Terminator: Salvation (2009, McG)

"Two day old coyote. It's better than three day old coyote." -Kyle Reese, Terminator: Salvation (2009)

In the words of comic book artist Jhonen Vasquez, "Terminator: Salvation the movie was no Terminator: Salvation the trailer."

There's been a lot of hype and anticipation for this latest installment in what has become the Terminator franchise. The first film launched the career of James Cameron; the sequel was a technological masterpiece. A decade later, Jonathan Mostow's workmanlike effort of the third in the series was forgettable at best, and appeared to signal not only the death knell of Arnold Schwarzenegger's acting career, but also that of the Terminator films itself, ostensibly coming one film too late.

So the announcement of a new trilogy several years after that came as a shock to most. The news that followed was a series of ups and downs: the film would take place in the future, and focus on John Connor and the war against Skynet and the machines, up; McG was selected to direct, down; Christian Bale was cast as John Connor, up; McG was still directing the picture, down. Then the trailers began to hit, and damn it if they didn't look promising and like a big step forward for McG's directing career. Simultaneously, one had to remember that this was going to be an action picture after all, and thus McG couldn't screw it up too much. And his football movie We Are Marshall had been a big step forward itself from his previous Charlie's Angels pictures. On top of everything else, the involvement of Jonathan Nolan, screenwriter of the recent Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale Batman films, as a script re-writer/editor held some degree of promise.

And so I went into the film, expectations buoyed by the trailer even in light of the publicized Bale rant, hoping that the discovery contained in the trailer that Marcus was a cyborg wouldn't spoil the film. The short answer is that it doesn't-- it's fairly obvious from the opening of T:S, even though the film simultaneously telegraphs this dynamic while also trying to use it as a surprise about an hour into the film. I'm also very happy to report that McG doesn't screw up the film; he does an admirable job of stepping up to the plate and hitting the action sequences out of the park. However, one can still hold him ultimately responsible for the reasons the film fails.

And that pair of reasons are screenwriters John Brancato and Michael Ferris, and overinflated star Christian Bale. Brancato and Ferris were responsible for Mostow's substandard third Terminator film, so why anyone would begin a new iteration of the series with their shoddy writing is beyond me. Yet, there were a few ballsy, near-genius ideas in their early drafts, but those ideas were jettisoned once Bale came on board. It seems the original draft had Conner barely seen throughout the film, leading the resistance largely by radio broadcasts, and then dying at the end of the film, with his face being transplanted onto cyborg Wright. Thus it was Wright who would go on to lead the resistance in the guise of Conner, and become the future hero that the first films had led us all to believe was Conner's destiny. Once these plot details were leaked, internet bloggers and fanboys were up in arms, decrying what seemed to be a betrayal of the Terminator audience and the already-established Terminator history.

Then there was Bale, who declined the offered role of Marcus Wright and insisted on playing John Conner, and then on having the script rewritten and revised to beef up the Conner role. This meant that subplots developing both the Wright and Reese characters were truncated, replaced by unnecessary and extraneous scenes of Conner yelling and taking charge. And quite frankly, as good an actor as Bale is, his angry grumbling/muttering act has worn its course and reached the point of semi-self-parody. While it's possible and even likely that Conner dying and Brancato and Ferris' planned twist would have angered many an audience, it was also the biggest ambition their screenplay boasted. By eliminating this detail and rewriting per Bale's specifications, the project resulted in the worst and most mechanical of what all three writers had to offer.

And while all of this story structure tug-of-war was going on, it seems no one was on dialogue detail. What remains is a B-movie with some fantastic action and laughable dialogue, that never does anything beyond treading water. And bookending the visually inspired action sequences are a somewhat painful and belabored opening focusing on Marcus Wright and the poorly-served Helena Bonham Carter, and a castrated version of the orginal ending that lacks any real emotional resonance or sense of purpose. It manages to set up the rest of the new trilogy with about as much promise as it destroyed for itself over the course of its own production, but the actual production of the rest of the announced trilogy now seems unlikely, as the box office for the first installment has been a big disappointment for the studio.

Still, while nowhere in the realm of T2, and not even matching the lower-budgeted yet oft-inspired original Terminator, T:S is still a big improvement over T3. At its worst, it's a big, dumb summer action movie with shit that blows up good, a feat that T3 couldn't even satisfyingly muster. If T:S somehow manages to scrape together enough global box office, DVD sales, and good will to warrant the greenlight for the sequels, we can only hope that Nolan will be retained, Brancato and Ferris ejected post-haste, and Bale told to concentrate on finding some nuance to his brooding instead of interfering with the screenwriting process. This would leave Nolan free to pen some believable dialogue, so that I can watch the sequels without the constant, well-deserved sidelong glances and eye-rolling from my much-beloved girlfriend.

7/10