After the Skynet computer defense system gained consciousness and bombarded humanity with atomic bombs, bleak times descended upon Earth. The survivors wage a continuous war against robots, the robots hunt humans, and there seems to be no end in sight to this battle of life against colored metals in a nuclear wasteland. This grim equilibrium is destined to be disrupted by one of the Resistance leaders, John Connor. During a raid on a Skynet base, he discovers access codes to the radio frequencies on which the Terminators receive commands. The Resistance begins preparing for a decisive offensive, but Connor is more concerned about something else. Holding a photograph of Sarah Connor, he contemplates how to save a young man named Kyle Reese, who, by traveling to the past, is destined to become his father. Soon, Connor will have a strange ally who also wants to take care of the guy – someone named Marcus, a criminal sentenced to death before the Skynet bombings, who, in a way unknown to himself, awakens in the apocalyptic future after his execution instead of the afterlife.
A Shift in Focus
For those who have missed the Terminator franchise over the past two decades, rest assured – director McG’s promised appearance of Arnold Schwarzenegger does indeed happen. Not in person, of course, but computer technology provides a fairly decent copy of the Austrian Oak. However, the real surprise isn’t the eternally young T800, but rather that “Terminator Salvation” feels more akin to “Pearl Harbor” (2001) than its predecessors. McG has crafted a large-scale war film, complete with battles in the air and at sea, landing operations, minefields, and everything else that the genre entails. The fact that the opposing side isn’t fascists in helmets, but rather rusty, bloodthirsty bots, doesn’t change things significantly.
The Human Element
This epic militaristic scope puts the actors in an odd position. In American war films, Stanislavski lies with his feet towards the explosion and doesn’t flinch. Therefore, Christian Bale, playing Connor, the hope of humanity, and Anton Yelchin, playing Reese, like everyone else, mostly sport a military expression and showcase their athletic (and military) physique. Something similar happened with the third “Matrix” film. In a way, this is convenient – you can focus on the Terminators, of which there are many and all are different. The most unpleasant is the aquatic one, resembling a steel eel. The fastest is the motorcycle Terminator. The scariest is the 15-meter-tall Harvester. The military attraction races along the atomic roller coaster almost non-stop, and who is looking at whose photograph, and who is looking for whom, becomes completely irrelevant.
The Abstract Threat
What becomes important is saving humanity – something too abstract to empathize with. Ultimately, the first film wasn’t about time travel or giant humanoid robots. “The Terminator” (1984) told, in B-movie language, the story of a human’s battle with an angel of destruction. “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991) was about an angel of destruction who decided not to destroy. Good and evil had such a visible and ruthless form in them that achieving a similar effect afterwards seems to have only been accomplished by the Coen brothers, who unleashed Anton Chigurh onto the screen.
In “Terminator Salvation,” the angels of destruction are simply dangerous pieces of metal, and Skynet is no longer a sinister i-God, but just a supercomputer.
In his own way, McG has rebooted the Terminator saga in the most relevant way. There is no one to empathize with, the war with Skynet has no end, and humanity, like the viewer, can only watch in admiration as the bombs explode.