting paradoxes have always struck me as one of the films enduring qualities, has McG corrected the course of the franchise and delivered a new contemporary classic of its kind? In a word, no. No he hasn’t.
A prologue in 2003 introduces us to Marcus Wright, a death row prisoner who signs away his body to medical science following the pleas of the cancer stricken Dr. Kogan (a thoroughly unexpected Helena Bonham Carter), a senior scientist for the recently USAF acquired Cyberdine Systems – yes, we’ve heard of those jokers before. After Wright bites the needle we flash forward to post holocaust 2018 with mankind’s last struggle against the merciless Skynet in full swing, our last hope resting in the guise of John Conner (Christian Bale, broodily angry as usual) has acquired an ultimate weapon that can disable the mechanoids battle machines, a WMD that represents humanity’s last chance of survival. The arrival of a confused Wright, no older than the day he was executed some fifteen years before challenges Conner’s understanding of the future he was led to believe, is this Skynet’s last coup de grâce on the exhausted militia or an omen of a unseen, uncertain future?
Overall it’s an unfortunate waste. The post ‘Judgement Day’ west coast irridated USA could have been a potent playground for taking the franchise forward, genre fans like yours truly were always keen to see the dimensions of the furtive battles against our robotic overlords. Whilst it delivers some faintly impressive set-pieces – it’s not the utter travesty that was predicted – it clunks from one encounter to another with virtually nothing in-between, no context for the struggle, no examination of the burden that a self proclaimed saviour of mankind would endure and most critically no tangible grasp of the time skipping anomalies that could take the tale into uncharted waters. I don’t want to sound too churlish about this, at the end of the day it’s a big, bombastic action movie not a Cassavettes or Sayles character piece but I was hoping for more of a mariage of kinetics with intellect.
Stylistically it’s the stalwart bleached film texture coupled with hand-held immediacy which seems de rigour for any movie with a $50 million plus budget made since ‘Saving Private Ryan‘ over a decade ago – can’t we move on? The film-makers chuck a few of the iconic lines in from previous installments (although they missed the finest dialogue exchange of the entire series, if they’d made her the correct Sarah Connor, that would have been interesting…) to warm the cockles of every fanboys heart and I’ll concur that the film does improve somewhat in the final act with a stealthy incursion into the heart of Skynet offering some genuine excitement and thrills (including an amusing CGI rendered cameo from a certain mono-syllabic politician) but it’s all too little too late. One of the more interesting aspects of the series – the time travel loop and its consequences – is paid mere lip service which was for me the films main failing. If you removed the Terminator mythos aspects of the plot you’d be left with little more than a mid-1980’s direct to video action-SF number which is all well and good if you’re in the mood for that, personally given the series previous achievements I was hoping for a little more substance. Just to be obvious, yes, here is a link to the films real cause célèbre, well it made me laugh……
