Terminator Salvation

I love the Terminator series.  Until I experienced the rapture that comes with repeated viewings of Road House and Purple Rain, Terminator 2: Judgment Day was my most viewed movie as a teenager.  I can even point out the single bullet that, had it not been dropped, would have ended the movie twenty minutes earlier.  While the first two Terminator movies are obviously classics, I'm even okay with the far inferior Terminator 3: Wanton Destruction of Property.  It's not great, but it could have been much, much worse.  As the fourth movie in the franchise, Terminator Salvation sits in an unenviable spot where it wants to recapture the fans that were turned off by the last film while relaunching the series by setting it in the Terminator future.  That is a tough trick to pull off.

How successful is this film?  Well, on paper it might work.  Christian Bale signed up to play the main role of John Connor and the supporting cast was partially filled out with Sam Worthington, Anton Yelchin, and Helena Bonham Carter.  Not bad, right?  I liked the notion of taking the series into the post-apocalyptic future instead of retreading the "to save the future, John Connor must live" plot from the last three films.  Also, Arnold Schwarzenegger's sagging man boobs should have no reason to show up, since he was busy governing California at the time of filming.  I love me some vintage Ahnuld, but the man stopped making good movies in 1994.  Oh, and this movie doesn't feature time travel, which automatically makes it slightly less ridiculous than any of the other films.  All in all, this movie was theoretically promising.

And then it starts to fall apart when you take a closer look.  Counting Bale, the pivotal character of John Connor has been played by four different actors in four movies and one TV show.  That implies that there is no true vision for the character, so despite him being a recurring role his character's presence does not indicate any particular level of quality.  The director ended up being McG, which is the most obnoxious Hollywood name in recent memory.  Oh, and he committed the cinematic sins of directing the Charlie's Angels movies.  The rest of the supporting cast consists of Bryce Dallas Howard (I don't care if she's prettier than her dad, she's not very talented!), Moon Bloodgood (whose acting is nowhere near as awesome as her name), Common (who still hasn't convinced me that he can act), and Michael Ironside (whose name should have belonged to a general or linebacker, not a B-movie actor).  And this movie was rated PG-13, not R, like the rest of the franchise.  Add all that to the fact that the script went through several rewrites, and this thing starts to sound like it will utterly suck.

As with so many things, the truth lies somewhere in-between.  In the year 2018, the future is a great big pile of crap.  The sentient computer program, Skynet, has instigated a nuclear holocaust, leaving mankind on the brink of extinction.  The remaining humans are trying just to eke out survival or they are active in the human resistance.  John Connor (Christian Bale) is a member of the resistance movement; despite having some knowledge of the future from his mother and his time-traveling Terminator friends from previous movies, he is not one of the leaders of the movement.  But, apparently, he is the voice of "Human Resistance Radio," the presumably made-up-by-me title to his occasional radio pep talks to the remainders of humanity.  The resistance has just had two major breakthroughs:

1. They have discovered Skynet's "kill list" of humans most in need of being murdered...John is #2, behind Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin)---John's father, who hasn't yet aged into Michael Biehn, gone back in time or slept with Linda Hamilton in The Terminator.
2. They have discovered a radio frequency that disables Skynet's killer robots.  Oh, and Skynet also is planning to kill the leaders of the resistance in one week.  How nice of Skynet to squeeze the leaders of humanity in on that day...I thought they'd be booked!  

Anyway, the resistance leaders are planning to nuke Skynet's central base after using the new robot-disabling technology to turn off their defenses.  The only problem with that is that Skynet has been capturing humans to experiment on them in that same base.  Casualties of war happen every day, but not on John Connor's watch!  He heads to the base to break out the humans before Skynet gets bombed.

Meanwhile, we are introduced to Marcus (Sam Worthington), a man that is being executed in 2003.  The next thing he (or we) know, he awakes in 2018 with absolutely no idea what is going on.  He meets the young Kyle Reese and his fellow survivor, the nine year-old Star (Jadagrace Berry), and they get kidnapped by Skynet machines and taken to the Skynet central base for unknown reasons.  Marcus feels obligated to break his only friends out of the base, so he finds and teams up with a Human Resistance member, Blair (Moon Bloodgood), and is taken to the Resistance base.  Once there, the Resistance discovers a startling secret about Marcus that explains the fifteen-year gap in his memory.  With that reveal, many questions arise:

• Is Marcus one of a kind, or is he a sign of things to come?
• Can Marcus be trusted?
• Can John Connor find Kyle Reese before the Resistance nukes Skynet's base?
• Will Skynet win by being nuked and killing John's soon-to-be father and wiping John out of existence?
• Will Skynet win by drawing John into their main base and killing him before the tide in the man vs. machine battle has turned in favor of man?
• Will Edward Furlong, Nick Stahl, or Thomas Dekker (the other three actors who have played John Connor) show up and really confuse things for viewers?

Let's start with the good things first.  I will admit that, while watching this movie, I was entertained.  It is nowhere near as intelligent a film as the rest of the series, but it has its own charms.  I liked Anton Yelchin's performance; it was reminiscent of Michael Biehn's work in The Terminator, but not indebted to it.  The movie looked good, too.  It can be difficult to capture the dirtiness of a post-nuclear world, but I thought the sets looked great.  I thought the design work for the various Skynet machines was imaginative and pretty cool.  There were a lot of cool mini-tributes to the first couple movies sprinkled throughout; the best was definitely the inclusion of the Guns 'n' Roses song from Terminator 2.  There was a lot of action, too, enough to keep you from thinking about the movie's plot or logic.

That is where things start to sour for this film.  Despite avoiding some time travel problems by setting this in the future, including a young Kyle Reese has the same effect as sending a Terminator back in time to kill John or Sarah Connor; if the Terminators succeed, then the entire time line is disrupted and, I assume, everyone wakes up in a delicious swimming pool of vanilla pudding.  Or, we blink out of existence; until the time stream is totally disrupted and I can be proved wrong, I'm sticking with my theory.  That headache aside, there are a lot of little things that don't make sense in this movie.  How can so many machines that are specifically designed to kill people have such awful aim?  How is Marcus able to swim, considering his presumed body weight?  Why don't Terminators just crush John Connor's throat or punch through his face?  Whenever they get their robotic mitts on him, they just throw him across the room.  Why would sentient machines have a radio frequency for an Achilles' Heel?  When the final plan is revealed, why is it so ridiculously convoluted?  Seriously, when I heard the plan explained, I thought I was listening to Cobra Commander, or possibly underpants gnomes.  And yet, we are supposed to believe that a brilliant and devious supercomputer came up with this?  I am insulted by the filmmakers (probably fair) assessment of the average American's intelligence.  And what was the deal with Skynet targeting Kyle Reese?  In the first Terminator, the father of John Connor was unknown by Skynet, but here he is their number one acquisition priority.  Did John, the only living person who knows the identity of his father, blab his daddy's name?  I'll just mildly state that I doubt it.  But let's say that, yes, John Connor spilled the beans...when Skynet captures Kyle, why don't they just squish him into meat jelly?  It couldn't hurt their evil plans, right?

Despite all that stupidity, though, this isn't a bad movie.  Yes, McG is a pretty bad director in terms of cinematography, storytelling, and working with actors, but at least the movie never drags.  Most of the actors turn in uninspired performances, but not necessarily bad...although Christian Bale was uncharacteristically one-dimensional.  And Sam Worthington still has the range of a box of Triscuits.  If you look at this as a continuation/reboot of the ultra-successful Terminator franchise, this was definitely a disappointment.  On its own, though, the movie is a fun, dumb little flick.  As much as the logic-loving part of my mind might disagree, I give this movie

***EDITED ON 9/27/10 at 14:20 PM***
An excellent comment from nobulljive has forced me to amend my rating.  Yes, it is incredibly stupid for Skynet to have designed a base that conforms to human proportions.  With so many uniquely shaped pieces of machinery, there is absolutely no reason for a base for robots, by robots, to be designed like any modern-day processing plant.  And it is even stupider for the interface for the central Skynet computer to have screens or speakers for Helena Bonham Carter to speak through.  The central computer in Skynet should just have ports for any machine to link up and communicate through. 

Man, I can't believe I didn't think of that; I am now equally upset with myself and this movie.  These logical flaws in the story, on their own, wouldn't bother me too much.  I can forgive action/sci-fi movies for some stupidity.  On top of all the other issues I had with Salvation's plot, though, I cannot in good conscience recommend this film.

Wanted

Casting Angelina Jolie in a comic book movie is so obvious, I can't believe that it took until 2008 for somebody to make it happen.  She's already played the physically (and proportionally) impossible part of Lara Croft, so why not take on the world of anti-gravity breasts and zipperless spandex unitards that is comic books?  It's not like they're going to take away her Oscar; Halle Berry already proved that with Catwoman.  So why not have a little mindless fun, right?

Wanted is a comic book adaptation, but the property is not a long-established one, so the story is new to most viewers.  Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) plays an average Joe living a below-average life.  He hates his job, he hates his boss, he hates his girlfriend, he hates his best friend (who is sleeping with his girlfriend), he hates the father that left him as an infant, and he hates the panic attacks he gets when any of these irritate him more than usual.  One day, Fox (Jolie) arrives and tells Wesley that his life is in danger and that his late father (David O'Hara) was a super-powered assassin.  It takes a cross-town shootout and car chase to make that seem plausible, but it works.  Fox takes Wesley to The Fraternity, an ancient secret society of assassins.  The group's head, Sloan (Morgan Freeman), explains that Wesley must assume the mantle of his father and avenge him, or Wesley will surely be killed by his father's assassin, Cross (Thomas Kretschmann).  Naturally, this takes some convincing.  In one of the movie's more memorable moments, Wesley is given a gun (for the first time) and told to shoot the wings off of some flies --- or he will be dead in thirty seconds.  Wesley begins to panic and the world slows down for a few moments, until he shoots.  Surprisingly (well, not really.  It's a movie.  But it would be surprising if you were Wesley), he has shot the wings off.  It turns out that Wesley's panic attacks were the misunderstood symptom of his body rushing extraordinary amounts of blood and adrenaline to his brain.  This superhuman ability can make Wesley able to move faster and notice more than average humans.  I guess that's a little more plausible than a radioactive spider bite.  This ability and natural talent are why Wesley is uniquely qualified to be the man who takes Cross out.

After a brief detour to quit his job and knock out his best friend, Wesley begins to train in earnest.  He is trained in marksmanship by the Gunsmith (successful rapper and emotionless actor Common), knives by the Butcher, how to take punishment by the Repairman, explosives by the Exterminator (Konstantin Khabenskiy), and the assassin life in general by Fox.  One of the important lessons in The Fraternity is the secret of the Loom of Fate.  This loom stitches a fabric that hides a binary code in the missed stitches.  The code spells out names, and The Fraternity kills the people whose names are stitched by the loom.  Yes, that's right...these international super-powered assassins are taking their cues from a magic loom.  Fox justifies this by saying that Fate wants these people dead, so if you "kill one, and maybe save a thousand."  Maybe.  Wesley is eventually experienced enough to take on Cross, but that just starts a whole new set of problems for Wesley.

The acting in this movie is pretty good for an action movie.  James McAvoy handles the lead role well, transforming from wuss to bad-ass in less than two hours, but still maintaining his charm.  He's a little whiny for the first bit of the film, but that has more to do with the character and the writing than his acting.  Angelina Jolie plays a supporting role in the movie, but it's a pretty big supporting role.  Her job here is basically to look sexy and cool, so it's not exactly her most demanding work.  Still, she look comfortable as an action star and plays the exasperated instructor to McAvoy well.  Morgan Freeman gets a rare opportunity to indulge his bad boy side as the leader of the assassins, but he is still playing his typical wise man role.  In other words, he's Morgan Freeman (which is awesome) and gets to swear in this movie.  Konstantin Khabenskiy makes his English-language debut after working with director Timur Bekmambetov on several Russian-language films (including the excellent Nightwatch).  He is just the adorable Russian guy here, but he's likable.  Terrence Stamp makes a brief appearance, and his presence exudes a sense of calm cool to a movie that is all about big and loud.  Sure, he deadpans all his dialogue, but it suits his character.  The rest of the cast turns in decent, but not particularly noteworthy performances, with the exception of Common, who still hasn't convinced me that he should act.

Visually, this film is amazing.  I remember being nervous about the film after watching the previews, but the special effects looked great in the context of the film.  Timur Bekmambetov has a gift for stunning visuals, but this movie is especially impressive.  The man can direct action, too, which is a big plus.  I think this movie's greatest strength is the variety of the action sequences.  There are a lot of shoot-out scenes (which makes sense, given Wesley's character), but they offer a lot of small but important variations.  As the film goes on, Wesley plays a larger and more impressive part in these scenes, until the inevitable huge shoot-'em-up ending.  It was interesting how some fairly subtle clues about Wesley's father are laid out in early action scenes, too.  Heck, I'm even okay with the ridiculousness of the "curved bullet" idea that is so central to most of these scenes.  Aside from the shoot-outs, though, there are a lot of other high quality action scenes.  The driving stunts are far beyond over-the-top, but their ridiculousness actually fits the action in the movie.  And there's some knife fights.  That's always a plus. 

Wanted is adapted from the comic of the same name by Mark Millar, who also wrote Kick-Ass.  This movie takes only the very basic principle of the comic and then makes its own story from there.  That's not a bad move on the screenwriter's part; the comic has Wesley and The Fraternity as super-villains, so there is no true hero to the story.  This script tries to show some heart and does a great job making these characters far more sympathetic than they are in the source material.  That makes this a rare exception, where the Hollywood version of something is far more palatable than the original material.  Of course, the whole "bending bullets" and Loom of Fate thing are absolutely ridiculous additions.  The magic loom is particularly stupid and I am amazed that some screenwriter came up with that as a story element.  It's even more amazing that the idea made the final cut of the film.  The clumsiness with that aspect of the writing (how do we make assassins look like good guys?  Two words: magic loom!) adds quite a bit of lameness to the movie, but it's not a fatal flaw.  Like the comic that it is based on, Wanted was never about the story so much as it was about the ain't-it-cool moments.  In that regard, this movie definitely succeeds.