I’m amazed that somebody didn’t veto the beginning and ending of
Terminator Salvation, the fourth and least successful movie in
the 25-year-old franchise. Director McG starts and ends his film so
badly that most of the life is sucked out of the ever-important middle
part.

Overall, Salvation isn’t a complete waste. There’s some
interesting stuff here, and while Christian Bale is given relatively
little to do as the new John Connor, he’s a good actor who might be
able to do more with the role in future chapters. My vote would be to
keep Bale, but jettison McG and his writers. While Terminator
Salvation looks interesting, it lacks soul and suffers from
mundane, sloppy storytelling.

Things start off horribly, with Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a
death-row inmate in the early 21st century, getting visited by an ill
scientist (Helena Bonham Carter) who requests that he donate his body
to science. The dialogue is so awful that it left me with a true sense
of dread: Was the whole picture going to be this bad?

The answer, thankfully, is no. The film has its moments and features
some good-looking man-versus-machine battles. The action picks up in
the future, after the nuclear war that ravaged the planet at the end of
the mediocre but slightly superior Terminator 3: Rise of the
Machines, which, oddly, featured only a slight hint of the
machines.

This film, in contrast, has machines aplenty, with iconic metallic
skeleton robots, motorcycle terminators and big
Transformers-looking bastards snatching up humans for nasty
reasons. In fact, there may be too many machines in the film, because
the human element is almost completely lost.

Meanwhile, Bale is stuck shooting at things, yelling from time to
time, and listening to an old-school tape recorder playing the rambling
warnings of his mother, Sarah (still the voice of Linda Hamilton).
Don’t you think Connor would’ve transferred these treasured tapes to
something more durable?

Bale’s character is more of a plot device than an actual human
being. Worthington’s Wright is given some of the film’s only depth for
reasons that the advertising campaign has had no problem revealing. (I
will refrain from explaining in case you don’t watch television.)

There is a much-ballyhooed cameo appearance by a certain California
governor, thanks to a body mold made by Stan Winston during production
of the first Terminator film. The moment he appears is arguably
the film’s best, but it is ultra-short. Anton Yelchin serves as the
film’s best potential element as Kyle Reese, the man who will
eventually become John Connor’s father. While Yelchin is very good, the
script fails him by shoving his character off to the side.

If you visit Internet movie chat groups, you probably read about the
leaked ending, and how the director allegedly changed it to throw off
the gossip-mongers. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that the
leaked ending seemed better than what ultimately transpired in this
film. The conclusion is hokey, misplaced and poorly conceived.

Producers need to dump McG and hire somebody like Ridley Scott or
J.J. Abrams to get this franchise back on track. Terminator
Salvation is a good-looking but empty-headed entry from a director
who favors style over substance. Some action franchises require a
better balancing act, and Terminator is one of them.

This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2009.